Author Notes: This is my first fan fiction piece ever, so I'd love to know what you think.

It was strange, holding onto Sarah's hand again, I thought, as I watched her sleeping peacefully in the almost eerie silence of the isolation room she had been occupying since we brought her back to the base. For once, the Tok'ra had responded mercifully quickly to our distress call, and finally, after years of suffering, Sarah was free from the parasite that had infested her.

She awoke confused, forgetting where she was and probably wondering why I was by her side, hugging her and telling her I would help her through this, but she quickly fell back asleep again after Janet injected her with something. First, though, Janet had examined her and assured everyone that she was indeed free. It would still be a long road for Sarah, psychologically, at least. But I remembered how strong she was, and I knew she would be fine. Eventually.

I still couldn't bring myself to let go of her hand. "Daniel, you need to sleep." Janet stood over me, with her trademark "I'm nagging because I care about you look" on her face.

"I just don't want her to be alone. I keep thinking about Sam, and how upset she was, after Jolinar...I'm the only one Sarah knows here, Janet. I mean, Osiris knew Sam and Jack, I mean, Sarah might recognize some of the rest of us, but I'm the one that she knew..." I winced as I listened to myself babbling. I was tired. It had been weeks since I'd slept properly, and I could tell Janet was unimpressed with my excuses. I needed to distract her.

"How is Pete doing? And Jack, he was pretending to be o.k. but I saw him get, um, ribbioned, I think?"

"Both are just fine." Janet crossed her arms and moved even closer to me, peering into my eyes. "Pretending to be o.k. seems to be an epidemic, though." she sighed. I sighed, too, turning back to look at Sarah again.

"She won't wake up for hours, if that's what you're worried about. I'll have her moved back into the infirmary, if you promise you'll let me examine you. And that you'll get some sleep there, too. I'll wake you when she wakes up, but Daniel, frankly, I don't think you can continue much longer like this."

She was right, so I stood up, rubbing my eyes tiredly and following her wearily down the hall. In the infirmary, she pointed to the bed I unfortunately occupied a lot.

I didn't even have the energy to protest anymore. I lay my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, waiting for Janet to finish all of the things she needed to do to have Sarah moved.

I knew Janet wanted to examine me first, but maybe because I was lying down, I couldn't fight off sleep any longer and felt myself drifting away.

In the morning when I woke up, I was surprised to find that it was not actually morning, but apparently still night. I could tell because the lights in the infirmary were dimmed, but as I sat up slowly to look around I noticed with relief that Janet had kept her promise and that Sarah was asleep in the bed next to mine, her beautiful hair spread out around her head on the pillow like a halo. I always wonder if Sam's hair would look like that, if she didn't cut it military-style.

As I tiptoed softly back from the infirmary's bathroom, hoping not to draw any attention to myself or wake up anyone who was sleeping, I felt a hand on my arm and jumped, turning around quickly.

"Shh...Daniel, it's just me. Sit down please and let me check you over again. You've been asleep for a long time." Janet's kind, quiet voice seemed to echo a bit through the long, narrow, cold room, with its weird concrete emptiness that had always seemed to me a stark contrast to the comfortable feeling I nearly always had whenever I woke up and found myself safely there, among friendly faces. Not that I enjoyed needing to be in the infirmary. I didn't.

"Don't you ever go home?" I asked plaintively, as I turned and sat again on the bed I'd been sleeping on, and she followed me, grabbing the clipboard from the end of the bed first. If I had a clipboard, I guess I was an official patient, not just a guest visiting Sarah as I'd thought.

"Oh, I've been home and back again. I'm afraid you've just about slept the clock around." she said, smiling as she stuck her icy cold stethoscope against my chest. I gasped involuntarily, then relaxed as she rested her free hand on my shoulder to keep me from jumping back up again. "Sorry, Daniel, it is a bit colder than usual in here, I'm afraid. The techs are working on the air system again."

I smiled worriedly back at her. "You did get some sleep, didn't you? You need to take care of yourself, too." I said.

"Yes, thank you for asking." Janet smiled, making some notes with the pencil she sometimes had a habit of sticking behind her ear instead of in the pocket of her doctor's jacket. "And I think you are back to normal, too, although it is the middle of the night, so you might want to try to sleep a little bit more, so you can get back to a regular schedule more easily. Or for the first time ever, considering the weird hours you usually seem to keep."

As if the reason she knew that wasn't that she kept very odd hours herself. I grinned. She smiled ruefully at me, and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed beside me in a gesture of quiet friendship. "Daniel, you can ask me whatever it is that I swear I can almost see hovering around unspoken behind those dazzling blue eyes of yours." She laughed lightly, to let me off telling her if I didn't want to. How does she always know?

"Janet, how is Sarah, really? You said you would wake me when she woke up, so has she been sleeping this long, too?" I tried to whisper, but another sigh that I hadn't meant to be quite so loud escaped me. Sarah only shifted slightly in her sleep, her nose wrinkling up a bit. She slept on apparently oblivious to our nearby voices.

"She did wake up earlier, Daniel, but she wouldn't let us wake you when she saw how peaceful you looked. She was very lucid. She seems to remember everything. She even asked for General Hammond so she could tell us everything Osiris knew that might help us. But I'm not going to lie to you, she did cry a good deal and then began to be upset, frantically so after awhile. I sedated her again, so she could at least rest. It is not going to be easy for her to have to live with the memories of everything she's been through."

"Of course not." I looked at my hands, staring blankly at the finger on my left which would have worn my wedding ring, had Sh'are and I been married on Earth. Lately I'd been able to put her out of my mind more and more, as I concentrated on the work of SG-1 and the desperate importance of it. I suspect, too, that Oma must have helped me to mitigate my crushing sorrow while I spent time with her during my ascension, though I can't remember much of it. Not yet, anyway.

I folded my arms across my chest and shivered in the cool air wafting over us from a vent overhead, but I looked up into Janet's kind eyes, hoping she would also see the gratitude I felt for her honesty, and her support. Sh'are was now like a distant, comfortable ache that I carried around in my chest, a scabbed over wound that I could put out of my mind when necessary. But it was hard to see Sarah in that bed, free, exactly as I'd always longed for Sh'are to be one day. I should have been able to save both of them. They should not have needed saving at all in the first place. It would always hurt.

"I slept through Sarah's crying?" It suddenly occurred to me that surely I would have woken up had there really been that much confusion going on around me. I felt instantly guilty. It had been years and years since Sarah and I had been a couple, and I knew that we were not in love anymore, but she was my friend and her voice in distress should have been familiar enough to me to wake me even from a dead sleep, surely.

"Well, I confess you were starting to wake up when you heard her crying, but we decided to give you something to send you back to sleep. You hadn't been sleeping very long, and you would have been very disoriented. You were suffering from a very serious case of sleep deprivation, you know. Seeing you like that wasn't really what Sarah wanted or needed just then. She told us she wasn't ready to talk to you just yet. But she will be soon. She's going to be all right, Daniel. It will just take time." Janet absently rubbed comforting circles across my back as she spoke, trying to keep me calm. It always worked. Just having her near me was comforting, somehow.

"Thanks, Janet." I said, smiling at her.

"Now, I've got some more rounds to do, will you at least try to sleep a little bit more?" she asked, standing up again.

"I could rest a little, I guess." I said. Truthfully I still felt groggy, and very relaxed. It made more sense now that I knew I had been drugged. I reached for the glass of water that had been left by the side of my bed. Janet smiled at me again and left through the door that led to the isolation rooms, where I bet they had hidden Pete to keep him from observing too much of our top secret lives. That man was too nosy for his own good, obviously.

I wondered if Sam would forgive him for spying on her. She probably would, I decided, and she was probably there, too, sitting next to him in the isolation room, holding his hand. It would be good for her to be able to share at least some of her secrets with him, though. Surely it had to be difficult and painful, to be forced to hide so much of everything that was important to you, everything you believed in, and lived for, and worked at daily, from anyone that you loved or even just were good friends with, for that matter.

I considered that I was really the only one of us four, besides Teal'c of course, who hadn't ever had to suffer through doing much of that. Most of my family had been acquired because of the stargate: first Catherine who became like an Aunt to me, then Sh'are and her brother Skarra, Kasuf my good father, and later on Shifu, Sh'are's mysterious harcisis son. Even my grandfather had traveled to another planet, albeit unknowingly, long before I ever did, and had later on been drawn into the secret. And now Sarah had been drawn into it all, too. The stargate seemed to consume my life and everyone in it.

"Daniel?" The voice was low, muted, but full of question.

"Sarah?" I breathed, sliding off the edge of my bed and moving to sit in the chair that sat between us. I leaned over and peered at her, my myopic eyes distracting me. I looked around for my glasses and spotted them on the table. I put them on and looked at Sarah again, not sure exactly what to say to her.

"Sarah, how are you feeling?" I asked softly, taking her hand in mine. "Do you want me to find Janet for you?"

"No," she said, in that same hushed, quiet voice, so unlike the harsh and grating tones that Osiris had forced to cross her lips, and so unlike the strong, confident tones of the Sarah in my memories. "I'm much better than I've been in quite some time," she added. I almost thought she smiled as she said that, but her eyes were so full of sorrow I wasn't truthfully sure.

"Sarah, I'm so sorry, so very sorry. I never should have..."

"Daniel, you rescued me," she said, stopping me in mid-sentence. "I will be forever in your debt. And I know you, I know you are thinking this is your fault, but it wasn't, there is no way it could have been, and I certainly don't blame you." She was reassuring me when I meant to reassure her. Her heart had always been so good, it made me so angry to think of what she had suffered.

"Besides," she continued, and something like a sob seemed to begin rising in her throat, "I should apologize to you, for all the times I tried to kill you and your friends. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop her." Her hand trembled in mine, and I wondered if was too soon to be talking to her about these things.

"I know. I know, Sarah, it's o.k. We knew it wasn't you anymore. I'm just so glad we could help you. I was always so afraid there would be nothing we could do, that we would end up having to..." my voice trailed off. I started that sentence without thinking through to the end of it. I reached up and wiped away a small, shining tear that had slid down her cheek as she spoke, and she reached out and grabbed my hand, clutching it to her, sobbing again, but only for a second. Then she was quiet again, and let my hand fall from hers.

"You were right all the time, Daniel, and I just called you crazy. You were right. The pyramids, all your looney theories that got you laughed out of academia. You were right all along. And no one knows about it. I wish I believed you before, I wish..." Sarah began crying again. "I'm sorry, Daniel."

"Sarah, this was never about me being upset that no one believed me. I never blamed you for that. You were right, I was crazy and obsessed back then. Most of the time, I wish I had been wrong, actually. And I think I'm glad that most people can sleep at night and not be kept awake with worrying about intergalactic politics, the way we both probably always will." She did smile at that.

"You never slept much at night, I remember that well enough, Mr. coffee addict." she tried to smile, "and it looks like you haven't changed, since it must be night now?" Her eyes still looked so tired, as if the light behind them had been dimmed. I hated seeing her in so much pain.

"I don't think you should be alone right now, so I'll only sleep if you do." I said. "I know I probably can't help you, because I have no idea really what you've been through, but I want you to know that I'll be here for you, Sarah." I said.

She only smiled and sighed. "I'm glad, Daniel." she said. "I feel sleepy, but not enough to sleep yet. Will you tell me something that has been bothering me about you for a long time now? Tell me how you came to actually believe in your own crazy theories? You were always the smartest person I knew, it was astonishing to me the way you let yourself descend into what everyone thought could only be madness." She needed to distract herself, I guess, or maybe she really did want to know.

I would do anything she asked, if only to somehow atone for the part I felt I had played in drawing her into this world, this secret battle between good and evil that she should never have been aware of if life had been fair to her. If it had been fair to any of us, really, although the idea of my life without ever having known Sh'are, even though I lost her so quickly, was more than I could bear thinking about. I said that I sometimes wished I had been wrong about everything, but how could I wish we had never opened the Stargate? How could I measure the good we had found against the evil? I couldn't.

"Well, you know about my Grandfather Nicholas Ballard," I began. "He was a famous archeologist with theories about aliens, too. Maybe it is a genetic thing?" I said, trying to make light of the question.

"But Daniel, I remember how you used to fight with your Grandfather about his alien theories. You didn't believe him, he didn't believe you. I never understood how you could think he was insane but at the same time not realize that your theory was really no different from his. That contributed to my conclusion that you were both just crazy." she said, smiling, no doubt thinking back to the crowded little apartment we had shared for awhile in Chicago, imagining me pacing back and forth across the already very worn oriental rug on the floor, shouting into the phone at Nick at least once a week when I called to check in on him and our conversations inevitably descended into arguments.

"I know. I found out later that we were both right, actually. I had to apologize to him for all the yelling." I looked at my hands again, for a second, then back at Sarah's familiar yet not familiar face.

"So what was it, then, that made you believe. You never did find any proof, until a lot later, did you?"

"No, not until I met Catherine, and joined the Stargate program. Before that, it was just pieces, conjecture, a huge intuitive leap of faith that I never could quite explain, even to myself."

"But you have a theory about that, too? Daniel Jackson, you have not changed much, you still keep all your unspoken words in your eyes instead of your mind." She laughed, reaching out to touch my face affectionately, as if to reassure herself that I really was sitting beside her.

"Funny, people keep telling me that. Maybe I should wear sunglasses more often?" I asked. "Truthfully, it's going to sound more like a bedtime story than a theory." I sighed, "and I've never even told all of it to anyone before, actually."

"I could use a bedtime story about now," Sarah said hopefully, holding my hand again. "It might help distract me, from things I can't think about yet." she said. She settled back down on her pillow, trying to get comfortable, and I reached out and helped her arrange her blankets again.

"Well, once upon a time," I said, laughing, but feeling like those words were a bridge to a part of my life I rarely enjoyed thinking about or looking back into for any reason, "I lived overseas with my parents, who were very open-minded people and taught me to think for myself. Which helped. But something happened to me later in my childhood, after they were dead, that opened my mind even wider to possibility than ever before."

"You were a foster child. I'd forgotten." Sarah nodded to herself.

"Yes, and it usually wasn't the best of times." I agreed. "There wasn't much to believe in or hope for, really. But there was one family I stayed with who were different. Who taught me to think about the universe, instead of just the world. That it was all much bigger than anyone thought."

"How old were you?" Sarah asked sleepily. Her eyelids were half closed, and I wondered if I would be telling this story mostly to myself. Which would be o.k., actually.

"Nine or ten, I think. It was summer, and they lived on the edge of a great forest." I began, my eyes never leaving hers, although I could feel rather than see that Janet had returned to the room and was probably leaning in the doorway, not wanting to interrupt. I decided that was o.k.

"What was it like?" Sarah asked.

"It was beautiful in the woods, and the family was genuine in their kindness. They had a daughter named Maggie, who was the same age I was, but her brother had died the year before. He had fallen off of a cliff in the woods that they used to play near together. They were very close." I had instantly bonded with Maggie, sensing perhaps that we both shared a rare and deep sorrow. I could still see her in my mind, her red hair in long braids that swung behind her as she ran.

"That's terrible." Sarah whispered, drawn into my story as she seemed to be, her eyes opened a little bit wider.

"It wasn't true, though." I said. "It was only what they told people had happened to him. Because he had cancer, and was going to die. No one could save him, but he was saved in a way they couldn't explain, and he was still mostly lost to them. Maggie told me the truth after she started to trust me."

"The truth?" Sarah prompted me. It had been years since I'd thought of any of this, and I was beginning to feel weary myself. I rubbed my eyes distractedly and then continued.

"Maggie and Josh had made friends with aliens in the woods. They didn't know they were aliens at first, they just thought they were fairies, or some other kind of creatures from their storybooks. Children believe fairy tales." I sighed, "until life contradicts them."

"Maggie's father was the one who decided that maybe they were aliens instead. He followed Maggie and Josh into the woods one night to see what they were up to, he was worried about them. He saw them laughing and playing with a strange looking creature they called Molla. The way Maggie described Molla to me, I still don't know what race of aliens he might have been from. One whose planet we have not explored yet, maybe even a planet without a stargate, I don't know really."

"But aliens for sure? Not fairies?" Sarah asked.

"It seems more likely because of what happened next." I said. Although once you start believing in impossible things, it is hard to stop yourself from believing everything. All good myths are based in some kind of fact, after all.

"Molla and the other aliens came every summer, and Maggie and Josh and then later their mom and dad would go out to meet them, to play with them for the few days they were around. Maggie always said it filled her with wonder. She always thought they were fairies because Molla could fly, a little, and sometimes he would pick her up and float with her down the cliff into the ravine. She would shriek with laughter, and it would echo all through the valley. Her mother told me that part."

Maggie's mother played the violin, and she liked to bring it with her and make its voice echo across the ravine as well. I always imagined how haunted the forest must have sounded then, filled with alien, children, and violin noises all at once.

"Daniel, are you sure this is really true?" Sarah asked, "they weren't just telling you stories? Were they writers? Artists? Film makers?" she looked concerned. As if she was still the old Sarah, not the one who had just lived through an unbelievable nightmare herself.

"Maggie's father was a writer, I think, actually." I said. "But Maggie took me to meet Molla herself once. I fell asleep and never got to actually see her. But I saw Josh. And he was supposed to be dead. Maggie said Molla was just shy, that she didn't trust me because I was a stranger. She apologized for not being able to trust me."

"She put you to sleep, so you would not see her? Daniel, what happened to Josh?"

"He had cancer, and it had gotten really bad the year before I came to them. He was going to die. They took him home so he could die there, instead of in the hospital. He wanted to go out into the woods one last time, to see Molla and the other aliens and say goodbye to them. Maybe the mystery of all of it, made him feel easier about dying somehow, I don't know, or maybe he just felt happiest there in the woods by the ravine, where they had all been so happy."

"He was very weak, and on midsummer eve Maggie's father carried him into the woods. Maggie said that he fell asleep and the three of them just sat around him in a circle, crying, when the bright lights that signaled that Molla was coming shone down upon them." Sarah's hand grasped mine tighter. She was under the spell of my words, distracted, I hoped, from her own troubles.

"Molla and the other aliens cried when they saw that Josh was dying. And they told the family that they could save him, but he wouldn't be able to live with them anymore if they did. It would change him too much, he wouldn't be quite human. He would have to stay with Molla and his family forever. But he could visit them each summer."

"So they pretended he died? But he went with them? Disappeared?" Sarah asked.

"Yes, and that summer I was there was the first summer he came back to spend a week with them. He was strong again, I couldn't tell he had ever been sick a day in his life. He wouldn't speak of what he had seen or where he had been. 'I can't tell you anything,' he explained, 'I'm not allowed. But Maggie, the universe is more wonderful than we ever even tried to imagine.' I remember him saying.

"And you believed all of it? You didn't tell your social worker that they were insane? That they lied about the death of their child?"

"I was ten, Sarah, and besides, I saw Josh with my own eyes. I believed them because I wanted to. They gave me back the sense of wonder in the world that I had been living without since my parents died. I trusted them. I knew instinctively that they weren't the kind of grown-ups who lied. And Maggie wouldn't lie to me, the sorrow she felt from having to live her whole life except one week a year without her brother was very real." I couldn't explain it still, but I had believed their story wholeheartedly at the time.

"It blurred in my memory, and the older I got the less I believed in it, really. But it was always in the back of my mind, I guess, Sarah. And I think that is why, when I began to connect all of my theories together, I never really stopped and worried about how impossible they sounded. I had already learned how to believe in impossible things."

"That does explain a lot," Sarah reached her hand out and pulled my face close to her, kissing me on the cheek. I pulled away a bit awkwardly, but smiled down at her. "It was one of the things that attracted me to you from the beginning, Daniel, the way you could so passionately believe in things. Thank you for not giving up on me, Daniel. Thank you for telling me about Maggie, too. I need to remember the wonder of everything I've seen, not just the pain, I think." she added.

Her voice was suddenly heavy with sleep, and I realized that she was barely awake. I guess my weird story had worked as a bedtime story after all. Sarah's eyes closed and I gently covered her with another blanket. It was still the middle of the night, so I sat down on my bed again, not sure what I wanted to do next. I didn't feel peaceful enough to sleep; I was worried about Sarah and wondering how I could help her through all of this. I had forgotten that Janet was still standing in the doorway. Otherwise, I wouldn't have let her see me sitting there so forlornly, my head resting in my hands.

"Daniel?" she asked, walking across the room and putting her hand on my shoulder. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn't help overhearing. I'm glad you got Sarah to fall asleep naturally, it is probably the best thing for her right now. But are you o.k.? I know you dislike talking about your past." she asked.

I took a deep breath. For the first time, I considered that my whole childhood had lead me here to this place, that everything I experienced, the good and the terrible alike, had prepared me for my membership in this secret battle between good and evil. It was more important than anything I had ever imagined, and it still took my breath away that I had any sort of role in it at all. I wondered what had happened to Maggie and Josh and their parents and Molla. I wondered how many other incredible and amazing things that even I would have trouble believing in were happening right now, on Earth, on other planets, all across the universe. Maybe I had known about more of it, when I was ascended, but just now the thought filled me with wonder again.

Suddenly I felt very tired.

"I'm feeling a lot better, actually." I said. "I think Sarah is going to be alright. I think everything is going to be alright." Janet smiled at me and silently pushed me back onto the bed, throwing the blanket back over me.

"Sleep until morning, then, Daniel." she said, "Goodnight." she moved over to Sarah's bed, and began checking to make sure she was o.k. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep, without dreams, for the first time in weeks.

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