TITLE: The Wine of Dionysus
AUTHOR: ELG
AUTHOR PAGE: ELG
CATEGORY: Drama/Angst/Action/Adventure
SPOILERS: All episodes up to S3 episode "Legacy".
SEASON / SEQUEL: Season 3, directly after "Legacy".
RATING: R
CONTENT WARNINGS: Character rape possibly occurs and is discussed (although it is not shown). Major angst. There is life-threatening violence to two members of SG-1; minor injuries to the other two; also minor injuries to various secondary characters. Mention of past violence. Some minor language from Jack, and Daniel makes a very dubious joke.
SUMMARY: After the events of 'Legacy' an exiled Goa'uld tries to use Jack's feelings of guilt and Daniel's feelings of inadequacy to persuade them that Daniel should leave SG-1.
STATUS: Complete
DISCLAIMER: Stargate Sg-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret productions, and Gekko Productions. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Especial thanks to the world's best and most long-suffering beta, Brenda. Many thanks to Cathy for all her helpful suggestions and encouragement; to Sue and Rowan for the invaluable medical beta; to Bead for additional archaeological suggestions and advice, and to Lisette for the wonderful pictures of Mycenae. Thanks as well to Bri for all her assistance in the shape of detailed spoilers. 

Daniel was standing on a beach watching the tide come in. There were white birds shrieking overhead that might have flown in from a poem by Yeats, while the sea air was sharp with salt and the promise of winter. The sea was grey-green and lapped idly, barely caressing the sand as a milk skim of foam unfolded at his feet…

That damned faucet just kept dripping. He could hear the sound of it, hollow, metallic, insistent. The first proper wave took him unawares, washed over his bare feet; shocked him with its coldness.

Why were his feet bare anyway?

Why were his feet bare and his glasses missing and why was there a white band around his wrist? He had to squint to read it: Doctor Daniel Jackson. Yes. That was correct. That was his name. But why had he been labeled like an artifact? And what was that other word? That defining word that told the world what Doctor Daniel Jackson was? Headcase.

The wave hit him so hard it knocked him over; filling his mouth, his ears, his eyes, dragging him down into the cold wet hollow where insanity waited for him. The sea was blue now, shimmering. No, please, not this, not this; any moment the hand would reach out and…

The hand came out of the wormhole, grabbed his jacket and dragged him forward. He knew what was waiting for him in there; not the dead Goa'uld, this time, but the room. The white room. Please God, no, don't send him back there…

He woke up crying in the corner of the white room. He was so frightened. It was coming. Not the footsteps, although the footsteps were echoing in his brain. Insanity was coming. His mind was dissolving and once it was gone he would never get it back. He would stay here forever. Don't go, Jack! Don't leave me! They were leaving him because he was crazy. Because no one could reach him or help him. Please, Jack, please! Sam! Teal'c! Don't…The door closed. He slept. He dreamed. The beach. The dripping faucet. The birds screaming. The waves crashed over him.

He woke to find himself curled up on the floor of the white room. Not crying this time. That must be better. He was better. It was all so much clearer now. The room might still spin a little but the insanity was receding, the tide going out again. He could explain it to them and it was perfectly reasonable. The relief was overwhelming.

Daniel got to his feet and stumbled over to the door. All he had to do was open the door and then walk out of here; but when he tried the handle he realized the door was locked. And when he peered through the glass, the corridor was empty. There was no one there; no one waiting for him. He banged on the door, shouted, tried to tell them that he was better now. All better. That he wanted to go home.

No one heard.

No one came.

Daniel woke up with a gasp and fumbled for the lamp by his bed. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest with residual fear. Stupid. Stupid to be so frightened of something that would never happen again. He wrapped his arms around his chest and rocked backwards and forwards, reminding himself that it was over. Everyone knew he was sane. No one was going to send him back there. It didn't matter what he said or did, they wouldn't send him back there. He knew that all he had to do was turn the handle on that damned door and open it; just picture it in his head. Picture it unlocked and the door opening…

No! He had never been insane. He'd heard things and seen things that weren't there, but he had never been insane. So they would never send him back there. And Jack had come for him. And the door had opened. And why the hell couldn't he just step through that goddamned doorway, go out into the corridor, and leave that terrible white room behind…?

 Part One

"You know, it doesn't matter how many times I get my molecules ripped apart and then thrown back together, I just can't seem to enjoy it." O'Neill stepped down from the Stargate as the wormhole disassembled behind him and took a careful look around at their surroundings. As this particular Stargate had been built on the top of a rise, he could see for some distance, and there was so clearly nothing at all in view to worry him he found that worrying by itself.

The landscape was hilly rather than mountainous, a patchwork of different shades of green and brown, red earth speckled with baked stone, lush valleys like giant punchbowls held by fingers of dark forest or ridges of grey rock. Tranquil. Inviting. It seemed to be afternoon here. There was a drowsy feel to the day, the lazy sunshine, a few white clouds barely troubling to make their way across a halcyon sky. Birds twittering, bees humming, things growing. All of it so self-consciously peaceful it immediately made O'Neill's antennae twitch.

"It looks very fertile, Colonel, so I'd lay money that there will be people around here somewhere." Carter was already taking a soil sample to confirm, but, gazing through his field glasses, O'Neill didn't feel he needed a laboratory to tell him that this mixture of streams, groves, pastureland, and forest was an environment tailor-made for transplanted Homo sapiens.

O'Neill looked across at Teal'c who was also gazing around at the landscape, and said, "Seems quiet enough?"

"It does appear to be so, O'Neill," Teal'c responded in the manner of someone who was nevertheless taking nothing on trust.

"It feels…Mediterranean." Daniel was turning a slow circle. "Like Greece or Turkey."

O'Neill handed him the field glasses so he could see for himself. "How's your Greek and Turkish?"

"Not too bad." As always Daniel had to alter the focus to see through them and O'Neill made a mental note to change it back when the binoculars were returned. "I can see deer," Daniel announced. "There's a herd of them over there. See, Sam, just on the edge of that wood."

O'Neill took the opportunity to take a look around at his team. The team he had damned near lost half of only a fortnight before. It might give O'Neill the heebie-jeebies just thinking about that snake inside Teal'c, but given how essential Junior was to the Jaffa, it was no wonder it had come to matter to them all that his larval Goa'uld should stay alive. Seeing Teal'c standing there now with his staff weapon in his hand and every sense alert for any possible danger, you'd think the man had never been ill in his life, let alone damned near dead. So, at least O'Neill had no worries there and Carter was clearly having fun taking readings and collecting things in her little plastic pots…

Which left only Daniel.

Apart from being a little quieter than usual, Daniel seemed 'fine'. That was the word Daniel was currently going with when asked how he was feeling, and the word O'Neill had picked to describe him to Hammond and Doctor Fraiser when they asked how the younger man was coping before allowing him back on active duty. So, despite having spent far too many hours locked up in a padded cell with only his hallucinations for company, Daniel was 'fine', and SG-1 was 'fine', and everything was just fine and dandy.

Except that O'Neill didn't feel he could make a joke or call Daniel by any of the various nicknames he had given him over the years, or do or say anything that referred back to an intimacy and ease between them which might no longer exist – because that would be like laying claim to something they both knew he'd forfeited.

He'd asked Daniel if 'they' were okay and Daniel had said 'Of course.' But O'Neill didn't feel there was any 'Of course' about it. You didn't stand aside while they carted your best friend off to the asylum and then just slip back into the same old friendship like you were pulling on a pair of favorite slippers. It was ironic that for perhaps the first time in their relationship, O'Neill was there, ready, waiting, and willing to 'talk it through' and Daniel didn't want to do it. Daniel seemed to want to pretend that there was nothing to discuss. And every time O'Neill had tried to start the conversational ball rolling in the dangerous direction of the younger man's wrongly diagnosed 'schizophrenia', Daniel had side-stepped it somewhere safe with a skill that O'Neill couldn't help admiring in a guy who readily admitted to having consistently sucked at all sports.

He failed to avert his eyes fast enough as Daniel turned back to hand him the field glasses and O'Neill saw the archaeologist register that he was being watched, an almost imperceptible flinch. Damn. Just what he'd wanted to avoid: Daniel thinking they were all still looking at him sideways waiting for him to become irrational.

"Venison for supper tonight sound good to you?" O'Neill said lightly, glancing through the field glasses to establish that they were indeed now temporarily completely useless to anyone with normal vision.

As he turned the dial to change the focus back, he waited hopefully for Daniel to tell him that the deer might be sacred or part of the local population's fertility rituals or something equally Daniel-like. But the younger man just said, "I think they're gone now anyway," as he shoved his hands into his pockets and deliberately didn't meet O'Neill's eye. A minute later Daniel had turned away and gone to walk next to Teal'c: always the best member of SG-1 to choose for company if you really didn't want to talk.

O'Neill grimaced. This was clearly going to be a long – and very quiet – day.

***

They had walked two miles from the Stargate and O'Neill was starting to think the place was unpopulated when they saw the regular outlines of possible habitation halfway down the hillside up ahead of them. From a distance it looked like a low wall describing a circle on the green rise; something a parent might build from papier mâché to enclose a child's farm. Within it were patches of shadow, soft as spilt coffee grains, and here and there faint horizontal lines in the distance that could have been stone steps.

"Some kind of town?" O'Neill turned to Daniel. His eyesight was a lot better than the younger man's, and those buildings were still only a stone shimmer in the sunlight even to him, so it wasn't really Daniel's opinion he was looking for. What he was looking for was some sign of that spark of enthusiasm he'd got so used to seeing in Daniel's blue eyes; that almost childlike openness to new experiences that seemed to have been temporarily banished and which O'Neill was really starting to miss.

Daniel shrugged. "Could be." Was that interest? No, it was evidently hunger because the archaeologist was digging out a PowerBar and unenthusiastically unwrapping it. He pulled a face as he chewed it but did swallow the first mouthful down. Well, at least Daniel was eating, O'Neill thought. There were times when the guy didn't even remember to do that. Admittedly he was probably only eating this because he'd overslept again and had to miss breakfast in order to be only his habitual five minutes late for their pre-mission briefing, but hey, it was sustenance going into Daniel and that was always a good thing in O'Neill's book.

He'd never thought that he would actually want Daniel to be running around talking too fast about things nobody else even began to understand, but right now that was what he would have given a month's paycheck to see. Daniel…being Daniel, rather than Daniel being this rather reserved young man who thought twice before he opened his mouth instead of just diving in head-first; someone whose smile wasn't reaching his eyes, and whose eyes were…watchful. Basically, O'Neill kept seeing someone left wary by the experience of being committed to a mental institute when what he wanted to be looking at was someone who'd forgotten all about it and was back to who he'd used to be. Someone who didn't blame O'Neill for not believing in him would have been nice too.

O'Neill didn't know how long it took to get over an experience like that. Not the physical incarceration, not the drugs, not even the hallucinations, but having everyone you cared about ready to accept you were a headcase who needed to be medicated and locked up, when what you really needed was for people to know it had to be some outside influence making you behave this way because you were so palpably sane it couldn't be anything else.

Damn, he'd always known that calling Daniel 'flaky' was going to come back one day and bite him in the ass.

Darting another glance at him, he saw that Daniel was still attempting to eat the PowerBar, jaw working with more determination than pleasure, but was also scanning the dusty road they were following, and yes, O'Neill thought there was a definite spark of interest there. Daniel said, "There are no wheel ruts here so either the population hasn’t invented the wheel yet or else they've died out."

"Were there people who never invented the wheel?" O'Neill enquired. "I thought everyone got that one – kind of like fire and the urge to kill the next tribe along?"

Daniel was looking around at the landscape now. "Well the Olmec never did, and people who lived in really mountainous places, like the Incas or some of the people of Tibet have never found a use for it as a means of transportation. But this is the kind of topography where one would expect it to be in use."

As they drew closer, the patches of shadow revealed themselves to be the entrances to buildings and archways, the regular lines became the geometry of semi-ruined staircases, that toy wall a towering fortification of massive stone blocks. O'Neill could also see odd beehive-like structures scattered upon the hillside outside the wall, but there were no signs of any life here and the unfamiliar buildings looked as though they had been abandoned centuries before. Basically, O'Neill thought, they were looking at a bunch of old ruins, dull stuff to most people but to Daniel…Darting another glance at Daniel he was relieved to see that there was definitely a gleam of interest in the archaeologist's eyes. He had stuffed the half-eaten MRE back into his jacket pocket and was already scrambling in his pack for the video camera.

"Looks Helladic," Daniel muttered, switching on the camera. "In fact, it looks a lot like – but it can't be. This is incredible…"

"Looks like ruins to me," O'Neill returned. "Lots and lots of ruins." Time to play it cool, he decided. A yawn, a shrug, a "But, I guess we could take a look round if you want to."

Carter was also gazing at the fallen city and wondered why she was so surprised by it. She supposed it was inevitable that there would be worlds where the civilization transplanted there by the Goa'uld had not survived and prospered, where the population had withered over the thousands of years since, but the thought of an entire planet being empty was an eerie one. Although not, perhaps, for an archaeologist. In fact, looking across at Daniel, she thought he looked remarkably like a small boy set loose in a candy store. She suddenly realized that Daniel hadn't looked like that for weeks. She quickly glanced across at O'Neill and saw that he was also covertly watching their archaeologist with close attention. She and O'Neill exchanged a relieved glance and then quickly looked away before Daniel noticed what they were doing.

But Daniel was oblivious of everything except the ruins. The nearer he got, the more exciting he realized this find was. "The Lion Gate!" he yelped.

"Did a bee just sting you, Daniel?" O'Neill enquired mildly.

"Look – up ahead. It's exactly the same, Jack!"

"Exactly the same as…?"

Daniel turned to him in bewilderment, as though it was inconceivable that even he couldn't know something this obvious. "The Citadel of Agamemnon at Mycenae."

"Oh yes, of course," O'Neill nodded gravely. "What else could it be?"

"Where's north?"

As O'Neill frowned at him in perplexity, Daniel repeated urgently, "Where's north? Left? Right? Up? Down? Where?"

O'Neill took Daniel by the shoulders and turned him around. "There's north – and I can't believe you didn't know that."

But Daniel was already lost in his calculations, digging out his notebook to sketch a rough map. "Okay, so if that's the Lion Gate, then the tomb of Clytemnestra would be over there – Jack can I borrow your field glasses again? And we must have already passed the oldest Tholos tombs. I guess the rise of the hillside must have hidden them and – yes!"

"That's Air Force equipment you're waving about there, Daniel. You break them you pay for them."

"Look, Jack, look!"

O'Neill found the binoculars being shoved back into his hands by a Daniel who was trembling with excitement. "See, there – over there, do you see? The Tomb of Clytemnestra!"

Adjusting the focus – he really needed to get Daniel some field glasses of his own before the next mission – O'Neill found himself looking at another distant ruin and wondered how anyone could get this excited about something so derelict. "Very nice," he offered.

But Daniel was already rushing ahead, stumbling over the uneven ground as he tried to trot while simultaneously filming everything at once. The others followed him at a slightly more sedate pace although O'Neill noticed that Teal'c was taking even longer strides than usual so that he could keep up with Daniel's more erratic progress without appearing to be hurrying. O'Neill smiled as he realized how over the years they had all honed their own strategies for keeping a protective eye on Daniel without making it too obvious. And then he thought of Daniel in the padded cell and his smile faded. None of their cute little ploys had been able to save him from that. None of them had been able to do zip about those voices in his head or the dead Goa'uld he kept seeing once Machello's killing device had gotten under his skin.

"Look at the size of those stones," Carter murmured. The citadel was surrounded by massive defensive walls built of grey blocks almost as tall as she was. She wondered how the people who had built this place had ever been able to move them. The gate Daniel had mentioned was also huge and imposing, a relief of a lion towering above the square gateway. As they passed through it, Carter wrinkled her nose at the smell of corruption, of death, dust, and decay; an odor almost immediately overtaken and cancelled out by a musky perfume of almost unbearable power.

"Hey, size isn't everything," O'Neill put in.

"The Greeks called these kind of walls 'Cyclopean'," Daniel was turning circles as he tried to video the gateway and the walls, "since they were built of stones so large only a Cyclops could move them. But if this is a copy of what I think it is, we should also be seeing polygonal walls and ashlar masonry and…"

O'Neill began to hum quietly to himself, and for once it wasn't to drown out the sound of Daniel going scientist on him. He just felt happy enough to need an outlet for it. Daniel was spinning around so fast trying to videotape everything at once that he was almost certainly going to get dizzy and fall over in a minute, which would prove that the man was back to normal and also be mildly amusing to watch. Teal'c also seemed to be aware of that possibility and was hovering close enough to catch Daniel before he actually hit the ground when the inevitable occurred.

"This place has a bad atmosphere," Carter said.

O'Neill frowned at her. "Now don't go raining on Daniel's parade, Major. The boy's having fun here."

"I'm sorry, sir, but something just feels…off to me."

Overhearing Carter's last comment, Daniel briefly stopped turning circles to beam at her. "But it's supposed to be like that, Sam." He inhaled and then nodded. "Yes, definitely a smell of corruption in the air, just the way Robert Payne described it."

"And this is a good thing?" O'Neill prompted.

"This is a copy of the Citadel of Agamemnon, Jack, which was supposed to be the home of the mythical House of Atreus." As O'Neill looked simultaneously both blank and impatient – and Daniel had never worked out how the man managed to do that – he hurried to explain: "Atreus, who fed his brother, Thyestes, his own children for dinner."

"What lovely people you know, Daniel."

"Atreus was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Menelaus was the husband of Helen of Troy. Agamemnon was the husband of Clytemnestra who killed him on his return from the Trojan War to pay him back because he'd sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the gods and gain favorable winds. Clytemnestra herself was later murdered by her son Orestes who was forced to avenge his father's death even though it meant committing matricide, and was subsequently pursued by the Furies for his crime. Mycenae was never a happy place, Jack. It ought to smell of death."

"And flowers."

As they turned to look at her, Carter shrugged. "It also smells of flowers, Colonel."

"Schliemann didn't mention any flowers, so they must be – Oh my God!"

"Daniel Jackson, are you hurt?"

Teal'c was there in an instant and O'Neill allowed himself a superior smile, having successfully identified Daniel's strangled yelp as denoting excitement rather than the pain it might suggest to the uninitiated. Daniel's usual yelp of pain, as he remembered it, was about a half-step lower in tone.

"Grave Circle A!" Daniel bounded across towards a sunken stone circle pitted with open shafts.

O'Neill said conversationally, "Maybe next time out we should bring one of those retractable dog leashes. Probably save a lot of trouble."

Tearing her attention away from Daniel's headlong rush towards what appeared to be a series of bottomless pits, Carter focused her attention on the flowers whose perfume was overlaying the scent of decay. The blooms were heavy, sensual, a musky mauve against the pitted white pillars, delicate stamens rich with golden pollen. They coiled around the ruins seductively, leaving faint gilt stains where their pollen touched the stone. The perfume was dizzying in its intensity, so rich it was almost unbearable. Carter automatically looked across at Daniel to see if he was sneezing but oddly enough, he wasn't. It was impossible not to pluck one of the blooms and hold it up to her face. She gasped with the sensory shock of that wonderful smell but then felt something stir inside her: warning, resistance; the memories of Jolinar awakening protectively within her. For a reason she didn't quite understand, she threw down the bloom and backed away from it, taking the sterile wipe from her pack as she walked and wiping every trace of pollen from her fingers.

Daniel was peering excitedly down into echoing square shafts. Ashamed of her irrational action and pocketing the towelette, Carter hurried to catch up with him. "Daniel, take it easy, we don't know how stable this place is." One look at his face told her that he wasn't even listening.

"Sam, this is uncanny. I mean, this place is bigger and there's a lot more of it left intact, but these are the same burial chambers, the same enceinte wall. I have got to get a look at that palace in a minute – see if it still has its megaron. But these burial chambers are just incredible…" He fished out his flashlight and leant in even further. "This one's already open, it doesn't even need excavating…!"

Carter looked across at O'Neill who wiped the Cheshire cat grin off his face and came over to them, saying, "Daniel, you're going to be in that burial chamber in a minute."

Daniel's voice bounced eerily off the walls as he called up to them. "I can see golden death masks. You know that's exactly what Heinrich Schliemann found when he first uncovered the site at Mycenae. He telegraphed the King of Greece to tell him that he'd 'gazed upon the face of Agamemnon'." Small chips of stone were trickling from the top of the shaft he was leaning against.

"Daniel Jackson, you should listen to Colonel O'Neill," Teal'c warned. "This site seems to be in an advanced state of decay." The Jaffa was taking careful stock of their surroundings as he spoke but as she hovered protectively herself, Carter noticed that Teal'c was also staying close enough that he could grab an ankle if Daniel did take a header into the shaft.

O'Neill was too good a poker player to still be smiling but he felt like it. Daniel was being reckless around old ruins and not listening to a word anyone said to him: things were definitely getting back to normal. With a lighter heart, O'Neill reached down and hauled the archaeologist up by his jacket.

Daniel didn't even seem to notice O'Neill's action, still talking excitedly as he was pulled back into the daylight. " – Of course, that was poetic license on Schliemann's part because the site was from around 1600 BC, while the Trojan War – if it ever did take place at all and wasn't just a metaphor – couldn't have happened any earlier than 1300 BC but the point is that this is – well unbelievably similar. It's a mystery that's never been explained why they suddenly started building these elaborate burial chambers apparently for no reason. There's no transitional period, it just seemed to happen overnight that the wealthiest citizens of Mycenae would inter themselves in these incredibly elaborate graves stuffed with treasures and we have no idea why." He noticed his flashlight still shining faintly in the sunshine and switched it off.

"Well if everyone here wasn't already dead you could have asked them." O'Neill waved his free hand to encompass the ruined temples and crumbling walls.

Daniel noticed the lack of life for the first time. "Oh." His face fell. "I was hoping someone could tell me about it. Maybe although this citadel fell into disrepair, there will be others. Or they may have left some writings…"

His attention caught by something on the side of what appeared to be a palace wall, he made to dart away but O'Neill was still holding onto the back of the younger man's jacket and now tightened his grip. "Whoa, Daniel. Slow down. Nothing here is going anywhere and like Teal'c says, this place is a ruin and ruins have a habit of falling down suddenly. You getting crushed by falling masonry isn't going to help solve any interesting archaeological mystery." A millisecond after he'd finished speaking, O'Neill remembered how Daniel's parents had died and saw Carter wince beside him as she also evidently recognized his faux pas. For once he was actually relieved that Daniel wasn't listening to a word he said.

Daniel absently disentangled himself from O'Neill's grasp as though he was a thorn bush he'd got snagged on, said, "Linear B!" and scrambled over several pieces of broken pillar to peer intently at a tablet of inscription.

Carter saw Daniel push the purple blooms away impatiently to examine the script; the aurum pollen staining his fingers making him look as though he'd been struck down with the curse of Midas. Again, she waited for the inevitable sneeze and felt slightly disconcerted when it didn't come.

"We are never going to get him away from here," O'Neill said with satisfaction. He gave Teal'c the usual 'stay with him' look and the Jaffa followed the archaeologist without needing a word of explanation.

Carter was still looking around at the ruins, not just within the walls but the tombs outside that were now clearly visible. "Sir, the thing that strikes me about these burial chambers is how many of them there are. And presuming that only the wealthiest families could afford these elaborate funeral rites and that therefore those dead buried here must be a relatively small percentage of the population as a whole…"

"You're saying – whole lot of dead people, right?"

"Yes, sir. And if what Daniel says is true, and this particular method of interring the dead happened over a relatively short period of history on Earth – and if this society mirrors the one on Earth – then that suggests a high death rate over a possibly compressed time period."

"So - whole lot of dead people in what could be a very short space of time."

As Carter nodded, O'Neill said, "Maybe we should stick with Daniel. He might find some kind of record of what happened here."

As they came up, Daniel was excitedly running his fingers across a stone tablet. "This is a variant form of Linear B I haven’t seen before."

"Who or what is Linear B?"

Not taking his eyes from the tablet, Daniel said absently, "Oh, it's a very early form of Greek writing, probably derived from the Minoan Linear A. It was actually in use for a comparatively short period of time, from maybe 1450 BC until about 1200 BC when the Greeks appeared to have reverted to illiteracy – again, we don't know why." Daniel reached up and ran a finger across the inscription, tracing it gently. "The Greek alphabet proper didn't turn up until about the ninth century BC. Linear B was primarily a kind of administrative script, there's no evidence it was ever used as a spoken language, but this is a different form of it from anything I've come across before. It seems to be a richer, more expressive version…"

He was oblivious of them for the moment, O'Neill could tell, lost in yet another lost language. He tried to coax him back to reality. "Daniel, I'm not saying this isn't fascinating, but could you please try and find out what happened here? There are a lot of dead bodies in those – Mynezian graves and I'd kind of like to know how they got there."

"Mycenaean, Jack, or Helladic if you prefer, and that tends to be what happens with graves, isn't it?"

O'Neill frowned as he finally became aware of the heavy perfume enveloping them and noticed the purple blooms. "Why aren't you sneezing?"

"What?" Daniel made a half-hearted attempt to turn his head in O'Neill's direction but his gaze was so unwilling to leave the inscription that it was the barest gesture towards paying attention.

O'Neill reached forward and lifted up the trailing stems, the drooping flowers perfuming the air, the pollen coating his skin like Christmas card glitter. He made to wipe his fingers on his jacket and then reached across and wiped them on Daniel's instead. "You should be sneezing."

"What? Why?" Daniel noticed the flowers for the first time. "Oh." He leant forward and inhaled tentatively then waited for the sneeze to hit him. It didn't. Mildly surprised he shrugged. "Well, I guess they don't affect me."

"We ought to take some back – could make a million. Flowers that even the most allergy-ridden people can sniff in perfect safety."

Daniel gave the older man a look of mild irritation. "Jack, can you forget the flowers and look at this tablet – there are way more than ninety signs here, I've already counted over a hundred."

"And this is good or bad?"

"It's proof that this form of Linear B didn't fall into disuse, it developed beyond anything we've found on Earth. Don't you see what that means? There could be a much more complete record here of a civilization that used to exist on our world." Daniel peered at the tablet. "My God, I think these could be isolated consonants…"

Carter said, "Daniel, does it mention anything about a war? Any reason why the population died out?"

"I haven't found anything about that yet."

"Well, what have you found out?" In his desire to have Daniel restored to his usual self, O'Neill had forgotten what a pain in the butt Daniel's usual self could be. Too often in the past he'd found himself thinking that if you could just keep the archaeologist away from all things archaeological, he was perfectly good company, a little vague, perhaps, and inclined to wander into trouble if you didn't keep an eye on him, but otherwise a reasonably efficient member of the team who had saved all their bacon more than once; but give him a sniff of an artifact or something incomprehensible in cuneiform and you just knew you weren't going to get any sense out him for at least three hours.

Also, Daniel was no fun when he was like this. You couldn't hold a conversation with him without first waving your hand in front of his eyes to get his attention; he would just take root somewhere and then stare at scratchy writing for hours at a time, making pages of notes in his unintelligible personal shorthand and going "Mmm?" or "Yes," or "If you say so, Jack," every now and then in an unconvincing attempt to prove he was listening to you. You couldn't even tease him, however fed up you got, because he didn't notice you were doing it – which rather defeated the object of the exercise.

O'Neill much preferred a Daniel he could benevolently tyrannize for his own protection to one he had to tiptoe around like an unexploded bomb while that astonishingly agile mind rummaged around in its memory banks. Daniel the Archaeologist was practically a stranger to the rest of them, and an unpredictable stranger at that. O'Neill had never liked the way he could blink a couple of times and then turn back to find himself completely excluded from the younger man's consciousness. Hell, show Daniel a couple of pictograms and nothing else in the world even existed for him.

Realizing he still had some pollen on his left hand, O'Neill wiped it on Daniel's shoulder again, ignoring the raised eyebrow that earned him from Teal'c as he did so. One day, O'Neill thought, he was really going to have to give the Jaffa a crash course in Why Picking On Daniel Is Not Only Fun, But Good For Him. Instead he cleared his throat, "Uh – Earth to Doctor Jackson? What does it say?"

"Well, like I said it's a variant of the script that I haven’t come across before. However it does bear some resemblance to several Mycenaean Linear B tablets from around 1250 BC that mentioned Dionysus – and incidentally confirmed his status as a divinity, because originally Dionysus was thought to be something of a latecomer to the pantheon of Greek Gods, maybe a foreign god imported into Greece from Phrygia or Thrace even whose cult actually met with violent resistance. However, that was another theory that got blown out of the water by the tablets they found in Mycenae…"

"And it says…?"

"I don't know, Jack. It's full of new symbols I don't recognize and it's going to take me a while to work out what they are."

"So, basically you're saying it's a variant of the script you haven't come across before?"

Just for a moment, Daniel wondered if Jack was making fun of him and he darted the man a suspicious glance. But the older man stared back at him stolidly, no hint of mockery in his face, and Daniel decided he was being unfair. Jack was obviously just being a bit slow today and needed to be humored. "Um – yes, that's right."

Teal'c had been staring fixedly at the archway to the ruined palace and now said flatly, "This is the symbol for the Goa'uld known as Zagreus."

They all looked up at that. Daniel said, "Zagreus? That was the Orphic god who was supposed to have been the giver of 'blessed immortality'."

Carter raised an eyebrow. "Sounds about right for a Goa'uld. They could be said to bestow immortality of a kind. Can you remember anything else about him?"

Daniel frowned in concentration. "Well, in mythology, Zagreus was the son of Zeus and Persephone, and he was torn to pieces by the Titans at the urging of Zeus's jealous wife, Hera. Zeus arrived in time to stop the Titans devouring Zagreus and gave his heart, still-beating to Semele to eat. Semele being, of course, the mother of Dionysus. But although there's a kind of a father and son link there, I think the significant point is that they shared the same heart and the two cults often overlapped. They had a lot of the same associations." He looked back at the symbol on the palace wall, his brain visibly working. "Of course, what the myth might actually be referring to is the transference of a Goa'uld from one host to another interpreted in our mythology as the 'heart' of Zagreus being reborn in Dionysus..."

O'Neill had stopped listening minutes ago. There was a limit to how many words he didn't recognize he was prepared to allow per sentence before he gave up on the conversation, and Daniel was well over his quota. And besides, the word 'Goa'uld' was enough by itself to tell him all he needed to know. This place might look like paradise lost, but more likely if there was a Goa'uld involved, it had been paradise deliberately destroyed.

Carter pointed to a picture on the wall. "Is this Zagreus?"

Daniel peered at it. "That's Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, intoxication and ritual madness. Homer called him a 'joy for mortals' because he introduced wine to men. According to Greek mythology, he was the twice-born son of Zeus and Semele, snatched prematurely from his mother's womb when she was burnt to death by Zeus' thunderbolt, then stitched into his father's thigh until he could be born full-term. He was dressed as a girl for most of his childhood so that he would escape the vengeance of Hera, and he was generally portrayed as an androgynous character, occasionally even as a hermaphrodite, and he was always described as a god with a dual nature."

Daniel glanced across at Jack and saw that he was wearing that glazed look again. Trying to get his attention back, he decided to cut to the summary but he sighed inwardly as he did so. There was no way he was ever going to be able to give a paper again; it would be automatic now to try and encapsulate all the information he had into a five minute gabble with all the long words cut out of it. Speaking faster, he said, "The Bacchae calls him a god 'most terrible and most gentle to mortals'. A lot of his cults were orgiastic and although his rites usually started with something fairly harmless like drinking too much, and singing and dancing, a form of madness was supposed to overtake the revelers so that in their ecstasy they would degenerate into sparagmos and omophagia."

"Which means?" O'Neill prompted, tuning Daniel back in again now the younger man was clearly winding down. His fingers still felt a little tacky from the pollen and without thinking he wet them with his mouth then absently rubbed them off on his chest.

"Oh – tearing live animals – or occasionally humans – to pieces and eating the flesh raw."

Carter pulled a face. "And he looks like such a nice boy."

"He was supposed to be divinely beautiful and is generally portrayed as young, beardless and either naked, like here, or half-naked. He never used brute strength and ignorance like most of the Greek Gods to get his own way, but he was merciless about persecuting those who refused to recognize his divinity – driving people insane so that they'd commit infanticide was a favorite trick." Losing interesting in Dionysus, Daniel turned to O'Neill. "Do we have any rope with us? You know – all this equipment we carry around with us, is there likely to be any rope?"

Torn between annoyance and relief that Daniel still didn't know what they had in their packs after all these missions, O'Neill stalled as casually as he could. "Why do you want it?"

"Well before I start looking around the palace, I really want to get into one of those burial chambers and have a look at the artifacts. If they're the same as the death masks Schliemann found in Mycenae that would not only give us a good idea when the people who lived here were brought through the Stargate but we might actually be able to learn something about our own history as well."

"Daniel, quite apart from the other considerations, that's grave robbing."

"Well, that's kind of what archaeology is, Jack. Burial chambers are often the only things that survive. That's where most of our information about past civilizations has come from. What do you think the pyramids are?"

"Uh – no."

"No what?"

"No, we don't have any rope, and no you couldn't have it if we did. Daniel, try to keep your mind on the essentials. There was – and maybe even is – a Goa'uld on this planet. Everyone in this city died and we don’t know why or how or when."

"Well if you let me go take a look at some of the skeletons I might be able to tell you that. I mean that is actually what I do. For instance, if there was weaponry buried with the corpses that would suggest that it was warriors who died. As this seems to mimic Mycenaean culture pretty exactly, I could have a guess at the era, and if I could get a look at the skeletons I could probably have a reasonably good idea of whether they died in battle or of some other cause."

"It's the 'some other cause' that's worrying me." Mentally O'Neill sighed, Come on, Daniel, show some sense and just this once don't make me have to play the heavy with you. He was waiting for the day when instead of him having to put his foot down, Daniel would say, "Jack, you know I think you could be right, that might be a little risky mightn't it?" But given the way Daniel was staring at him with that familiar mixture of exasperation and bewilderment because once again crabby old Jack was inexplicably refusing his perfectly reasonable request, O'Neill figured that day was probably still a long way off.

He was grateful when Carter intervened before Daniel got irritable. "Daniel, what if they all died of bubonic plague?"

"Well there are certain burial patterns that are established when people die of contagious disease, there is a marked deterioration in the funeral rites. One would expect to find a lower level of corpses that had been interred with due ceremony and then maybe others just dumped on top of them. There would be mass graves that would almost certainly be marked by some kind of warning. If you just let me go down there I could see if there are any indications…"

"And what if they did die of plague and the spores are still active?" Carter indicated the city. "Look around you. Everyone died. There was no one left to rebuild, to repopulate. Whatever killed these people did it very efficiently."

Daniel looked between O'Neill and Carter in annoyance. "Isn't this just 'don't touch it, it's dead and you might catch something from it' dressed up as military strategy? If archaeologists had never examined any bodies over the years for fear of what diseases they might have we'd know almost nothing about our own pasts."

Daniel looked thirty seconds away from trying to climb down into the shaft even without any rope and recognizing the all-too familiar signs of an archaeologist poised on the brink of outright defiance, O'Neill sighed inwardly. Okay, damn, going to have to play the heavy after all.

In a way that he hoped would brook no argument, O'Neill said, "Daniel, no, okay? No, you can't go and pick over some three thousand year old corpses that might have died from some extremely contagious disease. No." It was on the tip of his tongue to add: 'Do you remember what happened the last time you got too close to some really old corpses…?' But there was still too much unresolved between him and Daniel about the aftermath of their finding the dead Linvris and he still had enough misgivings about his own behavior in that affair to make it something he wanted to bring up. All the same, the urge to say 'Daniel don't you ever learn?' was almost overwhelming.

Daniel was staring at him with that now familiar expression of frustration in his blue eyes. "So why do you even bother bringing me along with you if you're not going to let me do my job when we get here?"

Oh well, O'Neill thought, at least he's definitely back to normal: annoying, argumentative, and lacking even a vestige of common sense. He said mildly, "Getting killed isn’t actually your job, Daniel – good at it though you are. Translating and communicating is your job."

Daniel stared around at the dusty ruins. "Well excuse me but I don't see a whole hell of a lot of people around here for me to communicate with. And what would be the point anyway? You and I are supposed to be speaking the same language and I can't even get through to you, can I?" He moved off to look at another tablet and O'Neill shook his head wearily. The last thing he'd wanted was to get into a fight with Daniel. He'd been hoping they could build some bridges on this trip not blow up the damned riverbank.

Carter looked torn between the two points of view. "Sir, what if Daniel put on protective clothing? I mean he does have a point – archaeologists have been digging up dead bodies for years without too many ill affects."

"And, once Daniel's got clearance he can dig away to his heart's content, but I'm not letting him lower himself into a crumbling grave with only a flashlight for company. However, I am quite happy to go ask General Hammond if it's okay, get the proper equipment, then come back with a team of people who can tell us if those chambers are stable enough for Daniel to go down into them and if there's likely to be any risk of infection from the dead. I mean look around you, Major, these ruins are going to be here for a little while yet and it’s not like there's some rival archaeologist going to beat him to it, now is there?"

"You're right, sir."

"I quite often am. It would be kind of nice if people occasionally remembered that."

"I'll go and tell Daniel."

Carter found Daniel angrily translating a tablet, the point of his pen making vicious indentations in the page of his notebook. Teal'c was watching him with mild disapproval. "Daniel Jackson – O'Neill is correct. There could be much danger in – "

"I don’t want to hear it." Daniel pulled off his glasses and stuffed them irritably into his top pocket then collected himself and gave the Jaffa a look of apology. "Sorry, Teal'c, but sometimes I just can’t see the point in me even being here." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Damn, now I'm getting a headache."

Carter came up behind him. "Daniel, the Colonel's just said that he's very happy for us all to come back with a proper team who can assess the stability of the ruins and the likelihood of any danger and if they say it's okay you can dig up as many bodies as you like."

Trust Jack to go ahead and be reasonable about it, Daniel thought irritably. He was trying to hang onto his anger because he was afraid that if he let go of it he would become horribly aware of how much like a spoilt kid he was acting. He knew damned well that the man would have given in to him if he could. Jack probably gave in to him way too often if he was honest about it, like that time when Daniel had been so adamant they had to try and grab Apophis that he'd steamrollered Jack into agreeing to it and had gotten them all killed…

He saw the staff weapon flare, the bolt strike Jack squarely in the back; saw Jack fall and lie there, lifeless, that terrible wound still smoldering. Saw Sam blasted in the abdomen as she jumped up to go to Jack's aid…

Daniel winced as he felt his headache immediately get worse. Those damned flowers were drugging his senses, their perfume so pervasive it was like having purple velvet wrapped around your brain. Hell. He'd seen that weariness wash over Jack's face so often: how many times had they had variants on the Want-to-go/No-you-can't conversation? How often had he been right? Well, gee, that was a tricky one; wasn't it…never? And how often had him going ahead and doing what he wanted got everyone into trouble? Well now, that was too many times to count, wasn't it? Daniel groaned inwardly. Damn. Damn. Damn. Now he was going to have to apologize to Jack and he really didn't want to.

Teal'c's words came as a welcome distraction. "I still do not understand why the long dead are treated with so much less reverence than the recently deceased on your world."

"It's an archaeological ethical dilemma, Teal'c, that we're still in the process of resolving." Daniel did have the grace to look slightly abashed by the Jaffa's expression as he put away his notebook and pen, absent-mindedly licking the pollen from his fingers as he realized they were still sticky. "Well, okay, basically we try not to think about it otherwise we couldn't do what we do, but – "

"Hey, kids." As O'Neill came up, Daniel looked at him awkwardly over his shoulder but O'Neill saved him having to apologize by nodding at the tablet. "Does it say anything interesting?"

"Not really, it's just some more of the same: Blessed are the followers of Dionysus, for they are protected by his love."

Carter looked around at the ruins. "Well his love didn’t seem to do a lot for these people."

"On the contrary. It gave them many centuries of perfect contentment."

The voice was rich, musical, and oddly compelling. As they all turned around, Teal'c primed his staff weapon and O'Neill raised his MP-5. The young man who stood before them was as tall as Teal'c and almost inhumanly handsome. His expression was pleasant and welcoming but although he nodded slowly to both O'Neill and Teal'c, O'Neill noticed that his gaze rested with a slightly unnerving satisfaction upon Carter and Daniel. He was dressed in a tunic-type garment that revealed rather more than it concealed so it was possible to see that his body also appeared to be inhumanly perfect. The only thing about him that suggested he had not stepped straight off a Greek vase was the thin coronet around his head decorated with a single red jewel.

"And you are?" O'Neill prompted.

"The Goa'uld, Zagreus," Teal'c said flatly.

The newcomer looked at the Jaffa without a hint of irritation. "The god, Dionysus, in these people's culture."

"Actually, that isn't specifically our culture," Daniel explained conscientiously. "Dionysus was a god to the Ancient Greeks but in our era he's considered a – uh mythological character."

"Mythological?" Zagreus leaned forward and blew gently on the archaeologist's cheek. "Do I seem like a myth to you?"

Seeing Daniel looking a little dazed and remembering Hathor's powers, Carter said quickly, "Daniel, move away from him."

Zagreus smiled at her as though her words had pleased him greatly. "You are fond of the boy, then? You would protect him even from one who means him no harm?" He stretched out a hand and touched her hair. "Although we sense you are a warrior of great courage, we perceive that you are also compassionate as you are beautiful. We have always been a friend to your race and are most pleased that you have visited our world. We would offer you our friendship and protection."

Carter opened her mouth to tell him to get away from her, now, but found herself distracted. He had golden eyes, not glowing, a soft gold, sympathetic, compassionate. He was, without a doubt, the most handsome man she had ever seen. With an effort she reminded himself that this outer shape was just a husk; whoever he once was, this body was now only host to a Goa'uld.

As he gazed at her, the jewel on his forehead began to glow and then flickered and died. He frowned. "You have been host to a Goa'uld?"

"To a Tok'ra," she made the distinction pointedly.

"You are then as…unusual as you are beautiful." But he seemed disconcerted and she was glad to see it. She wondered if he knew that the host in which he lived might have powers over any human female with a fully functioning libido that no alien parasite ever could. Just pheromones, she told herself firmly, but she still took care to take another step backwards. She had vivid memories of Daniel and Colonel O'Neill making idiots of themselves over Hathor and had no desire to follow in their footsteps.

His MP-5 had been nestling comfortably in the crook of his arm, but now O'Neill lifted it a little higher so that even a very unobservant and complacent Goa'uld could hardly fail to notice it. "Well, no offence, Zagreus or Dionysus or whoever you are, but none of us are exactly champing at the bit to pal up with a Goa'uld."

"We perceive you have been unlucky in your god," Zagreus addressed himself to Teal'c. "The one you once served was always evil. He had no love for humanity. He would never interact with them. We are not all like Apophis."

"I have found that you are."

O'Neill added, "And to be honest with you, Hathor interacted with some of us for all she was worth and we didn't much like her either."

"We remember Hathor. She was always predictable." As he spoke, the Goa'uld was gazing at Daniel with the expression of one who has rediscovered a favorite son.

O'Neill reached across and caught Daniel's arm, pulling him back a couple of feet while still addressing the Goa'uld. "You want to tell us what happened to these people? How did they die?"

Hathor? Daniel gave his head a shake to clear it, but that name was still echoing through his aching brain and he took a rapid couple of steps backwards as an automatic response to it, stopping only when Jack's fingers tightening on his arm halted his retreat. Hathor's dead, he reminded himself firmly. Jack had turned her into a Popsicle and they were obviously just talking about her, not saying she was somewhere around. Zagreus was the Goa'uld they needed to worry about now, the one wearing a khiton, sandals, and nothing else, and who was looking at him with that oddly affectionate gaze. But perhaps the guy was just really pleased to see some humans after so long by himself? That was probably it. Damn, this headache was really screwing with his concentration. Something was really screwing with his concentration anyway. He was sure he'd just missed a big chunk of a discussion he should have been listening to and now Jack was asking something else and he definitely ought to try and understand the answer. Oh yes, the citadel, the corpses. How had everyone died? Good question, Jack. At least one of them still had his brain in gear.

Zagreus shrugged regretfully. "Their blood grew thinner. We sought to bring fresh codes of life to strengthen them, but the newcomers brought illness. All withered and died. The others of our kind exiled us here in punishment for our love of your race. Heartless as they are, they would not allow us to send our people through what you call the Stargate lest they carried the plague to their worshippers."

"It must have been a very virulent plague to wipe out the entire population?" Carter frowned. "Even with the worst diseases on Earth there are usually survivors."

"Your world is large. This planet is small, there was but this one citadel and the germs had nowhere to go except into our people."

Carter looked at O'Neill. "Well I'm not a microbiologist but that does ring a vague bell. The Ebola Virus was supposedly activated by overcrowding. On the whole viruses don't want to kill the patient because it means they die as well but in cases where human beings have encroached on new areas they sometimes force the virus to infect them almost in self defense."

Daniel was still gazing at Zagreus thoughtfully, but when O'Neill nudged him to see if he was still with them or had been mesmerized in some way, Daniel came out of his reverie at once to murmur, "Jack, I was just thinking – the Goa'uld know things about ancient civilizations on our world that nobody else ever could. I mean – they were actually there. If this Goa'uld is friendly then that would be like being able to sit down with Apollo and ask him if his fiery chariot was a death glider – which, incidentally, I bet it was. This Goa'uld might know if the Trojan War took place, if Achilles ever actually existed - "

"Just slow down a little," O'Neill told him. "We've only got this guy's word for it that he's friendly and I don't remember Ra or Apophis ever offering to fill you in on all those little grey areas in the Book of the Dead."

"If you accompany us to our palace we can offer you refreshment." Zagreus leaned forward and plucked the half-eaten PowerBar from Daniel's jacket, sniffing it curiously. He smiled at Daniel, and Carter thought she had never seen a smile so alive or so charming. "Poor child, if this is all they feed you, it is no wonder you are so pale. Come with us, we will offer you far better fare than this." As Daniel appeared uncertain, the Goa'uld threw the bar onto the floor, adding beguilingly, "We can tell you why the people of Mycenae changed their burial rites."

At once Daniel was reaching for his glasses, hurrying to put them back on before fishing out his pen and notebook. "Really?"

O'Neill caught Teal'c's eye, saying in an undertone, "What do you think? What does he want from us? Is there anything strategic we could gain from going along with him for a while?"

"I do not think that we should trust him but that does not mean that there is nothing we can learn from him. He was reputed to have unusual powers not common to the other Goa'uld which suggests he may have developed technologies unknown to them."

"What kind of a reputation did he have in Goa'uld circles? Is anything he's said so far likely to be true?"

"Some of it may be. I heard that he was accused of being corrupted by too intimate contact with your race many centuries ago. And it was rumored that he had been exiled by the System Lords for some crime that was never spoken of."

"Well someone the other Goa'uld don't like might be a useful ally."

"Sir, I think he could be dangerous," Carter murmured. "And I think he wants something from Daniel. And given how much reason Daniel has to hate the Goa'uld don't you think the way he's just gone off with this one is a little suspicious?"

Daniel was already accompanying Zagreus along the road, scribbling rapidly into his notebook as he did so. The Goa'uld was almost a head taller than he was, but was bending down to speak directly into the archaeologist's ear. Although Daniel was clearly intent only on the information he was being given, nodding as he wrote, Carter disliked the intimacy of the Goa'uld's body language. He seemed only a moment away from putting an arm companionably around the archaeologist's shoulders.

"If the guy's been here by himself for centuries, he's probably lonely, wants someone to talk to." O'Neill was also observing them. No one could have been warier of the Goa'uld than him, but if Zagreus had really been here alone then he would have had no opportunity to produce any more Goa'uld larvae with which he could infect anyone, and as his host certainly seemed to be in excellent shape, it seemed unlikely this mature Goa'uld would want to jump ship to any of them. And presumably even aliens who thought they were deities could get lonely over a couple of millennia by themselves. All the same, a Goa'uld was a Goa'uld when all was said and done, and that meant however friendly they appeared to be, you couldn't trust them worth a spit. He raised his voice: "Daniel! Wait up a minute!" O'Neill turned to Teal'c. "What do you think?"

"If we accept his invitation, we must not relax our guard but we might lose more than we would gain by passing up this opportunity to question him."

"Okay, we go but we stay alert. The first sign of anything – Goa'uldy and we're out of there."

They quickly reached the palace of Zagreus – a wonderfully elaborate structure whose walls were covered in molded carvings of the life of Dionysus – where, somewhat disconcertingly, they found fruit and dried venison already piled on platters in readiness for their arrival. Just for a second, O'Neill wondered if he had made the decision to come here unbidden or if the Goa'uld was influencing him in someway. Why, after all, should they accept the hospitality of one of their sworn enemies? Determined to keep a hold on himself, he refused the wine the other offered. "Thanks, but I have my own." He took a bottle of water from his pack and ostentatiously sipped it.

For the first time Zagreus looked disconcerted. "But we are the god of wine, all drink in our honor. We gave your race the fruit of the vine." He proffered a goblet to Daniel. "You shall drink? You, I know, would not offend us?"

With an apologetic look at O'Neill, Daniel dutifully took a sip from the goblet before helping himself to fruit, sitting down on a silk cushion as he chewed. He seemed to have recovered from his earlier disorientation and of all of them appeared the most at ease in the Goa'uld's presence. He was clearly fascinated by the paintings on the walls depicting the various myths relating to Dionysus. Carter was trying not to be too impressed by the magnificence of the Goa'uld's palace, but there was something very beguiling about the mosaic-tiled pools in which golden fish circled lazily through the clear blue water. The mosaics also depicted the life of Dionysus and as the deity was naked in every picture, what little was concealed by Zagreus' tunic was no longer left to the imagination.

Quickly averting her eyes, Carter darted an enquiring glance at O'Neill who nodded towards Daniel pointedly. She went and sat next to the archaeologist, asking him about the stories depicted in the mosaic to make it less obvious why she had done so. As she spoke, she was getting her own bottle of water out of her pack. As the Goa'uld turned his attention to O'Neill, Carter quickly emptied the bottled water into the fish pond and picked up Daniel's goblet, tipping half of its contents into the bottle before quickly screwing the top back on and replacing it in her pack. Absorbed in telling her the story of Pentheus and his grisly fate, Daniel didn't notice.

Zagreus seated himself beside Teal'c and O'Neill, saying to the latter, "You are the father of this tribe?"

"I'm in charge of SG-1 if that's what you mean."

Zagreus indicated Daniel and Carter. "Then will you sell your children to us? The boy and the girl? We would have their company."

O'Neill almost choked on the second mouthful of water he had taken and spluttered for a moment before Teal'c reached across and thumped him on the back. "Thanks," he managed.

"You are welcome, O'Neill."

Recovering, O'Neill looked at the Goa'uld, saying in a low but determined tone, "No. One – I don't own them. Two – they're not for sale. And three – you can't have them." He felt he should add something forceful about the repugnance of slavery and perhaps try to impress upon Zagreus that Daniel and Carter weren't his children – God forbid! If that was indeed what the Goa'uld thought they were; it was difficult to know how a several thousand year-old alien who believed himself to be a god would be thinking; but Zagreus was simply looking puzzled.

"They would be well taken care of. Indeed, they would be loved and protected. No harm would ever come to them. Can you promise as much?"

O'Neill got to his feet. "Carter! Daniel! We're out of here."

Daniel swallowed a mouthful of fruit before saying, "So soon? I wanted to ask uh – Dionysus about Euripides' source material for the Bacchae."

"Another time."

As Daniel put down the goblet he was holding and began to get to his feet, Zagreus said, "Will you not even ask them?"

"What, if they want to be sold into slavery? I kind of think I can speak for them on that."

"There would be no slavery. Indeed, we can promise you they would be treated with great kindness. Can you say as much of your world? Can you say as much even of yourself?"

Although he knew he should just keep walking, O'Neill paused. "Meaning what exactly?"

Zagreus crossed over to where Daniel was standing with a half-eaten piece of fruit between his fingers. The Goa'uld waved a hand before the Daniel's eyes and O'Neill caught sight of the jewel in the palm of his hand, which he could have sworn hadn't been there a moment before. Thinking it must be a ribbon device, he started forward, but Zagreus held up the other hand to stop him. "We give you our word we will do him no harm. We want only to confirm what we already know."

"Colonel, are you going to let him…?" Carter looked to O'Neill for guidance. All her instincts were telling her to reach across and knock the Goa'uld's arm down quickly before he got Daniel in the grip of the hand device, but the Colonel was looking curiously indecisive, like he'd had a blow to the head and hadn't quite got over it yet.

Zagreus waved the glowing jewel before Daniel's face and Carter noticed that the jewel in the Goa'uld's coronet was now also glowing red. Daniel looked oddly peaceful. He seemed to be fascinated by the light, but certainly not hurt by it. And she could feel an odd complacency creeping through her, something telling her that Daniel was perfectly all right, that nothing was injuring him, that she should just sit down and enjoy the wine because there was nothing at all to worry about. Even as she tried to fight it, she found herself sitting back down next to Daniel. It was very hard not to look at the light, but she made herself stare fixedly at the floor. She was aware of people talking but it was happening a long way off and it seemed remote and unimportant. Carter struggled valiantly against the peculiar calm seeping through her. She shouldn't be calm; there was danger here, Daniel was in danger, that Goa'uld was doing something to him, to all of them. She had to tell the Colonel to stop this. But in a minute, when this odd faintness had left her, she would tell him then.

Concealing a smile, Zagreus glanced over his shoulder at O'Neill. "The boy has been lost or damaged while under your protection, more than once. Indeed, we would say on many occasions you and your people have failed to keep him safe." He waved the jewel near the left side of Daniel's jaw and it glowed a little brighter. Zagreus looked at O'Neill accusingly. "You yourself have struck him on occasion."

"On one occasion, okay? One. Don't make it sound like it's a hobby or something. I just wasn't myself that day. And anyway – I don't have to defend my – "

"O'Neill, I advise you not to listen to him."

"It was at the time that the primitive people took him, he was dragged through the forest for many miles. Though he has never told you of it, they treated him brutally while he was their prisoner. He was injured and afraid. He thought that you would come for him, but you did not. Not until the boy had been lost to himself." The Goa'uld's eyes glowed and the words seemed to hang in the air for an eternity.

"Well I was kind of busy at the time…" O'Neill tried to fight back but he could still hear the echoes, could feel those unwanted truths slipping under his defenses like an assassin's blade. And it was no good. He was back on P3X797. The Touched were now the Untouched again, everything was hunky dory and they were heading back for the Stargate. Daniel was limping. He could see it out of the corner of his eye but he didn't want to make a fuss in front of SG-3. For Daniel's sake or his own?  Both, perhaps. Back then he'd still been a little embarrassed by how worried he'd been about their wayward civilian. He'd still been thinking that emotions weren't something you showed; concern wasn't something you admitted to. So he'd let Daniel limp back to the Stargate unaided. It had been quite a long walk.

Then once they were back through the Stargate he'd sent Teal'c, Carter and Makepeace off to fill in Hammond on their success story, while he hauled Daniel straight to the infirmary. He'd yelled for Doctor Fraiser as he sat Daniel down on one of those uncomfortable beds, patting him down to see if anything was broken, checking out those scrapes on his legs where the damned Touched had dragged him through the forest and seemingly left half of it in his clothes, hair and skin. Letting the anxiety he'd been masking bubble up like a hot spring.

Daniel had been vague and sleepy and kept trying to lie down on the bed – which O'Neill had thought was a sure sign of concussion although Doctor Fraiser had later assured him it was simply overwhelming fatigue. He'd had to keep pulling Daniel up while helping him peel off his shredded uniform, the exhausted archaeologist trying not to yelp as every movement sent pain jarring through his scrapes, cracked ribs and multi-colored bruises. So many bruises. Some of them ones O'Neill had made himself but the rest from the fists, feet, and clubs of the Touched. He remembered Daniel had rested his head on O'Neill's shoulder while still only half undressed, murmuring, "So tired…Just want to go to sleep, Jack. Just really want to go to sleep…"

That was when Daniel had closed his eyes and drifted off, his jacket trailing to the floor where he'd had pulled it off one arm and then given up, boots unlaced but not yet removed and still wearing his ripped T-shirt and trousers; Daniel so dirty and bedraggled but his breath warm and sweet as a child's against the older man's neck. The archaeologist had obviously needed somewhere secure to rest after the ordeal he'd been through and had unhesitatingly picked O'Neill for his safe haven. O'Neill had marveled at the time at Daniel's continuing faith in him, felt honored and scared by it, because it didn't seem to matter what he did: Daniel just trusted him regardless.

Doctor Fraiser had come in and found them like that: Daniel fast asleep on his shoulder, O'Neill awkwardly cradling the younger man in his arms, uncomfortable and embarrassed and yet also moved and oddly touched by Daniel's trust. That was probably when that damned protective pyre had been lit inside him: the one that flared so agonizingly whenever Daniel was lost or hurt.

Fraiser had said, "How is he?"

"Beat. In every possible way. But alive, Doc. Definitely alive." He'd ruffled Daniel's blood-matted hair and let the relief soak into him.

Now, O'Neill wondered if Daniel would ever do that again: just fall asleep on his shoulder knowing that 'Jack' would look after him and everything would be okay. In the shadow of the padded cell that had come between them, would Daniel ever trust him like that again?

He realized Zagreus was still staring at him intently and that jewel on his forehead was glowing brighter than comet fire. "Have you no defense?"

"O'Neill!"

"Colonel!"

He was vaguely aware that Carter and Teal'c were trying to get his attention, had been trying to get his attention for some minutes now and Carter had a hand clamped to her forehead like she had the worst migraine in history, but for some reason he could only concentrate on one thing at a time. For his own peace of mind he had to answer Zagreus, had to prove to both of them that he could take better care of Daniel than any Goa'uld. "I don't need to defend myself," O'Neill retorted. "Look Daniel doesn't have a problem with – Daniel, tell him – "

O'Neill turned to look at Daniel but the man was staring dreamily at the glowing light in Zagreus' palm, bemusedly following its circling and swoops. The Goa'uld smiled indulgently at Daniel's fascination and O'Neill was reminded of someone waving a piece of yarn for a kitten for the pleasure of seeing it bat at it. Suddenly O'Neill's mind cleared and he realized why Teal'c and Carter had been shouting his name. "Will you cut that out with the light show?" he demanded, angry with himself for not having stopped it before. "Maybe you're not hurting him but you're still not doing him any good."

"It was only because of Colonel O'Neill that Daniel Jackson was rescued from remaining one of the Touched forever," Teal'c put in. "He permitted Doctor Fraiser to experiment on him that others might be saved. Were it not for Colonel O'Neill, Daniel Jackson would still be on the dark side of the planet."

"O'Neill allowed the boy to travel to the dark side of the planet in the first place," Zagreus returned, closing his fingers across the light to extinguish it and then lowering his hand slowly. Daniel blinked as the light faded but remained still and passive. "The boy is not a warrior and we would never have exposed him to such a risk. We would not permit any harm to come to him. We would keep him safe at all times. He would bask in the love and protection of Dionysus. He would never know fear, or captivity, or ill-treatment again."

"Or freewill? And stop calling Daniel a boy, will you? He's a married man with a couple of PhDs, for crying out loud. At least treat him like a grown-up. Daniel," O'Neill reached across and caught Daniel by the sleeve of his jacket, "we're leaving." A little disorientated by the Goa'uld, O'Neill jerked the younger man away from Zagreus more roughly than he had intended.

Zagreus frowned. "We perceive that you do not treat him gently."

"Look, this is going nowhere. You can say whatever you want, you're not getting Daniel or Carter to keep you company. I'm sure you'd look after them just fine and I'm sure you're lonely as hell after so many years stuck here by yourself, but you'll just have to wait for the next bunch of travelers to come through the Stargate because right now we're all going home." With his fingers still firmly wrapped around Daniel's jacket, he strode out of the doors, towing the dazed archaeologist after him. After a moment's hesitation, Carter collected herself and followed them.

Teal'c lingered a moment longer to look at the Goa'uld with suspicious eyes. "These humans are not as you remember them. Much has changed on their world since you were driven from it. They will not be beguiled by you this time."

Zagreus reclined on a couch and reached for some fruit. "You are mistaken, Jaffa," he returned. "It is not in the nature of humans to ever change."

Teal'c strode back out into the sunlight and let the double doors of beaten gold clash shut behind him.

***

Part Two

A hundred yards down the road, Daniel looked at O'Neill's set face. "Uh – Jack what just happened in there?"

Realizing that he was almost dragging the younger man along, O'Neill let go of him and smoothed out the creases in his jacket apologetically. "Zagreus wanted to buy you and Carter to keep as house-pets. I guess he got fed up talking to the goldfish."

"So, how come I don't remember any of it?"

"He made you all woozy with this sort of – non-painful ribbon device. I think I may have lost it myself for a minute or so as well. You feel okay now?"

"Never better." Daniel noticed he still had some fruit in his hand and tossed a segment into his mouth. "In fact my headache's gone."

"He wanted to buy us?" Carter demanded.

"Yeah. Said he'd look after you better than I would. Accused me of constantly mislaying you, or something." He darted a sideways glance at Daniel. "Incidentally, what do you remember about being a prisoner of the Touched?"

Daniel swallowed the fruit he was chewing. "Not a lot really. I mean it wasn't the most fun I've ever had but I seem to recall that as long as I kept my head down, they pretty much left me alone – too busy fighting amongst themselves." Seeing O'Neill's expression, he said in disbelief, "Jack, are you seriously feeling guilty about something that happened – what – two, three years ago, and which you couldn't have done anything to prevent?"

"No," O'Neill said so defensively that they all knew he had to be lying.

Teal'c said, "It was I who lost Daniel Jackson on the dark side of P3X-797, O'Neill, not you."

"Nobody 'lost' me," Daniel protested irritably. "I got captured. It happens. And not just to me."

"But mostly to you," O'Neill pointed out. "Zagreus did have a point about that."

Daniel thought about doing the calculations on his fingers but had a sneaking suspicion the truth might not help him win this argument. That 'lost' was still rankling. Other people got captured and no blame was ever attached to who was with them, but whoever was with him apparently considered themselves responsible for getting him home in one piece; like he was some kid they let tag along but who always had to be kept out of danger. But it wasn't something he could ever confront directly because nothing was ever said or done that was too obvious. It just happened that when the bullets started flying, Sam or Jack or Teal'c always seemed to be between them and him; or someone's hand would close on his arm and push or pull him out of harm's way while he was still wondering what the hell that noise was?

Deciding that to go over that old argument again would be futile, he moved onto firmer ground, saying, "You know, Jack, that was Dionysus' specialty – messing about with people's heads. You really don't want to pay any attention to anything a Goa'uld tells you."

"I wasn't." After another pause, O'Neill added, "But I'll talk to General Hammond about him assigning a team to help you excavate the burial site. Okay? As I understand it, Maybourne's people have been slowly getting together a bunch of Pentagon-approved scientists for a while in case anything like this turned up so it won't kill them to push up their schedule a little."

"Sir, I really don't think that's a good idea," Carter said at once.

Daniel looked at her in hurt surprise. She was usually inclined to take his side, or at least to mediate between him and Jack when their positions were directly opposed. And, being a scientist he would have thought she would have been the first member of the team to see the significance of such a site. "Why not?" he demanded.

"Zagreus wants you for something, Daniel, and I wouldn't mind betting it won't be a good something."

"Like Jack says, I expect he's just lonely. If the system lords have exiled him here for fraternizing with the enemy and all his worshippers are dead then of course he'd try to take the opportunity to buy the next couple of people that came along, what else would you expect from a Goa'uld? Incidentally, how much did he offer for us, Jack? I hope you asked for a decent price."

Carter said, "Daniel, I don't think you should joke about this. The Goa'uld don't like taking no for an answer. What if he has the same power that Hathor had?"

Daniel had only a hazy memory of being seduced – well, raped, not to put too fine a point on it – by Hathor so that she could use his DNA to make baby Goa'ulds, but it was not a recollection he cherished. In fact it still made his stomach curdle with shame and disgust and he was pretty sure that Sam knew that, which made it all the more inexplicably tactless of her to have brought it up. Affronted, he didn't answer her.

After an awkward silence, she said, "I just think it might be better if we left this place and didn't come back, that's all, and if you're adamant about wanting that site excavated then I think you should send somebody else."

Although Daniel knew with one part of his mind that she was right, there was suddenly a much larger part that wanted to excavate that site more than anything in the world. Every time he closed his eyes he saw those golden death masks shimmering out of the shadows, slants of sunlight gilding the soft metal. Those burial chambers were calling to him like siren song and he couldn't bear the thought of just filling his ears with metaphorical wax and ignoring them. Unable to think of a logical refutation, he said irrelevantly, "Well according to Jack, he wanted you too."

"Exactly why I'm not proposing to come back here. I don't want to end up a slave to Zagreus."

O'Neill hastened to intervene. "Kids, let's not fight about this. That's probably exactly what he wants."

"Fine." Daniel threw the last segment of fruit onto the grass at the side of the road. "But that site could hold the answers to questions we would never be able to solve on earth and nothing – including some three thousand year old would-be deity – is going to stop me excavating it."

"Fine," Carter echoed.

O'Neill looked between them awkwardly. Carter and Daniel almost never fell out. They were the genius twins of SG-1, and the only problem with them working together usually was that if you didn't keep an eye on them they'd stay up all night metaphorically reading under the covers with a flashlight – well working on some damned science project when they were supposed to be home getting some sleep. Sibling rivalry had never been a problem until now. He looked to Teal'c for guidance and then remembered that Teal'c was also the father of an only child. They exchanged an anxious look then O'Neill shrugged. Carter and Daniel were both stomping along with their noses in the air but they'd sort it out. Daniel was a sulker, certainly, but Carter wasn't and she'd patch things up. He'd better keep out of it and let them deal with it in their own time.

They walked the rest of the way to the Stargate in silence.

***

General Hammond had listened to Daniel's enthusiastic description of the ruined citadel with scrupulous politeness before telling him that he would certainly give the matter his full attention. He had then sent Daniel off to the infirmary to get some blood tests he had supposedly forgotten to give Doctor Fraiser the previous week. Although this sounded entirely plausible, it was obvious to the rest of SG-1 that this was simply a pretext for getting Daniel out of the way. Daniel, however, appeared happily unaware of any ulterior motive, and practically skipped out of the room in his eagerness to describe the ruins to another captive audience.

O'Neill privately thought the doctor should be commended if she didn't take the opportunity to give Daniel one of those really-big-needle-in-the-butt shots that were one of the regular drawbacks of 'gate travel. He couldn't think of any other way of interrupting the archaeologist in mid-flow at the moment.

No one who knew the General could doubt that he was fond of Daniel but the young man was both a mystery and a worry to him at times, and this was definitely one of those times. Hammond sighed. "What's your recommendation, Colonel?"

"Sir, if we don't let Daniel take another look at those ruins I'm not sure he's ever going to get over it. As I understand it, this place could be a copy of some very significant citadel-type-thing and Daniel really wants to go dig it up."

Carter looked up. "Colonel, with respect, I don't think that's a good enough reason for risking his life and the lives of anyone who accompanies him back to that planet."

"Oh come on, Carter, if I veto this I'm going to feel like I just took some kid's Christmas presents away."

O'Neill felt that fate had offered him a chance to make things up to Daniel; a way to make amends for that padded cell that didn't involve either of them having to hold a toe-curling conversation. He would go out on a limb with Hammond to try and get Daniel permission to go and dig up some of those bones and stones and bits of pottery and rusty pieces of metal that Daniel liked so much, and Daniel would get well again. It would be like sticking the guy in an archaeologist's summer camp where Daniel could wear himself out in total safety for a week or so before coming back to them with his enthusiasm and self-confidence restored. It was the perfect solution – if O'Neill could just get the other three people in the room to see it; but at the moment none of them were looking too convinced.

Teal'c said, "I agree with Major Carter. I think it would be most unwise to trust Zagreus on this matter. Daniel Jackson can recover from any disappointment he would experience at not being able to excavate an archaeological site; the same might not be true of whatever fate this Goa'uld has in mind for him."

O'Neill glared between Carter and Teal'c, determined not to have his perfect scheme ruined. "Okay, what do you think this Zagreus wants with Daniel? I mean, to be honest, what use is Daniel to an exiled Goa'uld? Zagreus can't trade him because he's not in contact with the System Lords. He doesn't need anything translated. He certainly doesn't need any ruins dated – he was around when the ruins were built. Apart from the ones who want to kill Daniel because he's ticked them off, I shouldn't think your average Goa'uld would give you a Snickers bar for him."

"He does know the codes for this base, Colonel," Hammond put in. Seeing Teal'c's expression, he added hastily, "I'm not saying that Doctor Jackson would divulge them to anyone even under duress but from your description it sounds like this Zagreus might be able to read minds."

"Well if that's so, sir, then the Goa'uld's already got them because he definitely had a good rummage around in Daniel's memory, but the truth is, we don't think Zagreus can get off the planet. As Teal'c remembers it, the other System Lords exiled him there centuries ago and now he's stuck there. That's why, when all his worshippers died out, he had to just grin and bear it instead of going out and picking up some more."

Carter couldn't quite bring herself to point out the most obvious reason why the Goa'uld might want Daniel's company. She'd been hoping that O'Neill and the General could get there all by themselves without any help from her, but so far they were being lamentably slow. Or perhaps they had already considered that possibility and rejected it – the Colonel had certainly been very aware of that danger where Daniel was concerned when they had been trapped on Hadante after all, but the inhabitants of Hadante had been human not Goa'uld.

Carter had never quite worked out exactly how the Goa'uld felt about their human hosts – like an overcoat you pulled on, like being inside a car you were driving, or a more intimate connection? The fact that the Goa'uld were so determined to only have hosts who were beautiful – rejecting any who were imperfect with ruthless disdain – did suggest that the hosts the Goa'uld chose must be some kind of reflection of the personality of the Goa'uld within. So, presumably those who wanted to be terrifying burrowed their way into an Unas; those who wanted human males to be putty in their hands chose the guise of beautiful goddesses, and those who wanted to reap the benefits of playing the part of a dangerous and seductive demi-god like Dionysus chose a host of perfect beauty and great physical fitness. Carter couldn't help thinking that having gone to all the trouble to find yourself a human body like the one in which Zagreus now resided you might want to do something with it.

Carter darted a glance at O'Neill. The trouble with the Colonel was that he looked at the Goa'uld and just saw the snake inside them; the host hardly seemed to register with him. She knew damned well that if any human male wearing that costume had shown the interest in Daniel Dionysus had the Colonel would certainly not have agreed to Daniel going off alone with him to talk about burial chambers. But O'Neill wasn't seeing those oiled pectoral muscles and that six pack stomach; he wasn't even seeing that here was a human male who even without the extra strength the Goa'uld gave him could always have beaten Daniel in a fight: he was seeing a parasite who wasn't in need of a host and might have some technology they could use.

And, of course, the Colonel being riddled with guilt about Daniel's sojourn in a padded cell was probably a factor in this particular equation as well.

Having temporarily played host to a Tok'ra was no apprenticeship for knowing how it felt to be a Goa'uld, so she couldn't guess at Zagreus' intentions any better than anyone else. Carter decided there were a whole lot of things they should have asked Teal'c before now, and that whether or not the Goa'uld had sexual desire for the humans they ruled over was definitely one of them. All she knew was that when Zagreus had been looking at her out of those golden eyes, his interest certainly hadn't felt platonic. And if his interest in Daniel was equally unacademic then Daniel could end up knowing a lot more about Ancient Greek culture than he really wanted to.

The fact that Zagreus had wanted her as well might just mean that he liked his bread buttered both sides or it could mean he wanted something else entirely. Either way she had no intention of setting foot back on that planet and if there was any way she could persuade the Colonel not to let Daniel back there too she would – and to hell with Daniel's disappointment at not getting to dig up any death masks. She could live with Daniel being disappointed a lot more easily than she could live with Daniel being raped, injured, or killed.

General Hammond seemed to have a whole different set of concerns. "This mind reading?" He turned to Teal'c. "Is it possible?"

"Zagreus is always spoken of as a Goa'uld with unusual psychic abilities. It was his power to influence the thoughts of others that made him dangerous. In his years of exile he may well have learnt to enhance those powers through technologies unknown to the other Goa'uld."

"So he can read minds and influence thought and yet you're still saying you don't think he's a threat to Daniel?" Carter decided to try another route before they had to get onto the embarrassing reasons why Daniel shouldn't be left alone with Zagreus. "What do the Goa'uld always want? Hosts. Worshippers. People to prop up their divinity. Perhaps he just needs an audience and he thinks Daniel would be more receptive than the rest of us because he has information that Daniel wants. Perhaps he has a whole different set of reasons for wanting to lure Daniel back there. Whatever his reason, I know Zagreus was interested in keeping Daniel with him and I just can't see the justification for needlessly exposing him to danger."

"And aren't you doing exactly what Zagreus did – saying we ought to wrap him up in cotton wool so that there's no chance he can get hurt? Daniel's not a child, he's a doctor of archaeology and if he says this is a site of great significance and he wants to go excavate it, I kind of think that's his decision, don't you?" O'Neill nearly added, Damnit, Carter, we let them put him in a padded cell because we were so keen to keep him safe and how much good did that do him?

Carter opened her mouth to protest and then stopped. "Yes, sir, but – I just know that Zagreus is dangerous and - "

"All Goa'uld are dangerous. But at least this time there's only one of him and a lot more of us."

" – And I think it would be a mistake to let Daniel go back to Zagreus' world, that's all. And if he does go, I don't want to go with him." As O'Neill looked at her in surprise, she explained, "You said he tried to buy me and Daniel from you? Well if Zagreus needs both of us for whatever he has in mind, and I'm not there, he might leave Daniel alone."

"That makes sense." O'Neill said it in a way that suggested the opposite and then turned back to General Hammond. "Sir, I think I want you to okay it for Daniel to go back to that place with an archaeological survey team and dig up a few death masks. It'll keep him happy, it hopefully won't cost us very much, and, who knows, the Metropolitan might get a few artifacts to stick in their display cases."

General Hammond nodded. "I'll take it under advisement, Colonel."

As the others made to file out, he caught O'Neill's eye and the man obediently waited behind. As soon as the door was closed, Hammond said, "Colonel, I didn't want to say anything in front of Teal'c and Major Carter, but are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, are you sure you know why you're doing it? According to both Doctor Jackson and Teal'c this particular – god – was famous for being able to manipulate people's thinking."

"Well, sir, I don't think he's driven me mad if that's what you're asking."

"So, you would have made this recommendation even if you'd never laid eyes on that Goa'uld?"

"Absolutely. I'd already decided to do so before this Zagreus character ever turned up. I mean, when all's said and done, Daniel is an archaeologist and this is clearly a significant archaeological site and it's hardly surprising he wants to excavate it." As Hammond looked unconvinced, O'Neill waved a hand. "Sir, you should have seen him, he was so fired up with enthusiasm for all those dead things you wouldn't believe and I'm thinking we should just let him run away and play for a couple of days – "

"Colonel, part of the reason why the Pentagon are even willing to consider allowing external experts to take an interest in some of our finds is because it is taking so long to assess some of the objects and sites that we have encountered so far. Doctor Jackson occasionally being given leave to spend a couple of days there is just not enough."

O'Neill recalled all the times he had complained about SG-1 having to hang around while Daniel examined crumbling ruins. Not to mention all those occasions when he'd practically dragged Daniel from his office on the base by the scruff of the neck; hauling him off to the canteen or home with him to eat a proper meal, or to a hockey game, or just outside to make him breathe in some fresh air, while the younger man protested unheeded that he had too much translating to do to possibly take a break now. For years, O'Neill had been seeing all those damned artifacts the SG teams kept bringing back for Daniel to look at just as things that interfered with the younger man's sleeping and eating patterns; an irrelevant distraction the rest of them had to put up with because of Daniel's illogical interest in them. The thought that there was actually way too much work for one man to do alone and that Daniel probably needed six months just to catch up with himself had never occurred to him until now.

Seeing O'Neill's frown, Hammond sighed. "Jack, Are you aware that it takes years to properly excavate an archaeological site? And a site of this size would in all probability take decades?"

"Uh – no. It does?" It occurred to O'Neill that if that was the case then for the last three years Daniel must have been feeling like someone who wanted to sit down to a feast but instead was only permitted to snatch the odd scrap from the floor in passing. The realization that he, more often than not, had been the one dragging his friend away from the banquet was not a welcome one.

He was pretty sure that Daniel was finally beginning to realize how important he was to the rest of them, what an asset he was, how they looked on him as part of their families, damnit they were Daniel's family now; and as a human being he hoped the younger man felt wanted, needed, and cared for, but as an archaeologist…As an archaeologist he must have been feeling permanently half-starved and probably very frustrated.

Damnit, Daniel, O'Neill thought, why didn't you just tell me? Except Daniel might have tried to, dozens of times, and he probably wouldn't have listened. There was a certain look Daniel got in his eye when he was going to start saying something about ancient civilizations, or dead languages, or lost rituals that always made O'Neill want to put his hands over his ears and start singing. To be fair to himself, Daniel had almost exactly the same reaction when O'Neill tried to explain to him why his sidearm strapped on the way it did, or what their packs actually contained, or how you armed a claymore: that dogged determination to hang onto one's ignorance come what may didn't all go one way, but…With a sense of shock O'Neill realized that Hammond had been talking for some time and that he'd missed most of it.

"…so even supposing the Goa'uld turns out not to be a threat, do you really want to risk Doctor Jackson deciding he wants to leave SG-1? Because given the way he was talking to me about how much work needed to be done on that place, I don't think he's planning on coming home any time soon." Hammond looked at O'Neill. "And given – recent events – do you think this is a even a good time to let Doctor Jackson separate himself from the rest of SG-1? His self-confidence must have taken a hell of a knock back there. I think he needs the rest of you with him right now."

O'Neill almost gasped aloud as he had another unexpected flash of memory; not one scene this time, but a jumble of images: Daniel burning; Daniel being thrown across the room by a hand device; Daniel being shot by a staff weapon; Daniel bleeding his life away; Daniel sobbing hysterically after that sarcophagus addiction had nearly stolen who he was forever; Daniel cowering in the corner of that padded cell his hands clasped to his ears to try and block out the sound of ghostly footsteps only he could hear…Christ, what were they doing to this kid? All of them, Hammond, the military, but most of all O'Neill himself. Daniel wasn't trained for this. Daniel should never have been allowed to put himself at risk like this.

The Daniel he knew today was not the Daniel he had known on that first trip out to Abydos. There were all kinds of shadows behind those blue eyes now that had certainly never been there before. This was a Daniel who'd seen things, and done things, and had things done to him, that the old Daniel hadn't, and it had cost him. Big time. This was a Daniel who'd been worn too fine by life and was starting to get a little brittle, like very old, very good china you started to be afraid to drink from in case it shattered in your hand.

God, he'd let a civilian sign up for this terrifying roller-coaster ride on the arrogant assumption he could keep him safe. But he hadn't kept Daniel safe, had he? And Daniel's scar tissue and Daniel's shadowed eyes were the proofs of his failure. How could he ever have made a mistake like that in the first place? Didn't he know better than anyone that you couldn't keep others safe, however hard you tried, however much you wanted to? How many times was he going to let Daniel wake up in the infirmary before he realized that sooner or later the guy's luck was going to run out? It was only chance that Daniel wasn't still in a mental institute condemned to a terrifying half-life of drugs and delirium. What if the next time they walked through the Stargate, Cronos or Sokar was waiting for them? Were either of those dangerous sadists going to question O'Neill or Carter or Teal'c when they were all trained not to divulge information and Daniel would be right there next to them looking so frighteningly vulnerable? God, how come he'd never realized any of this before? It was so obvious now. Did he want Daniel to spend his last hours being tortured to death by the Goa'uld?

"…However, if you insist he should be allowed to return to that planet, I will back your recommendation and request that some personnel with the right security clearance accompany him and begin excavation, but I am concerned not only that Major Carter might be right and that Goa'uld a very serious threat to any Homo sapiens that come within his reach, but that even if this Zagreus turns out not to be hostile, Doctor Jackson is still going to quit SG-1 to return to archaeology."

O'Neill used the general's words as a lifeline pull himself back to the present but he could still feel his heart hammering way too fast in his chest. For a moment there he'd almost seen the Jaffa dragging Daniel away, almost heard the younger man's screams…He collected himself with a huge effort. "Sir, that would be Daniel's decision and I certainly don't want to be the one who stops him from doing what he thinks is right. And maybe he should go back to archaeology. Maybe it would be safer."

"Safer?" Hammond frowned in puzzlement.

"Well, my record at keeping him in one piece isn't that special – actually my record in keeping him alive isn't that brilliant – I'm starting to lose count of how many times he's come back from the brink."

"Colonel, given the extremely hazardous nature of the work you do it would be all the more surprising if every member of SG-1 hadn't sustained injuries of some kind over the last couple of years. And I know that the rest of us you have done all you can to safeguard Doctor Jackson on every mission, frequently risking your own lives to protect his."

"Yes, sir, and we've still only got him back by the skin of our teeth far too many times. The rest of us are soldiers, it goes with the territory, and Teal'c's got Junior to even the odds a little, but to be honest, we've been damned lucky to keep Daniel alive this long and I'm thinking maybe it's time to quit while we're ahead." As Hammond looked unconvinced, O'Neill sighed. "Sir, you and I have lived through one memorial service for Daniel and it wasn't a fun ride. I just don't want to have to do it again."

"I don’t think you're making this recommendation with your head, Colonel."

Yeah, well that's easy for you to say, General, you've never had to walk away and leave him bleeding to death on a ship that was going to explode any minute. Believe me, that is not something you get over in a hurry. Aloud O'Neill said,"Well call it gut instinct, but if we don't let Daniel do this, I think he's going to quit anyway. Let's allow the man do his job, then he can make up his own mind."

Hammond couldn't pretend that O'Neill was being anything other than reasonable. Perhaps that was what he found just a little worrying – O'Neill was being almost too reasonable. However, there was nothing he could object to. "All right, Colonel. I can't promise anything but I'll pass on your recommendation."

"Thank you, sir, I appreciate it."

***

Carter couldn't help thinking that there was an irony in the fact that when O'Neill was an Air Force officer, like herself, and Daniel a scientist, like herself, that the only one of SG-1 she felt she could totally rely upon at the moment was the ex first Prime of Apophis with the larval Goa'uld in his pouch. The imperturbable alien who sat across the table from her was eating the canteen food with an air of grave detachment but was much too polite to pass comment on it. Carter wondered in passing if she ought to tell Teal'c that they all thought the food here sucked, but decided they didn't need the distraction right now.

She said, "Doctor Fraiser's trying to analyze that wine for us now and I'd be very surprised if it doesn't contain some kind of mind-altering drug. But I also think that Goa'uld got to the Colonel in some way. I don't mean that he managed to drug him or hypnotize him the way he did with Daniel, but I still think he's influenced his thinking."

"Yet Colonel O'Neill does not appear to be acting irrationally."

"Except he's saying he thinks it's a good idea for Daniel to go back to a planet with a Goa'uld ruling over a couple of thousand corpses."

"Although I agree with your misgivings, I could detect no hostility in the Goa'uld's attitude to Daniel Jackson. It may be that he genuinely means him no harm."

She took a sip of her coffee. It was vile but did wash away a little of the taste of the food. "The first time we came across her, Hathor didn't mean Daniel any harm either but when she'd done with him he was pretty near catatonic and we were almost overrun with baby Goa'ulds."

"It occurs to me that if the Goa'uld had succeeded in persuading you and Daniel Jackson to stay with him that he would have had the means to produce more followers."

Carter thought she was usually pretty quick, but the idea of having sex with Daniel was so unthinkable that it took her a moment to realize what the Jaffa was suggesting. She pulled a face. "A very slow means and who's to say we'd co-operate? And even if we did, one new follower a year isn't going to repopulate an entire planet."

"That is true. Nevertheless, as you yourself pointed out, it is only people that Zagreus lacks and you and Daniel Jackson are both young and relatively healthy."

Knowing the 'relatively' was for the allergy-ridden Daniel's benefit rather than hers, Carter didn't take offence at the qualification. "But you can't repopulate a planet without a diverse gene pool to draw upon. If people who are too closely related all begin to interbreed then pretty soon you're going to get some deadly regressive gene showing up that will wipe them all out. You can't start with two people and create an entire dynasty."

"Except the Goa'uld have themselves closely interbred without ill affects for many thousands of years."

"What?"

"Their genealogy is recorded in your mythology with a surprising degree of accuracy. For instance some of those you called the Greek Gods are descended from two Goa'uld whose children interbred for many generations with no loss of vigor."

Seeing Daniel approaching with a cup of coffee in his hand, Carter called out to him, "Daniel, just the man I want to see. Can you remind me about the genealogy of the Greek Gods?"

"Which ones?" She was relieved to see that he didn't still appear to be irritated with her. If he had been she would have suspected Zagreus' influence for Daniel had never learned how to bear a grudge. Even on those rare occasions when the Colonel became exasperated to the point of addressing him like a difficult child who had forgotten to tidy his room, Daniel very rarely took offence. Now he sat down at the table with them and looked at her enquiringly. "Which gods, Sam?"

"Well – the main ones. Zeus, Hera."

"Oh, right, well the first gods all came from Uranus and Gaia." Daniel used the salt and pepper pots to stand in for the mother and father of the Gods. "Oceanus, Tethys, our old friend Cronos, Rhea, Hyperion, Theia, and so on. Basically all the brothers married all the sisters except for Mnemosyne who just produced the Muses with her nephew Zeus." He sketched it out for her with his finger as he talked, invisible lines on the canteen table from which gods and Goa'ulds were descending to marry and interbreed. "Then the offspring of the children of Uranus and Gaia all married each other, producing the line of Prometheus on one hand and all the children of Zeus on the other. Zeus, of course, slept with most of his female relatives, including his sister Demeter and was married to one of his other sisters, Hera."

"So, we're not talking genetic diversity here?"

"Oh no, definitely not. The Ancient Egyptian gods actually followed a very similar pattern, quite apart from Hathor marrying her father, Ra, we have Isis marrying her brother Osiris, and Isis' sister, Nepthys, marrying their other brother – good old High Priest of the Death Cult, Seth. These were definitely people who believed in keeping it in the family."

"So, to a Goa'uld the idea of incest wouldn't be a problem." Glancing across at Daniel as he sipped his coffee it occurred to her that he and she did not look very different. He was perhaps a couple of inches taller than her and her hair was a few shades lighter but there were certainly enough surface similarities between them that to Zagreus they might seem well matched. And it was true that she was probably as close to him as she was to her own brother; closer perhaps as they'd been through so much together. It was definitely the case that having sex with Daniel would have felt exactly like incest to her and she was pretty sure he felt the same way, but Zagreus, even had he believed them to be blood relatives, would probably see no impediment to the two of them founding a dynasty for him that would fit his aesthetic ideal.

Talking of aesthetic ideals…She grimaced apologetically. "Daniel, weren't the Greek gods inclined to take more than an…academic interest in good looking young men as well?"

Daniel nodded. "Oh yes, of course. Most male Greek gods were bisexual. It was really the Greek ideal and naturally the god reflected the fashion of the time. The original Greek myths are full of tales of the gods carrying off beautiful young men, although they did tend to get Bowdlerized in later versions. Zeus disguised himself as an eagle so he could abduct Ganymedes. Herakles, the son of Zeus, was definitely more than good friends with Hylas. And he was involved with Iolaus too, and with Admetus, who was also having a relationship with Dionysus, who was involved with Ampelos, who he had to petition Zeus not to abduct because he wanted him for himself. Then there was Apollo and Hyakinthos, Hypnos and Endymion, Poseidon and Pelops, and so on and so on. According to some sources Achilles basically raped Troilus to death during the Trojan War. And the centaurs, of course, were notorious for…"

Carter put her hand on his arm. "So, it's possible that Zagreus might have the same…outlook as the Greek gods?"

He blinked at her in mild surprise. "Maybe. I don't know. I could ask him if we get the go ahead to return to the site. That's a good question, Sam. I'd like to know how much the Goa'uld adopt the habits of the deities whose identities they've stolen."

"Yes, but, Daniel. He could be – "

Daniel drained his coffee and got to his feet. "Sorry, I'd love to talk about this another time, but I really think I need to just tell General Hammond again how important this site is."

"The Colonel already told him."

Daniel paused. "He did?"

"I certainly did." They looked around to see O'Neill approaching. "Hammond says he's going to recommend that a team is set up to begin the excavation so we just have to hope that the Pentagon will give the right clearance to enough of the right people – otherwise it's just going to be you up there with a shovel in your hand."

"But I can go?"

"Looks that way. As long as you promise not to talk to any strange men with Goa'uld's inside them. Teal'c excluded of course."

Daniel looked so delighted that even Carter couldn't be entirely sorry that Hammond had agreed. He sat down dazedly. "If their version of Linear B developed into a more complex language then there might be a complete record of the civilization they came from as well as the one they became under Dionysus' rule. I need to read up on everything Schliemann found so I can make direct comparisons. I wonder if they…" He leapt up and headed off, already making notes on his now rather tattered book.

"See, it doesn't take a lot to keep him happy: the odd universal language, a few interesting artifacts, a whole ruined citadel full of dead people he can dig up."

That was when O'Neill had an overwhelmingly vivid memory of what it felt like to punch Daniel on the jaw: how hard he'd hit him; how much he'd wanted to go on hitting him; the guilt reverberated through him like a shockwave and he almost staggered from it. Angrily he reminded himself that it had been a long time ago and that he'd hardly given it a thought in the intervening years. He and Daniel had talked it through; hell, they'd even made a few jokes about it. A lot of things had happened since, many of them much worse, so why suddenly couldn't he get that memory out of his mind?

Carter's voice cut in on his thoughts. "Sir, are you really okay with this? It feels like we're losing him."

Recovering, O'Neill shrugged. "I was just saying to General Hammond that maybe it's high time Daniel went back to archaeology anyway."

"I really don't think that's what Daniel wants. He's just caught up in the excitement of this find for the moment – I mean, as I understand it, Schliemann's discovery of what he believed at the time to be Ancient Troy was one of the most significant finds ever, so it's not surprising Daniel's excited about the thought of excavating his own version, but I still don't think he'd want to leave SG-1."

"Well maybe it’s time he did." O'Neill was still watching him. "Before something else happens to him."

As O'Neill left them, Carter looked at Teal'c. "You see? I think that Goa'uld guilt-tripped him – all that talk about Daniel getting damaged while under the Colonel's protection must have had more effect than we realized. I think Zagreus wants it to eat away at him until he agrees to hand Daniel over. And Daniel won't object because we've already seen Zagreus scramble his mind once."

"It is imperative that you do not return to that world." Teal'c returned. "If our theory is correct and Zagreus needs you both to begin the repopulation of his planet then it will safeguard you both from his influence."

"I don't think he can influence me, Teal'c. I think he tried when we first met him and whatever his box of tricks is didn't work with me – something to do with Jolinar, I suppose. And I still don't understand why he can't just go through the Stargate and get more worshippers. I mean the Stargate's definitely working. We used it."

"We are not Zagreus. It must be programmed to let other life forms – indeed other Goa'uld – pass through it without harm, and yet prove fatal to him. I have heard of such things used by the Goa'uld before to punish those of their own kind whom they wish to banish. And do not be too sure that he would be unable to influence you, Major Carter, he may have more than one method of affecting the human mind at his disposal. The other Goa'uld would not have banished him unless they believed him to be dangerous."

Taking the plunge at last, Carter said, "Of course, he might just want Daniel for…himself. From what I remember of the Greek gods that must also be a possibility." She looked apologetically at Teal'c as she said it, knowing there were some things men never wanted to hear.

But the Jaffa took that in his stride as imperturbably as ever. "Although I think it unlikely, that is another outcome which it would be preferable for us to avert. I will suggest to Colonel O'Neill that he and I accompany Daniel Jackson on his return to the site and do all that we can to prevent him from falling under the influence of Zagreus."

***

They were holding Daniel down, two of them, men even bigger than Teal'c with brutal haircuts and dead, white clothes. Daniel was struggling between them so feebly like a half-drowned cat, spikes of sweat-darkened fringe plastered to his forehead, terror in his eyes as they pinned him down so the nurse could jab that needle in his vein. They were so much stronger than he was and he was so weak from the drugs and the exhaustion they overpowered him in seconds. Daniel's skin was as white as those pitiless walls. God, he looked like he hadn't slept in a month…

And what was good old Jack O'Neill doing to help his friend? He was…keeping his distance; pressed back against that padded white wall. O'Neill could see himself, head averted, eyes averted. Not wanting to know. Because Daniel was crazy and, frankly, scary. Daniel had attacked him. Had thrown himself at Carter when she called for the aides and had to be restrained by Teal'c, and now Daniel was hallucinating again, saying something had gone into Teal'c just like he'd been saying that an imaginary Goa'uld had gone into O'Neill when the man had been doing his damnedest to help him, to keep him out of this horrible claustrophobic little cell. All Daniel had needed to do not to be here was to stay sane. Why the hell couldn't he have stayed sane?

Carter had told Daniel it wasn't his fault, but whose fault was it if not Daniel's? They'd all been through the Stargate the same number of times. Why was Daniel doing this to himself? To all of them? Going nuts when life would be so much better for everyone if he could have just hung on in there and remained sane?

Was that really how he'd felt back then? God, why hadn't he just gone over there and put his arms around Daniel, told him it was going to be okay, that there was nothing to be afraid of? That they were all there for him, wouldn't abandon him. Why hadn't he soothed Daniel; comforted him; done the things you should do when your best friend was sobbing with terror in a corner…?

O'Neill could leave the padded cell behind in his nightmares, but although he could get out of there, push his way out of the door as soon as consciousness returned, he couldn't escape the fact that he'd left Daniel in there – alone with his terror and hallucinations and his fear of the insanity he could feel creeping through him.

He still found it hard to believe he'd done that, but he had. He'd left Daniel behind. The one thing he'd sworn to himself he would never do again.

O'Neill got out of bed and went into the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face. The water ran away, gurgling quietly, a defeated sound, but the faucet went on dripping even after he tightened it as hard as he could, evidence of a washer he hadn't got around to replacing.

He'd known something was wrong from that first briefing; his radar telling him that there must be a reason why his friend was so distracted and odd. He'd thought Daniel must have received some bad news and had waited behind in case the man wanted to confide in him. But what Daniel wanted from him was confirmation that he'd seen it too: the dead Goa'uld coming back through the Stargate. O'Neill hadn't known that then, of course, couldn't make any sense of the look on Daniel's face as he turned to him, that quick anxious glance, needing something from O'Neill he knew he wasn't going to get: the proof he wasn't losing his mind. And then Daniel had turned away, looking furtive as a shoplifter, and he'd known something was badly wrong.

He'd been on his way to see Daniel, to get the truth about what was bothering him, when he'd heard the cries for help. That was when he'd burst into Daniel's office only to find the man lying on the floor, unconscious, without a mark on him, and no one else within sight. He'd thought 'Ree’tu!' immediately and hit the alarm button, wondering what those invisible sons-of-bitches had done to Daniel as he called for a medical team and fast. It was only after Janet Fraiser had examined the still-unconscious Daniel twice and not been able to find so much as a scratch, and Carter and Teal'c had swept the whole base without getting a sniff of a Ree’tu, that he'd started to realize he'd read this one wrong.

O'Neill dried his face on a towel and then looked at his reflection in the mirror, ghostly in the half-light, skin too white, eyes almost black Those shadows under his eyes weren't all a trick of the gloom but even so they didn't measure up to the dark rings beneath Daniel's eyes when he'd been shivering in that muffled white room.

And he'd really thought he was done with this. He believed that Daniel accepted it: that they'd come across something that Jack O'Neill just couldn't cope with. Daniel certainly hadn't reproached him. He'd been a little tense afterwards, certainly, but that seemed to have more to do with a fear that people were going to put a big question mark next to his sanity or look at him sideways if he came up with any theories that sounded a little 'out there' rather than resentment because he felt his friends should have done more. Daniel had genuinely seemed to accept that it was just the way it was: Daniel couldn't cope with heights and O'Neill couldn't cope with people trying to rip imaginary Goa'ulds out of his head. Everyone had his Achilles' heel.

And, logically, O'Neill could tell himself that letting Daniel get dragged off to a padded cell probably hadn't been such a bad thing. Okay, it hadn't been fun for Daniel, no question about that. He'd had a horrible frightening time being afflicted by that Goa'uld killing device, made that much more horrible and frightening by thinking he was going to spend the rest of his life in a room without a view being pumped full of brain-muffling medication. But he had been sick, and he had been hallucinating, and the padded cell had at least kept him safe. The treatment Mackenzie had recommended had meant that while Daniel was being driven round the bend by Machello's little insanity slug he wasn't running under a bus or falling off a bridge, he was safe and protected…

…and scared. Scared. Scared. Terrified out of his wits and abandoned by the one person he'd trusted never ever ever to leave him alone in a place like…

Shit.

He could reason as much as he liked, but in his guts, in his heart, in his conscience, he knew that he'd let Daniel down. Taken a step back when he should have been taking a step forward. And he knew that Daniel must know it too. It was like that business with Shyla and the sarcophagus. Yes, he'd forgiven Daniel, certainly, held him in his arms and comforted him, not reproached him, but that didn't mean Daniel hadn't screwed up. Big time. It hadn't needed to be said. They'd both known it. You put it behind you and you moved on, but it still remained a fact that Daniel had left them down in those mines while he was…

God, don't let his subconscious start telling him it had been payback because he simply couldn't bear it. Had he been harboring resentment all that time? Looking for a chance to get even? No. On no level. In no part of his mind. Even at 0-dark-hundred with the guilt-monster taking up what felt like permanent residence, he didn't believe that there was any part of him that had felt any satisfaction at walking away and leaving Daniel in his own private hell. So why had he done it? Why had he left him there?

"Because he was nuts!" O'Neill said it angrily and aloud. Needing to hear it. Glaring at that ghostly reflection staring back at him with such accusation. "Okay? It wasn't his fault and it wasn't schizophrenia but he was still nuts. He told me nine dead Goa'uld wanted him for a host and that there was a Stargate in his closet for crying out loud! I tried to keep him out of Mental Health and he attacked me. I went over there to try and get him to tell me more about his theory and all he did was gibber, hide in the corner, and say he could hear footsteps. The second, Mackenzie sent me word Daniel wanted to talk to me I went over there. As soon as Daniel even half-convinced me he was sane, I got him out of there. Given the fact I was scared shitless, had no idea what to do, and was about ten miles out of my depth, I did the best I could for him." O'Neill ran a shaking hand through his hair. "I did the best I could for him."

O'Neill looked at the luminous hands of his watch: 4:00 a.m. He went into the kitchen and got himself a beer from the fridge, carried it through to the living room a