Work Text:
The planet was paradise. At least, that was what the MALP had promised.
Thick canopies draped the sky, sunlight filtering through like green-gold silk. Ferns the size of tents fanned open to drink the light, and somewhere beyond the trees, water lapped against stone in a rhythm too gentle to seem alien. Birds. Were they birds? Maybe they were insects, singing in bright, liquid tones.
SG-1 had been on worse worlds.
“This is nice,” Jack had said when they first stepped through the gate, squinting at the horizon as if expecting an ambush just for balance. “A place that doesn’t try to kill us in the first five minutes.” He put on his sunglasses, looked around with an easy smile, and sighed.
Sam smiled faintly. “Let’s not jinx it, Sir.”
But even as she’d said it, she’d felt the air shimmer against her bare skin like heat from a forge. It was too hot, too damp. She shivered involuntarily, the image of a large lizard licking down her forearm.
The readings from her sensor confirmed unusually high geothermal activity beneath the surface. Something about the energy profile didn’t sit right.
They discovered the ruins by accident—a temple carved into a rock face, its stones cracked by tree roots and the passage of time. The symbols were unfamiliar, a mix of Ancient and something older, something that hummed faintly in her bones when she got close.
Sam was wary. She didn't like the way the temple made her feel, yet she was inexplicably drawn to the glyphs.
Daniel was already snapping pictures. “Incredible… it’s almost pre-Ancient.”
“Meaning?” Jack asked.
“Meaning very, very old.” Daniel replied sarcastically. Jack rolled his eyes at the archaeologist.
Sam ran her fingers over the symbols. The rock was warm—warmer than it should have been. “There’s energy here,” she murmured. “It feels—alive.”
Teal’c raised an eyebrow. “You believe this structure possesses sentience?”
“Not sentience,” Sam replied, distracted. “But… something residual. Like static or....” When she touched one of the central carvings —a circle etched with concentric spirals —the world pulsed.
And then the heat came.
It wasn’t fire exactly. It was pressure, light, and sound collapsing into a single, unbearable moment that tore through her nerves. "Singularity," Sam thought as she gasped, stumbling backward, but her hand wouldn’t let go of the stone. It held her fast, skin to surface, as though the temple itself had claimed her.
“Carter!” Jack’s voice reached her through a roar in her ears.
"MajorCarter!"
"Sam!" Rang through in unison.
Heat surged through her arm, racing beneath her skin like liquid metal. The air vibrated. "I've become singularity..." Then came the memories, breaking violently through the dam of her mind: The crash of the Prometheus reactor. Jolinar's scream as she was dying in her head. The endless desert of Netu, choking on ash, the smell of ozone and blood.
She was burning again, only this time from the inside out.
Her vision fractured—white and gold and blinding. She saw her own hands trembling; the skin flushed and glistening as though the heat had risen straight through her veins. Her mind couldn’t separate illusion from sensation. Every breath seared her throat. "Expansion...Thermal..." Nothing made sense.
“Sam!” Daniel’s hands gripped her shoulders, trying to wrench her away, but the contact only made it worse. It was like being touched by a current of lightning. She screamed, wrenching away from him, brutally flinging herself into the stone.
For a heartbeat, she saw him as someone else—Bynarr, hands lustful and leaving bruises that felt like brands. The scene changed before she could breathe; it was her father, shouting from behind a veil of flame. The memories tumbled together, burning too bright, too fast.
Her knees gave way. Daniel and Jack’s voices blurred into background static.
The temple wall still glowed, pulsing in rhythm with her racing heart. Then, with a sudden jolt, the energy released her. She hit the ground; the impact shook loose a strangled gasp. The scent of scorched fabric clung to her. Sam's arm throbbed where she’d touched the stone—angry red welts already rising under the sleeve of her uniform.
Before her shoulders hit the ground, Daniel caught her. Teal'c rushed over with the med kit and opened it. Jack pulled his canteen from his pack and splashed cool water on her blistering hand. "Daniel! What was that?" Jack demanded.
The archaeologist looked between his two teammates. "I don't know, Jack." His panic rose as he watched the skin of Sam's neck blister. Quickly, he unbuttoned her BDU shirt.
"Daniel! What the hell?" Jack could see blisters forming on Sam's other arm. She was unresponsive.
The surrounding jungle should have been quiet—lush leaves whispering in the breeze, shafts of soft light cutting through the canopy—but all Sam could hear was the sound of fire. Not real fire. Memory fire. Netu’s fire. It roared in her ears and crawled under her skin, as if the infernal heat had followed her across galaxies.
She heard the panicked conversation of her teammates, although most of it made little sense. She was hot. Everything burned. Sam opened one eye. It was Daniel touching her, pulling her BDU shirt open. He was talking, but his words warped, dissolving mid-syllable. When she blinked, it wasn’t Daniel kneeling beside her. His eyes were gold; his hand held a Goa’uld ribbon device that sparked to life.
"Not again."
Her pulse spiked. She tried to push him away, but her limbs felt too heavy, her coordination failing. The ground beneath her was soft, overgrown with moss—until it wasn’t. Her mind flipped the world inside out, and suddenly she was kneeling on volcanic rock, the air thick with the reek of sulfur and decay. "Netu." The place she swore she’d left behind. Her knees ached. Sam could feel the shards of volcanic glass beneath them cutting into her.
Teal'c picked up Sam's limp body. Her skin was red and blistering. "O'Neill, we must get MajorCarter to water. I heard a stream just inside the treeline beyond the chappa'i." The Jaffa didn't wait for the other men. He strode away.
The hallucination deepened. The jungle’s shadows became prison bars, vines coiling like chains. She could almost feel the collar around her throat, the weight of the Tok’ra memories pressing against her mind. She remembered the searing pain of Sokar’s “light” bathing her in radiation until her vision blurred, the way the heat seemed to seep into her very bones.
And through it all, the voice: "You will always burn, Samantha Carter."
“Sam, listen to me!” Daniel’s tone broke through the static. He was still there—real, desperate—kneeling over her, and shaking her gently. “It’s Daniel. You’re here. You’re not there anymore.”
She blinked, the illusion faltering, a stutter in the world around her. The flames retreated for a breath. The smell of moss replaced sulfur. Water trickled in the background. But then the heat came back—wrapping around her chest, clawing up her throat. Her vision swam again.
“Daniel…” She barely recognized her own voice. “It hurts…”
“I know,” he whispered, though his face was pale, panic in his eyes. “You're too hot. Sam, we need to put you in the creek to cool. We. We’re going to get you out of here.” He huffed, frustrated. "We have to... Sam!"
"DanielJackson, we must hurry," Teal'c said, handing the archeologist a pair of scissors. "Her uniform may further damage her skin." Daniel hesitated, but followed Teal'c's lead in cutting her shirt. "MajorCarter, I will leave your dignity intact, but we must strip away your clothing. You are blistered."
Jack was standing a few meters away, P90 raised with his back to his team, scanning the treeline like he expected the forest itself to attack. His jaw was tight, head on a swivel, worry furrowing his brows. “What the hell’s happening to her?” he demanded.
Daniel shook his head. “The stone—something in the energy pattern. It reacted to her, maybe to the naquadah in her blood.I don't know. She's too hot!”
Her socks and boots were off, revealing more angry red blisters. Teal'c was cutting off her pants and tee. "T, is it necessary?" Jack asked, turning toward his team, keen eyes scanning up and down the stream.
"Major Carter will need water directly on her skin, O'Neill. We must soothe the blisters." Jack nodded, but stayed a respectful distance.
Teal'c carried her down the small embankment and submerged her in the stream. Sam’s body arched with another wave of pain rolling through her. A shimmer of gold raced across the blisters on her arms and chest, faintly luminescent, alien. Jack took an involuntary step back, instinctively wary.
“She’s healing,” he said quietly—but the way he said it wasn’t relief. It was suspicion.
Daniel looked up, confused. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
Jack didn’t answer immediately. His eyes stayed locked on Sam’s arms, scanning her neck, torso, and legs, watching the way her skin seemed to pulse faintly beneath the light. “Depends on what’s doing the healing.”
Sam was barely conscious now. Her lips moved soundlessly, eyes darting beneath closed lids. “Netu… heat… can’t breathe…”
“You are safe, MajorCarter,” Teal'c murmured.
Daniel waded into the stream. With trembling hands, he bathed her hair and face in the cool water. He hoped his voice would anchor her. “You’re safe, okay? It’s not real. Teal'c has you. I'm here. So is Jack.”
But in Sam’s mind, the cell door slammed shut again. She was back under Sokar’s gaze, the heat bearing down. She could taste sulphur. Her throat burned. The jungle was gone, replaced by orange light and choking air.
She reached for Daniel, half-believing it was Martouf, half-believing it was her father, or maybe no one at all. “Make it stop,” she whispered, tears mixing with the water, burning angry red welts down her cheeks.
Jack knelt beside the stream, finally, one hand hovering near his weapon, the other steady on Daniel’s shoulder. He didn’t speak for a moment—just watched her chest rise and fall too fast, the veins in her neck pulsing under her shimmering, miraculously healing skin.
Then, quietly: “We need to move. Whatever this thing is, it’s still working on her.”
“She can’t move, Jack,” Daniel shot back. “She’s barely breathing.”
“T?" Jack stood, looking at the Jaffa who stared down at her limp form. He nodded. "I shall carry her.”
For a moment, no one moved. The forest hummed around them—alien insects buzzing, wind whispering through tall ferns. The world felt wrongly alive, as if it were watching.
Jack met Daniel’s eyes, and what passed between them wasn’t military protocol. It was fear—raw, unspoken fear for someone they both couldn’t afford to lose.
Daniel exhaled through his nose. “She’s burning up,” he murmured. “And it’s not just fever.”
The colonel grimaced. “You think it’s… Goa’uld?”
"It is not Goa'uld," Teal'c replied. "They have no technology such as this, even on Netu." He stepped from the stream and walked toward the edge of the forest, where he stopped. "MajorCarter should be covered before we step into the sun. It may impede her healing."
“I think,” Jack said, glancing at the faint light still pulsing under her skin, “we don’t know what we brought back from that stone, but you're right, T, the sun might reverse it or make it worse.”
The silence stretched. Jack pulled a BDU shirt from his pack. Daniel did the same and pulled his boonie off his head. As they draped their clothing over her, Sam shuddered. She did not cry out, but her breath hitched as if she were caught between two worlds—one lush and green, the other fire and torment.
Then, softly, she whispered, “Don’t let them take me back.”
Jack froze. Daniel’s throat tightened.
“No one’s taking you anywhere except to the SGC, where Doc Fraiser is going to patch you up,” Jack said firmly, though his own voice sounded uncertain even to him. He looked toward the horizon, where their MALP beacon still blinked faintly through the trees. “Let’s get her home.”
Daniel nodded, his fingers brushing her pulse to make sure it was still there. “Yeah. Let’s.”
As they moved into the sun, the faint glow along her exposed skin dimmed to nothing—but the heat radiating from her intensified. And somewhere deep in the forest, the temple hummed again, as if aware that what it had touched was not yet done burning.
The world reassembled itself around the blinding blue of the wormhole and the echoing clang of boots on metal. Teal’c stepped through first, Sam’s limp form cradled effortlessly in his arms. The heat radiating from her was unmistakable; he could feel it as if he were standing beside an open furnace.
“Medic!” Daniel shouted the instant his feet hit the ramp. “She’s burned—she needs the burn unit now!”
Janet was already there, moving fast, snapping orders with precise calm. “Teal'c, get her on the gurney."
Teal’c lowered her onto the gurney. Sam trembled, her face pale beneath the sheen of sweat, her teeth chattering from the cool of the sheets against her too-hot skin.
Daniel grabbed the rail of the gurney as they started rolling. “It’s not a surface burn,” he said breathlessly, trying to keep up. “It’s deeper—something inside her. It started after she touched a glyph carved into a temple stone.”
“Inside?” Janet repeated, glancing at him as she fitted an oxygen mask over Sam’s mouth. “Internal heat injury?”
“She was glowing,” Daniel said. “Under her skin. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
Janet didn’t answer. Her expression tightened in a way Daniel had come to dread—the look she wore when the problem was new, unknown, dangerous.
Jack appeared at the base of the ramp just as the doors to the hallway swung open. His uniform was still damp from the planet’s humidity, but his posture was rigid, all command presence and tension.
“What the hell happened out there, Colonel?" Hammonds demanded, his voice clipped.
Jack pulled off his lucky ball cap and dropped his sunglasses to his chest. “We're not sure, Sir. Daniel thinks the temple may have reacted to the naquadah in her blood. She touched a stone on this temple we found. She started burning and blistering,” Jack finished grimly. "Can I?" He motioned toward the door the medical team rushed through.
Hammonds nodded. "Dismissed, Colonel, but I expect a full report before noon tomorrow."
Jack turned and jogged down the hallway to the infirmary. He was used to being there with Daniel. Seeing Carter packed in ice alarmed him. Teal’c stood quietly at the foot of the bed, his hands clasped, the faintest crease of concern marking his brow. Seeing that, Jack became even more worried. The Jaffa never showed emotion so clearly.
Sam’s body trembled beneath the sheet. Janet and her nurses moved with swift coordination—monitors, IV lines, saline drips—but the numbers flashing on the screens made little sense. Her core temperature climbed even as her skin cooled to the touch. Her pallor made her skin look almost translucent.
In the lab, Janet leaned over the microscope, her frown deepening. “There’s something in her blood,” she said quietly.
Jack’s stomach dropped. “Define something.”
“Crystalline structures,” Janet murmured, adjusting the focus. She looked up at the colonel and the archaeologist standing in the doorway. “Microscopic. They’re refracting the light—almost… humming?” She looked up. "I don't know how to explain it, but just looking at them, I feel like I can hear them. It makes no sense."
Daniel moved closer, eyes narrowing. “Like the crystal technology Thor's people use?”
Janet didn’t look up. “Whatever it is, it shouldn’t exist in a human body. Whatever that temple did, it’s rewriting her on a cellular level.”
Jack’s jaw clenched. “And you can fix it?”
She finally met his eyes. “I don’t know yet.”
Teal’c stepped past Jack and into the lab. In a voice low but steady, he said, “I will return to the planet. Perhaps these crystals originate from within the structure itself.”
Daniel nodded immediately. “I’ll go with him. We can take some sensors, see if there’s a connection. Karl, with geology, would probably love to go, too.”
Jack hesitated—his instinct was to keep everyone grounded until they understood what had happened—but one look at Carter and he knew they didn’t have time to argue. “Fine. Go. Don’t touch anything.” He stared hard at Daniel.
They left within minutes, boots echoing down the corridor toward the gate room.
Jack stayed behind. The infirmary grew quiet after they left—machines whispering in steady rhythm, Janet murmuring instructions to her staff before retreating to prep a sterile field.
He moved closer to her bed. Sam’s breathing was uneven, her eyes fluttering under half-lowered lids. The faint shimmer beneath her skin had faded, but the heat hadn’t. Standing near her was like leaning too close to an open engine.
He sat down beside her, the metal chair scraping softly against the floor. For a moment, he didn’t speak. He just watched her chest rise and fall, the fragile line of her throat, the pulse fluttering beneath translucent skin.
Finally, his voice came low and rough. “You scared the hell out of me, Carter.”
Her eyes opened—barely, heavy-lidded. “Sir…” The word rasped out, faint and trembling.
“Yeah,” he said, forcing a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Still here. Still calling me that.”
She tried to smile back, but it broke halfway, her face tightening with pain. “It wasn’t… supposed to happen. I thought I could—control it.”
“Story of your life,” Jack whispered.
Her gaze shifted toward him, glassy but aware. The corner of her lip quirked, almost a laugh, almost tears. “Guess so.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “They’ll figure it out. Daniel and Teal’c—they always do.”
Silence stretched between them. The steady beep of the monitors filled the space, a slow metronome counting out the seconds neither of them wanted to face. Sam drifted in and out of consciousness.
“Sir…” Her voice was softer now, barely audible. “You shouldn’t stay.”
Jack shook his head. “Yeah, I should.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer right away. The words gathered bitter on his tongue, dangerous things better left unsaid. But the sight of her—pale, trembling, her breath hitching in quiet pain—broke whatever restraint he’d been holding. Jack knew this could be it for Carter.
“Because you mean. You mean a lot. To. To me. Carter.”
She blinked. The words sank in slowly. The monitors kept their steady rhythm, the sound too loud in the silence that followed.
“Sir...” she whispered.
He swallowed hard. “You’re not dying today, Carter. That’s an order.”
Her eyes drifted shut again, but her expression changed—something between peace and heartbreak. And then the memories rose, not from pain or fever, but from some deep, lucid place she couldn’t control. From a place she shouldn't be able to reach.
A loop. The control room. The feel of his mouth on hers, brief, stolen, impossibly real.
Another loop—learning to use a pottery wheel. The laughter. The slickness of the clay. Too real to be a fantasy.
"Magnets."
And then the day he escaped the loops, when she’d caught him looking at her too long, she didn't know, and he pretended not to remember.
Now, half-conscious in the infirmary’s sterile light, the moments overlaid themselves as dream images. She could feel his breath on her cheek again, his hand steadying her when the world kept ending.
“Jack…” she murmured, and this time her hand moved, reaching out for him.
He closed his eyes, the smallest tremor in his jaw. “Sir,” he whispered.
Janet’s voice broke the moment. “Colonel, I need you to step back. Her readings are changing.”
He obeyed, standing quickly and stepping back. He watched as the monitors pulsed brighter; the color returning to Sam’s face in a sudden, almost violent wave of heat. Janet barked orders; nurses moved fast. The alien glow surged beneath her skin, then dimmed, settling into a faint warmth.
Jack didn’t know if it was healing or something else entirely.
He only knew that when she finally drew in a deep, even breath, the relief that flooded him hurt worse than anything he’d ever felt.