Title: A Way Out
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson, Ba’al.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 854
Spoilers: Abyss.
Summary: Jack is trapped, helpless, being tortured by Ba’al for information he doesn’t have.
Content Notes: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 302: Gravity.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Stargate: SG-1, or the characters. They belong to their creators.



‘Damn the Goa’uld and their thieving ways, taking whatever they want and finding new and clever ways of turning it into a weapon just so they can play games with it.’

If the thought’s a tad incoherent, O’Neill figures no one can blame him. Coherency isn’t exactly a priority right now; anger is more sustaining and he’s got plenty of that, right up there along with frustration, fear, and pain.

How many times has he been here, spayed against this cold metal grid, feeling as if he’s staring up at Ba’al’s smug, self-satisfied face from the bottom of a well? He lost count after… was it nine or ten times? Doesn’t matter in the long run because it’s just gonna keep happening, over and over again, tortured to death and then revived in a sarcophagus, until he tells the bastard everything he wants to know, except O’Neill doesn’t know what it is Ba’al wants! How can he give up information he doesn’t have? The Tok’ra symbiote is gone, but Ba’al keeps insisting that O’Neill knows everything the damned snake knew, and he doesn’t! O’Neill’s already told Ba’al that, multiple times.

Ba’al isn’t buying it.

So here O’Neill is yet again, at the mercy of artificial gravity, something every Goa’uld ship has, something the air force is installing in all their craft capable of space flight. No one but a Goa’uld would ever think to weaponise it! That’s just insane, not to mention sadistic, and damned painful. No effort required on the part of his torturer; knives being dropped at him, and acid that sets his body on fire, white hot agony coursing through his veins, and all the time Ba’al keeps asking the same questions, over and over, until O’Neill thinks his head’s about to explode from them, and for what? Answers he doesn’t even have!

Questioned, tortured, killed, thrown in the sarcophagus, revived, tossed back in a cell, a tunnel that a change in the direction of gravity turns into an inescapable pit, then dragged back to that room for more questions. Lather, rinse, and repeat. It’s never going to end.

Daniel could help, except he claims he can’t. Daniel, whom Jack still isn’t entirely convinced is really here. How can O’Neill be expected to trust the word of someone he can throw his shoe through? Makes more sense, considering his pain and disorientation, and the long hours of torture, to believe he’s hallucinating his deceased friend, and yet Daniel is all O’Neill has to cling on to, in an entirely non-physical way. The lone shred of hope he has in this nightmare situation.

Hallucination or not, it sure looks like Daniel. Sounds like him too, wanting to help O’Neill ascend to a higher plane of existence. O’Neill wishes he could, but he’s not like Daniel, never has been; he’s career military, which is a whole other mindset to Daniel’s seeker after knowledge and the truth. He can’t be what he’s not, even if Daniel’s suggestion is his only means of ending this hell, of escaping Ba’al’s clutches. He might as well accept he’s doomed.

The least Daniel can do is make O’Neill’s next death permanent, but even as he suggests it, he know Daniel won’t do it. In any other circumstances he’d respect that. Maybe. It’s the way Daniel is. But right now it’s a betrayal too far. It cuts almost worse than Ba’al’s knives, burns like acid in his heart. Why can’t Daniel see that death would be preferable to this? Why can’t he be a true friend and grant that one final request?

Gravity changes direction again, the wall becomes the floor, and the Jaffa come for him. He tells Daniel he doesn’t want to see this cell again, practically pleads with him, but makes no difference; after the torture, and the sarcophagus, he’s back here again, but this time Daniel doesn’t come. Maybe, probably, it’s because he was never here in the first place.

Back to the torture room, pinned like a bug in a display case to the damned grating again, suffering, exhausted, weakening, whispering Daniel’s name, and praying for the end… Time has no meaning anymore. There’s no hope left in him.

He tells Daniel as much back in his cell, grateful for his friend’s insubstantial presence, and for one last chance to beg him to end this ordeal. But Daniel is different somehow, more intense, radiating all the hope O’Neill has lost.

“Jack, you just have to hang in there a little while longer. You were right. There’s always a way out.”

O’Neill isn’t sure what Daniel’s on about, but since when is that anything new? He’s never understood most of what Daniel says anyway. But Daniel claims there’s a way out, that Sam and Teal’c thought of something; Jonas too. He just doesn’t say what.

Then the whole building shudders repeatedly with the force of multiple explosions, the lights flicker, the gravity generators go off, and the wall is the floor again… It’s what O’Neill’s been wanting, a fighting chance, and he takes it. Maybe he’ll make it out of this after all.


The End