Chapter Text
Prologue
Resting her hands on the bench, Sam slowly straightens her spine, working out the kinks from being hunched over for too long. There’s an empty silence around her; the kind that settles over the base in the very early hours of the morning when most of the personnel are off-world or in bed.
She stretches her arms above her head, stifling a yawn. Bed. That’s where she should be. But she just has one more thing-
"Whatcha doin?”
She starts slightly, surprised; she didn’t hear him come into the lab, didn’t expect his voice so close to her ear. And she certainly doesn’t expect his hands to settle on her hips, holding her steady.
“Sir?”
“You’re up late, Carter.”
His voice is so close she can feel his breath washing against her skin. His hands are still on her hips, heavy and warm and intimate.
“I got caught up,” she says, her voice low and breathy in response.
“You work too hard,” he murmurs, drawing her closer still with his hands so she can feel the vibration of his voice against her back. “You need to take it easy, Carter.” He’s nuzzling her neck as he speaks, lips brushing against her skin.
Her heart is tripping in her chest, breath catching in her throat.
“Colonel?”
“It’s okay,” he soothes, fingers working their way under her shirt and straying across her hips towards her belly. “I can help you relax.”
Her legs feel weak, her mind confused and sluggish under the onslaught of his lips as he nips at the base of her neck. Her hand creeps up of its own volition, curling around the back of his neck, and her fingers running through his hair as she holds his head against her; he’s licking where he nipped, soothing the stinging skin.
“What… what are you doing, sir?”
He tugs her earlobe between his teeth, distracting her while his fingers pop the button on her BDUs.
“Helping you relax.” The words are hot and damp against her ear.
This is anything but relaxing, she thinks. There’s a rush of liquid heat between her legs.
She’s frozen; his hand is slipping down the front of her pants while the other skims up her side, brushing against the curve of her breast. Her breasts feel swollen and heavy with her arousal, nipples scratching against the fabric of her bra; she’s waiting for his hands to cup their weight.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No.” The word is little more than a moan, breathless and wanton and desperate.
His fingers delve in, slipping between her slick folds. Her hips buck against him as he brushes over her throbbing bundle of nerves, aching for more. He flicks it again, and lightning sweeps through her; her legs want to give way and she wraps desperate fingers around his wrist to try and hold herself up.
“Want me to stop?” he asks again.
“Oh God, no,” she moans as he teases the bud again. “No. Don’t stop.” She’s so wet and so worked up she wants to grind herself against his hand.
“Relaxed yet?”
Why does he keep talking to her, she wonders, pressing against his hand as he circles in just the right spot. Her hips are rocking now, and he’s thrusting the evidence of his own arousal against her backside. The fingers still in his hair clutch at him, trying to draw him closer, her lips searching for his, but he stays out of reach and instead drags his mouth down her neck.
When his hand cups her breast under her shirt—the rough skin of his palms scraping against her aching nipples—a strangled sound escapes her. Who is she, this crazed woman, so wanton in his arms?
A finger slips inside her, and she loses all sense of control. The pressure of his fingers, the thrusting against her back, the way he’s pulling almost roughly at a nipple... She grinds against him shamelessly, urging his fingers on, trying to change the angle so she can feel the hard length of him between her thighs. But his hold on her is unforgiving, and his fingers are unrelenting. His teeth close over the cords of her neck and the pressure builds and builds.
“Oh,” she gasps, bucking beneath his hands.
And then she explodes in his arms, legs giving way, and she’s tumbling over herself and flying with the stars before she slams painfully into reality.
All around her there are voices; a cacophony of alarms and yelling and chaos and she is pain and confusion and still trying to come back to earth with the remnants of her orgasm throbbing between her legs.
“Sam! Sam! Open your eyes, Sam, I need you to open your eyes!”
Why is Janet here? Where is she? What’s going on?
“Come on, Sam, I need you to open your eyes.”
“Ma’am, we’ve got Colonel O’Neill back!”
“Come on Sam, open your eyes. What’s his heart rate doing?”
“Steady on 60, BP is holding ninety over fifty. He’s responding to pain and voice, ma’am.”
“Come on, Sam. That’s it, open your eyes!”
Janet’s face swims into view over her head, the bright lights of the infirmary glaring down overhead.
“Janet?” she whispers. Her head is pounding in time to her racing heart beat.
“Welcome back, Sam,” Janet says with a smile; Sam can hear the utter relief on her voice.
“What happened?” Every whisper sends stabs of pain behind her eyes and deep into the back of her head.
“We don’t know. Someone found you in your lab, passed out on the ground. What do you remember?”
She remembers his hands, hot and persistent and so very, very intimate. The feel of his teeth sinking into her neck. The way she came apart in his arms.
“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t remember what happened.”
Chapter One
72 Hours Earlier
She wakes up slowly, the last honeyed fingers of warm light and soft dreams releasing her gently. The first thing she notices is that she’s uncomfortable, her left arm numb and aching from the position she’s lying in. When she moves her arm, she realizes that where she’s been sleeping is tight, cramped and uncomfortable, and she’s sharing that space with someone else.
Sam opens her eyes and tries to get her bearings. Whoever she’s been asleep next to starts moving as well.
“Carter?” It’s a familiar voice, thick with the fog of sleep.
“Colonel?”
She sits up and looks around, trying hard to work out what’s going on. She’s sitting in something vaguely familiar, pressed tight against Colonel O’Neill in the cramped space.
A sarcophagus, she realizes dimly, taking in the coffin-like shape and gaudy gold trim. Why are they in a sarcophagus?
“Colonel O’Neill, Major Carter, are you okay?” a female voice asks.
Several familiar personnel appear around them looking concerned; Teal’c is among them, and Sam knows him well enough to recognise the worry disguised in his features.
She feels hazy, as though Janet’s pumped her full of the good pain medications again.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
Beside her, she can feel Colonel O’Neill sitting up; he’s pressed close to her side in the confines of the sarcophagus.
“Carter, are you okay?” he asks. Between them, where no one can see, she realizes his hand is holding hers almost desperately. A fleeting memory of pain and terror brushes against her, and she grips his fingers back tightly.
“I think so,” she says. “You, sir?”
“I’m good.”
“Come on Major Carter, let’s get you out of there,” a kind voice says. Moreno, Sam thinks sluggishly. Lucy Moreno from SG-12.
Gentle hands — Teal’c’s, she realizes — reach in to help steady her as she rises to her feet and then climbs out of the sarcophagus. Away from the golden light she feels cold and shivery, bereft of something she can’t quite place. In all her years at the SGC, Sam’s never been inside a sarcophagus before, and never had a taste of the drugging sweetness that its light emits.
“What happened?” she asks again, shaking her head to try and clear it.
“I believe High Lord Janeel was attempting to obtain information from yourself and Colonel O’Neill,” Teal’c says.
Again, those flashes of pain and terror, and she finds herself looking over instinctively to where Colonel O’Neill has been helped out of the sarcophagus by Captain Moreno.
“He killed us,” she realizes, raising a hand to her throat. The skin is smooth and soft. There’s a hole in the front of her BDU’s, singed and brittle, where the pain stick was jammed into her again and again. She slips her fingers through the deficit in the fabric, finding the skin below intact and pain-free.
“What’s the situation now?” Colonel O’Neill asks.
She knows him well enough to recognize the hint of shock on his voice, the slight hollowness that tells her he is as stunned and confused as she is. She straightens her shoulders, hands looking for a weapon that isn’t there as her own training kicks in and she forces herself to pay attention to the world around her.
“Janeel’s dead,” Daniel says. Of them all, Sam thinks, he looks the worst, propped up against a pillar, blood running down his face. There’s a terror in his eyes that reminds her of the Daniel in the early days, when violence and death weren’t an everyday part of his life.
There’s a memory recall device on the side of Daniel’s temple, and Sam reaches over to gently pull it free. She’s surprised when moments later, Daniel reaches up to where she’s crouched over him and touches her temple before holding his hand out and revealing the small metal disk resting in the palm of his hand. Colonel O’Neill, seeming to realize what it means, reaches up and pulls his own device free. Sam takes the device from Daniel, and puts them in the chest pocket of her BDUs, adding the Colonel’s when he passes it over seconds later.
“Let’s get out of here,” Reynolds says, and even though she’s confused and disoriented, Sam thinks that’s a good idea.
In her pocket, the memory recall devices feel warm. She wonders what secrets the devices gave away to Janeel before they were placed in the sarcophagus.
It’s no surprise that Sam and the Colonel pass their post-mission physicals with flying colours. To be honest, Sam has never felt better physically; the ever present back ache from too many hours in front of a computer is missing, and despite the various cuts and burns to her uniform, there’s not a mark on her physically. She still feels that faint buzzing sensation crawling over her skin, and the ongoing nagging feeling that something is missing, but she puts those down to the after-effects of the sarcophagus and the fogginess of her memory.
Her memories are still few and far between, and that worries her. Judging by the perplexed expression on the Colonel’s face, he’s in the same boat.
She remembers gating to the planet. The peaceful walk through the forest. The familiar scenes of excitement and panic induced by their arrival at the local village. Vague recollections of Jaffa — but not Jaffa? — and then those flashes of pain and terror, and nothing until she woke up in the sarcophagus beside the Colonel.
Eventually the briefing room fills up as Janet and her team clear the members of SG-3 and SG-12, and everyone bar Daniel — who is still being patched up in the infirmary — is present.
“Let’s begin,” General Hammond says.
Teal’c has to recount their mission because, like her, Colonel O’Neill remembers very little.
P2S-491 was a world long-abandoned by the Goa’uld. Like other abandoned worlds they’ve encountered, the Goa’uld power structure was adopted by the remaining humans first as a way of avoiding Goa’uld return, and then later as a means to maintain their own power over their subjects. Janeel and his “Jaffa” were terrified that SG-1 was either going to bring the Goa’uld back, or worse, expose their deception to the local population.
And so, SG-1 was tortured visciously for information they didn’t possess, Teal’c managing to escape to raise the alarm. By the time SG-3 and SG-12 arrived for rescue, Sam and the Colonel were dead and Daniel in the midst of being tortured, likely to the death as well.
“We weren’t sure how long… if there was a time limit…” Colonel Reynolds falters, looking anxiously between Colonel O’Neill and Sam. “We decided to put both of you in the sarcophagus together, and save time in case there were more pseudo-Jaffa in the building.”
“What about the memory recall devices?” Sam asks when Teal’c’s story winds to a close.
“Janeel was displaying images from Daniel Jackson’s memory on a projection,” Teal’c fills in. “I believe both yourself and Colonel O’Neill must have undergone similar treatment.”
“How is Doctor Jackson?” General Hammond asks Janet who is sitting quietly at the far end of the briefing room.
A concussion, strained shoulder, multiple burns, several cracked ribs and a fractured fibula will keep Daniel out of the mission roster for several weeks. Which means SG-1 will have downtime until they find a replacement or a mission the General feels they can do as a three man team.
“I’m still concerned about the fact that both Colonel O’Neill and Major Carter have very limited recollection of their time on P2S-491,” Janet says. “I can’t find any unusual results on the investigations we’ve run so far, and nothing from the history other than their time in the sarcophagus could account for it.”
“Could those recall devices have futzed with our memory?” the Colonel asks.
“They’re not designed to interfere with memories, just bring them to the surface,” Sam disagrees.
“Doctor Jackson has full recollection of his time on the planet, and the device was also used on him. The only point of difference that we can see is the sarcophagus.”
“I’ve been in one of those things before and it didn’t mess with my memory,” the Colonel points out.
“Indeed,” Teal’c agrees. “I have seen many humans and Goa’uld alike utilize the sarcophagus without affecting their memories.”
“We did die,” Sam feels obliged to remind everyone, even though the words feel strange on her tongue. “Maybe we were just… you know… a bit of a delay before using the sarcophagus?”
“It is possible,” Teal’c concedes. “However Daniel Jackson does not believe much time had passed.”
Sam looks over at the Colonel who’s determinedly looking at Hammond.
“I feel great though,” he says into the silence around the briefing room.
“Anything?” Sam asks Janet, walking up to where the doctor is studying images on a computer screen.
“I can’t see anything jumping out at me,” Janet admits, scrolling through the multiple MRI images. “However, I could be missing something subtle. I’ll wait until the formal report is available, but there’s nothing to explain the amnesia in both of you, or why the amnesia covers almost exactly the same period of time.”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees. “It’s strange.”
“General Hammond wants you and the Colonel to stay on base until we have some answers, just to make sure nothing declares itself over the next few days.”
It’s not like Sam wasn’t expecting the words, but it’s still frustrating. “I better call Pete,” she sighs.
“Plans?”
“Only dinner and a movie, nothing important.”
Janet grimaces sympathetically. “Sorry, Sam.”
“It’s okay, Janet, an early night probably isn’t a bad idea.”
Despite her best intentions, it’s late by the time Sam sits back at her workbench and stretches her neck, rolling her aching shoulders to try and work out the kinks. Looking at her watch she winces - it’s well past midnight, and much too late to head home now that she’s been cleared. Looks like another night on base is inevitable.
The ache behind her eyes that she’s been ignoring in favour of focusing on the memory recall device pulled apart in front of her has increased to a fierce pounding, and the grittiness in her eyes tells her it’s definitely time to stop working. Maybe she should mention the headache to Janet, she thinks, rubbing at her temples, but she’s been confined to base for three days already and the last thing she wants now is for Janet to start a fresh round of investigations into non-specific symptoms.
She digs around in a drawer and finds some Advil, swallowing them with a mouthful of the tepid water sitting on the corner of her workbench. With a sigh, she rests her head on her arms for a few minutes, waiting for the Advil to kick in before she drags herself to bed.
It’s several hours before she’s found unconscious on the floor of the lab.