Title: Roundelay III: Erinye
Author: Jewels
E-mail: jhantor@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: All publicly recognisable characters and places are the property of MGM, World Gekko Corp and Double Secret Productions. They're not mine, never have been mine, even though I wish they were.
Summary: The events after Sam is saved from the Goa'uld, this time from Erinye's point of view.
Rating: PG-13
Status: Complete
Spoilers: Some for Tok'ra 2.
Archive: RR, anywhere else that already has my fics, my site: http://www.crosswinds.net/~tokrachick/
Category: Angst, Drama
Notes: The third part of the Roundelay series, the first two parts of which can be found at: http://www.crosswinds.net/~tokrachick/fanfic/sg1/sgfic.html
Additional notes: HERE! HAPPY NOW?? You monster lot you! (nah, love y'all really) People begging me constantly for the next part... I caved! I admit it! I'm totally weak willed!

**

I knew how Samantha felt.

How could I not know? I still wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, when the only sounds are the gentle trickling of water through the tunnels, and the shimmering noise, like the crystal is singing to itself, that is always present. I wake up, and I remember the horrible pain of my own symbiote, my best friend, Caule, being dissolved from the outside inwards, due to a neural solvent he injected into my blood while I was held against the wall, his hands around my throat, her screams ringing through my skull. I can still feel Cordesh's unwilling host's lips pressing against mine as he jumped from Kattran to me. Making me his new host. I have no doubt that he'd have preferred not to look me in the face while he did so, but he couldn't leave a noticeable scar, now could he?

Like her, I've had a Goa'uld bore its way into my skull, wrap itself around my brainstem, and squeeze my mind until I could barely breath. And through all of that, I watched what this thing that pretended to be me did. I watched the creature play a role, pretending to be Caule to others, after it had killed her. I watched it make a mockery of the very relationship that defines the Tok'ra; the mutualism that is the hallmark of our lives.

And this happened to Samantha twice.

Sometimes I wonder how she can remain sane.

**

Tren, one of the healers, had dismissed everyone from the small chamber off the main infirmary after we had separated Samantha from the creature that had inhabited her, and I went to inform the Council that the Goa'uld had been removed. They thanked and then dismissed me. I don't know what they planned to do with the creature, and to be honest, I didn't particularly care.

I think I'm past caring. About anything.

Or at least, at the time, that's what I thought.

I'll be honest. In the days... no, weeks... following Cordesh's removal from my body, I was virtually cataleptic. After one incident where I had started screaming the moment I sensed a symbiote coming near me, they were very careful to announce their presence and who they were. That didn't stop me from being terrified. Even now, I can't speak to anyone without suppressing the urge to flinch.

Samantha was doing more than flinching. The first time Selmak and Lantash tried speaking to her, she started sobbing and having hysterics, and she had to be forcibly sedated. She never had that reaction around me, and I never felt the need to flinch around here, and I suppose, in a way, that was a basis for our relationship. Not quite a friendship, I suppose, and we were more than acquaintances. I don't know what you'd call it, but we were comfortable in each others presence, and thus, when the Healer Senior recommended that I be the one formally in charge of her care (I had been caring for her informally for a few days), I wasn't willing to object.

It took her some time before she did more than lie on her bed on quietly sniffle and cry. When she did finally speak, I was the only one there to hear her.

I was bringing in some food (that she hardly ever ate - the Healers had to keep sneaking nutrient injections while she was asleep) and was absently rearranging some equipment to make room for the tray when she said,

"You're like me."

I looked at her, and those mournful eyes were staring at me from the bed. I nodded slowly. "Yes." I said.

That was all we said to each other, but it was enough to persuade her to force down some of the nutrient broth that the Healers swear is incredibly healthy, but tastes like waste water. I did try and add some seasoning, but it never, ever, tastes good.

I think it's deliberate, but no one will back me up on that.

She gradually started talking to me, even though she talked to no one else. She told me all about the nightmares she was having. Where she was back on her world, and Anqet was in control of her body. Where she walked around killing people because the Goa'uld was controlling her. She told me of all the terrible things that she had done. She told me of when Anqet had killed a Tok'ra operative that had once been a friend of Jolinar's. How both she and those memories were screaming in protest, and how she felt like she had three people in her head.

I did the only thing I could think of doing. I sat, I listened, and I offered both a figurative and a literal shoulder to cry on. But she still refused to talk to anyone else.

I was sitting with her, talking to her as she lay on her bed, and she had been describing a young girl, Cassandra, and her dog, to me, how much she missed them, when Jacob had entered. I have never seen anyone fall so silent and so still so quickly.

Both of us had been aware of his approach, but hadn't realised his intent was to enter until the last second. Samantha became a statue so quickly, I wondered if she had some sort of precognition that had allowed her to be prepared for his entrance. She went still, her eyes wide open and staring blankly at the ceiling, chest rising and falling evenly.

Jacob looked at her, and then turned to me, pain in his eyes. I felt an upwelling of sympathy for him then, one of the few emotional bursts I have had since Cordesh possessed me. "Is there any sort of improvement?" he asked me.

I didn't want to lie to him. To a father that was obviously so sick with worry for his daughter. But for Samantha, I had to.

"No," I said, "There's none. I'm sorry."

**

"I can't take it anymore." she said to me on the last day.

We had been sitting together, side by side, legs dangling over the edge of the bed, and she had been swinging them like a young girl as she ate her soup. Then she had suddenly become still and had uttered that sentence.

Maybe if I had any inkling of the possible consequences of my response, I would have said something non-committal, maybe made a quiet non-verbal noise. But instead, I asked her,

"What do you mean?"

Samantha blinked, and I could see tears threatening to spill over. "Martouf was in here." she said.

Hardly surprising to me. "Yes, I saw him come out." I said, nodding slowly. "What did you say to him?"

She shook her head. "Nothing." as usual. As far as anyone else is concerned, Samantha is catatonic. Only I know differently, and somehow I can't bring myself to inflict the people who would come and see her if they knew she was perfectly capable of communicating.

"So what's the problem?" I asked handing over a coarse grained loaf that she sometimes dips into her soup.

She took it, but did nothing except stare at it. "He begged me to talk to him. Said he couldn't understand, but he could listen." And this time the tears did fall freely. "Part of me was screaming to talk to him, and the rest of me was saying he was lying. That what I had gone through would repulse him, and that..." she faltered and stopped speaking.

"And that you can't help but hate him for what he is." I finished quietly. Samantha nodded. I knew. I knew what it was like to look upon people who had been your friends, your lovers, and feel nothing but disgust and repulsion for the very essence of their being. I don't tell anyone of course. They would all be very offended.

"And he touched... my shoulder." she continued in a broken voice. "I almost screamed." She shook her head and drew in a deep shuddering breath. "I can't continue like this. I just can't."

I bit my lip and took a deep breath. "Samantha..." I started.

Her head jerked up and she looked me in the eye. "Please," she whispered, tears in her eyes. "Just get me out of here. Please."

I couldn't refuse.

**

We snuck out in the dead of night, and it was actually ridiculously easy to circumnavigate the guards and to go through the Chaapa'ai without them realising it. All we had to do was hide Samantha in one of those billowing cloaks some of the Tok'ra like to affect.

If we went straight to the world she had asked to go to, there was every chance we would be spotted. So I was taking a rather circuitous route. First to an unoccupied staging world, Ia, then to Menta, then onto our destination.

No one stopped us from getting through the Gate, and at our destination we were greeted with puzzlement, and then pity for Samantha. They promised to take care of her for as long as necessary and I returned to the Tok'ra world.

It wasn't long after I returned that they realised Samantha was missing, and I was brought to account.

**

There is a chamber in the Tok'ra complex that is dedicated to extracting information from captured Goa'uld agents, where we torture them for information. I know some hosts are disgusted by this practice. They feel it makes us no better than the Goa'uld to use such practices to get what we need. But even they are forced to admit that all other methods have failed.

This is where they put me for questioning.

The available drugs we have that are designed to work on hosts won't work on me. After all, although I possess no symbiote to counteract the effect of the narcotics, the naqada that swims in my blood (courtesy of my dear Caule) and the protein marker of not one but two symbiotes makes all the drugs they possess useless. And I knew that even the hardest of the Council would balk at torturing me.

So they let Martouf speak to me.

"Do you know what you've done?" he asked me in a cold, hard voice.

Maybe he was trying to make me feel guilt. It was a poor attempt. "Yes." I told him, perched on a chair in the centre of the room. "I know what I have done. I know why I did it. It was for Samantha's own sanity." I tilted my head to look at him. "I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand that."

"That's not the point." he said, evenly. He wasn't going to get agitated. Martouf has been in charge of more than one interrogation, and none of those who run interrogations are very susceptible to goading. "It is in Samantha's own interest that we find her. She was not in her right mind. On her own, out there, she could do anything. She could even kill herself."

I shrugged. "Doubtful." I said. "I sent her somewhere that will provide for her far better than the Tok'ra ever could."

Martouf folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. "Did you send her to the Tau'ri?" I said nothing. "Ah. Obviously not." He was guessing. I hoped. "After all, they are very primitive compared to us."

"Says the host from another 'primitive' world." I said pointedly.

Lantash surfaced and I tried not to shift uneasily. Lantash is much less... diplomatic than his host.

"Where is Samantha?" he asked.

I smiled facetiously. "I do not remember."

"A lie."

"Perhaps not," I said. "After all, my memory is not what it once was."

"A lie." repeated Lantash firmly.

"Fine. A lie." I grated out, cursing myself for caving on that point so quickly. But my mind is not as strong as it is blended with a symbiote. In this, as I have been in everything since Cordesh, I was alone. "I will not tell you however."

"You will have to eventually." Lantash said to me, his eyes flaring briefly with obvious irritation. "You cannot keep this secret indefinitely."

"Your reasoning is flawed." I informed him. "I can keep my knowledge secret for as long as necessary."

Lantash frowned. "Samantha has knowledge that would be of invaluable use to the Tok'ra. Her knowledge of Anqet would be-"

"You know as well as I do that unless the symbiote dies within the host, that the host does not retain the knowledge of their symbiote once it is removed." I said. I remember every single detail of Caule's thousands of years of life, but nothing of Cordesh except what he did while I was under his control. "Anqet's knowledge is of no use to you." I tilted my head again. "Or is it Jolinar's memories you want? Some part of her still with you."

"I loved Jolinar." Lantash said sharply. "But Samantha is not Jolinar. I realised that a long time ago."

"And when you offered her hosting of Selmak? Your motives were pure then? I think not. In such matters, they rarely are." I was generalising, but I think Lantash took it personally, for after a moment, Martouf resurfaced.

"You're only making matters more difficult than they need to be." he told me.

"So they are meant to be easy?"

Martouf offered me a slight smile at that. "No. But it would be in your own best interest to co-operate."

"Or you'll what? Kill me? Then you'll never find out where Samantha is. And you'll have lost the knowledge of ship technology that Caule possessed." I think, sometimes, when I'm feeling morbid, that those memories are the only reason the Tok'ra let me stay around unblended. Caule was a recognised expert in ship technology. Show her a group of metallic fragments, and she could build a hyperspace-capable drive core within a week. And after her death, I became her replacement, after a fashion. I possess all that knowledge, and experience. Thousands of years of it.

"Samantha no longer wants contact with the Tok'ra." I said, trying not to grit my teeth.

"I can imagine what she went through, but-"

"How would you know?" I demanded, and dared to stand up and step close to him, looking him in the eye. "You wake up in the morning, and you stretch. You have control of your body. Maybe you debate with Lantash what you want for breakfast, but in the end, if you want fruit, and he wants cereal, you're going to have fruit. You have free will. Lantash is your friend. Someone who knows you better than anyone else in existence knows you. He is always there to support you. To help you. To be an emotional net for you."

I tried not to run a hand through my hair, forcing myself to keep still and continue glaring into his eyes, where I could see unease beginning to surface. "Now imagine, you wake up in the morning, not because you've slept enough, but because something /else/ thinks it would be a good idea. You're hungry, but something ruthlessly suppresses your appetite because if you eat it might spoil your figure, and it wants your body to look perfect. It dresses you in strange, unfamiliar clothes. It makes you move and walk against your will.

"It's always there, examining you like an insect under dissection. It takes your memories and twists them to its own advantage. It forces you to relive horrific memories that you buried in your mind, tormenting you until you want to scream, but you can't, because you can't control your voice.

"You see your friends, you colleagues, innocent strangers who did nothing more than look at it the wrong way die. And you see them die by your own hand. You feel your own hand raise, and you feel the power flowing into your fingertips and destroying them cell by cell. And all the time you scream for it to stop, but it won't."

I didn't realise that I was crying, but when I finally regained some semblance of awareness later, I realised that my collar was damp, and that tears had streaked my face.

"That," I said in a guttural voice. "Is what it is like to be taken over by a Goa'uld. So don't say you can imagine what she, or I, went through. Because you can't. And you never will."

For an entire year, I kept my silence.

And I was despised for it.

**

I was sitting eating my lunch with two Tunnel Engineers, Leinn/Vetnar and Tuya/Sanan, when I realised that my carefully maintained silence was going to be broken. Tuya had abandoned her food and was turning over a piece of crystal, a little larger than her hand, examining it carefully. Finally, she looked to Kaen.

"Well," she said, "It's not my fault someone collapsed a tunnel on it." She dropped the rock onto the table, which upon closer inspection would reveal itself to be a Tollan signalling device. Of course, it was doubtful that the designers of the device had ever intended it to be encased in crystal.

"It will no longer work?" Kaen asked, while I poked the crystal with a fork, as if that would have helped.

Tuya gave Leinn a 'what do you think?' glare, and Leinn coughed self-consciously and returned his attention to his food. But not before he had said, "The Council aren't going to be happy."

"The Council are never happy." I commented mildly, and Tuya nodded sharply in agreement.

"She should know."

I said nothing. I've heard enough aside comments about my former status as a Councillor to be immune to them by now. Tuya sighed and turned the clump of crystalline material over and over in her hands, then she sighed.

"We're going to have to get a new one." Tuya said with finality.

"Get a new what?" came a voice from just behind Leinn.

I automatically stiffened at Jacob's appearance, with Martouf close behind. From the looks of things they had been discussing tactical updates. Neither he, Selmak, or Martouf/Lantesh have ever really forgiven me for taking Samantha away from them. I don't feel guilty for having done so, but I do sympathise.

"Tollan signalling device." said Tuya, holding up the rock. "Someone who shall remain nameless," she said, glaring at Leinn. "Collapsed a tunnel on it. We had to prise it out of the wall."

Leinn contrived to look hurt.

"I wouldn't have minded." Tuya continued, rather blithely, I thought. "Except that chamber wasn't even scheduled for collapse. Dren'tek." She gave Leinn a playful whack on the arm to accompany her rather mild insult.

"This is the one we use to contact the Tau'ri, isn't it?" Martouf asked, peering at the device. "So we can't receive signals until we get a new one?"

"It's pretty much destroyed." I said and took a bite of the redfruit that scouts had found on the surface of a neighbouring planet when they realised that the fourth planet in the system of twelve (we were on the fifth) was a lush tropical world.

"Is there any way to repair this?" Jacob asked Tuya, ignoring me.

Tuya's uneasy gaze shifted between me and Jacob, noticing the tension. It was hardly a secret that Jacob and Martouf, and their symbiotes, hated me, but it still unnerved people to see it in action after all this time. Finally she shook her head. "No. It's worthless. Or, at least, that's what the technologists tell me."

"Then we will have to go to Tollana to get a new device." Martouf said, taking the object from Jacob and peering at it, now preserved for all time inside a bluish crystalline container.

My stomach went cold.

"I will go." I said, in retrospect, maybe a little too quickly.

Jacob stared at me, finally deigning to speak to me. "Why are you so eager?" he said in a suspicious tone.

I leaned back slightly and shrugged in feigned disinterest. "You need as many people here as you can for the meeting with the Tirrian ambassador, not to mention those tunnel extensions that are scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Therefore, I, as the one with least to do, should go. I have diplomatic training."

Jacob stared at me a moment longer, then shook his head. "No, Erinye. I believe that Aldwin or Martouf would be better suited to this mission. They have, after all, had contact with the Tollan before."

"You can't." I blurted out before I could stop myself. I cursed myself for saying that. It was the worst thing I could have said, but I was so desperate that my secret was not uncovered. I had faithfully kept it for a year. I couldn't let everyone know by accident now, of all times.

I wasn't expecting him to react physically, but before I knew what was going on, Martouf had grabbed my upper arm and had hauled me bodily to my feet so he could look me in the face. Silence fell in the chamber, everyone watching carefully, and even Jacob and Selmak made no move to prevent what was happening.

His grip on my arm was so tight it hurt, but I said nothing.

"What's on Tollana you don't want us to find?" he demanded in a low dangerous voice, tightening his hand slightly.

I couldn't bring myself to speak, to actually say the words. As long as I said nothing to Martouf and Lantash, I had not betrayed Samantha's trust in me, I had not broken my promise to her, that I had made as someone else who had been violated by the Goa'uld. That didn't stop them from guessing though.

"Samantha." That pronouncement from Martouf seemed to silence all muttering within earshot. Maybe it did, but I couldn't look away from the intensity of his gaze. It was desperate, and triumphant. "Samantha," he repeated. "Is on Tollana."

-End