This story was written as an entry for the 2007 Sam/Jack Ficathon on livejournal. It's based off a prompt from Sue, who asked for a story where, "Sam is kidnapped by Ba'al for some nefarious reason and it is up to Jack to save her." I ended up taking the idea in a slightly different direction, but, at least in my mind, I stuck to the prompt. Anyways, enjoy!

Fighting Grace

It's dark where she is, the absence of light so complete that at times she's unsure of whether her eyes are open or closed. It makes no difference either way, but she's lost control of so many other aspects of her existence that she would find it comforting to be able to just know that her eyes are open without having to blink a few times to check. So when she hears a door slide open behind her, she blinks. And while her eyes are open she catches a swatch of light falling against the wall across from her. The dark metallic surface gleams dully for a moment before once again it's covered in a darkness her eyes cannot penetrate. But even that brief moment leaves her imagining starbursts of color for a time after; her eyes are so adjusted to the darkness that any light at all sends her vision into chaos.

She senses it's him before she hears his footsteps or smells the musty scent of his robes; his mere presence makes her skin crawl and the hairs on her arms stand on end, though whether it's simply because of the naquadah reacting with her body's cells or her own mix of revulsion and fear is unknown. Probably both, but she's not willing to admit that he elicits such strong feelings just yet. She figures she can fool herself for a little while longer, and while she does she's able to retain some measure of control, some sense of self.

And in this game, control is everything.

His footsteps stop and she knows he's close; she flinches ever so slightly when his breath brushes lightly across her ear. For the first time in a while, she's grateful for the dark. "Now, where did we leave off, Colonel Carter?" he eventually drawls, his words distorted, deepened in pitch by the goa'uld within. Again, she's thankful for the darkness: this way she doesn't have to see the smirk she can hear in his voice. "Don't you remember?" This time he whispers it in her other ear, causing her to flinch in surprise again. His fingers trace along her jaw up to her temple before stopping. There they linger, tracing the slightly sticky outline of the small metal disc embedded through skin, flesh, and bone.

Her head starts to throb again. She's never had a migraine before, but she imagines the beginnings of one might feel something like this. "You're wasting your time. I don't know anything." She manages to keep her voice level, but the effort makes her head swim and his fingers continue to trace the sensitive skin around the device.

"You underestimate yourself, Samantha. I think we ended about here, don't you think?"

There's a sharp prick, and then… Sam clenches her teeth, but still she's sure a whimper escapes.

-----

He's certain he's aged more, faster since he took the position of commander of Stargate Command than he ever has before. It was hard for all those years, being a part of a team and worrying about the three people for whom he was always responsible, but now he has far more people under his command. And he worries about every one of them. Equally, he likes to think, but there are times when he can't fool himself, when it becomes obvious that certain people mean significantly more than others. When he realizes it's not only his personnel in danger, but his friends. His family. The one he… Jack stops his thoughts before they lead back to that forbidden place.

Suffice it to say, this is one of those times.

There's a small part of Jack that is detached enough from the real world that it is able to function separately from the overwhelming anger, panic, helplessness and exhaustion. That part of him is quietly amazed that Ba'al hasn't yet called up to gloat. It would be very like him to do so, but Jack acknowledges with more than a hint of bitterness that even megalomaniacal snakes occasionally show a bit of common sense.

He can't help it when his heart leaps a little bit with hope at the sound of klaxons blaring and one of the techs announcing an unscheduled activation of the gate. The blaring siren and flashing lights do nothing for the sleep deprivation-induced headache he's developing, but he runs anyways, as fast as is possible through the corridors seemingly crammed with soldiers and scientists. Jack desperately wants to shove the lot of them to the side, but he settles for an authoritative bark that sends military and civilian personnel alike back against the walls.

His enthusiasm is in vain, however, because SG-6 arrives back empty-handed and none the wiser as to Colonel Carter's location. They are the seventh team to do so, and while Jack dismisses them to the infirmary for their post-mission physical with a sad grin that mirrors the team leader's, he can't help but feel something inside twinge painfully. For a second, he worries that his façade will crack and he looks around himself quickly to make sure there's nothing that can possibly be broken if he lashes out.

But he doesn't crack. Not this time. It takes a concerted effort of will to pull himself back out of the pit of worry, anger, and fear threatening to swallow him up, but he manages it. He's not sure how; years ago, he wouldn't have even thought it possible. But now he has her smile to remember, her resilience and patience for models, and somehow that's enough of a leg up to bring him back to the present. Each time a team returns home unsuccessful, though, it gets harder: the smile he remembers seems a little less certain and his mind strays to the times when she wasn't so collected under pressure… and to times before that, when his darkness seemed inescapable.

Jack wearily drags himself up to his office, praying that the next search party will be luckier than the last. For Carter's sake, as well as his own.

-----

When the door hisses open, Sam knows that this time she's going to break, that this is the end. She has endured countless sessions, and through all of them he is there, Ba'al is there, his breath falling warmly on her chilled skin, his whispers worming their way deep into her mind so that long after he leaves and she is alone, she still feels his presence, still hears his voice in her ear. Still feels her skin prickle as if he is standing next to her.

There's no respite, no escape.

So she thinks this time will be the last time. Because there is no way she will be able to retain even a shred of sanity if she doesn't try to give him the thing for which his is searching.

But something is strange this time. There is a light despite the fact the door is closed, the white beam bobbing in time to careful footsteps, so bright it's blinding. After all her time spent in the dark, Sam can't feel anything except piercing pain behind her eyes and the only thing she can see amongst the light is burst after explosive burst of color. She lets out what is meant to be a groan but sounds more akin to a croak; countless screams have obviously damaged her vocal cords for the short term.

Now someone is calling her name. Not Samantha, like he has grown fond of using, but Carter. Colonel Carter. The voice is accompanied by a pair of hands on her forearm, tugging feverishly at the fastenings for the straps that bind her to the chair. She blinks furiously, trying to clear her vision of starbursts. The hands succeed in undoing one of the straps and immediately move on to the next one, all the while saying something about getting her out of this place, that she's lucky she's alive, that he's pretty sure he hasn't gotten any sleep for going on two weeks. The second strap comes undone and Sam raises her arms, flexing and twisting them experimentally. They complain and tremble a bit, weak from disuse, but they work – barely. The same goes for her legs, and she's sure she'd be nothing more than a tangled heap of limbs on the floor if it weren't for the sudden presence of a supporting arm around her middle.

She can't help it: she flinches at the contact. But the arm doesn't leave, and the last rational part of Sam knows she won't be able to go very far without support. She doesn't flinch again.

Outside is a chaotic amalgam of weapons fire, yelling, debris, and, in the far-off distance, the deep grinding of stone-on-stone. It's all far too much to deal with and Sam feels her brain shut down. She sees only what's in front of her, ducks only when pulled down by her rescuer, doesn't even cry out when a piece of debris grazes her cheek. The wound stings and the skin around it feels warm, but they're moving again and she can't bring herself to care about anything other than the pounding of her feet on sandy soil.

Her legs and lungs burn, but the feeling is distant, as if it's only a memory. The incline of the ground changes and they slow, slightly. Once over the hill, Sam can see the source of the grinding noise: a stargate, the inner circle of symbols being rotated manually. The person hurrying her forward, his grip not letting up as she stumbles awkwardly across the uneven terrain, shouts to send the iris code as an explosion of bluish energy erupts in front of them.

They pause, and then hurry forward again, straight into the light.

-----

Jack looks down on her from the observation room. There's work to do, files to read, teams to brief, a base to run and yet he can't seem to tear himself from the scene below. Because below, Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter is sleeping, her hospital gown not quite hidden by infirmary blankets, her cropped blonde hair brushed back from her face. She looks drawn, pale… peaceful.

He can't quite believe that they got her back. That he got her back.

The people of that planet had been talking of rebelling against the god for whom they mined naquadah and sought Earth's aid. Being that the god was Ba'al, Jack and the rest of the SGC were more than happy to oblige. But on the day of the rebellion, a message had arrived via SG-3 that Ba'al himself was present on the planet. Their message requested back-up, which Jack granted, but as soon as the wormhole disengaged, he found himself running to the locker room, gearing up. He had a feeling; Ba'al wouldn't be there without a reason. That small, detachedly rational part of him told him he was being reckless. And he was. Good soldiers don't rush off into the great unknown on a gut feeling.

But by this point, he was too frayed to care; he went along with the back-up under the pretense of helping with the mission. In the heat of the battle, he and a group of the native miners headed off in the direction of the Jaffa retreat. It wasn't long before he spotted the fortress, partially hidden amongst the tall pine-like trees of the locale.

He doesn't remember how he got in, how he got past the Jaffa guards, but he remembers how hard his heart pounded against his rib cage, how his vision seemed to swim when he was faced with corridor after corridor of identical rooms. The euphoric relief of seeing a blonde crown of hair poking above the top of a chair in the third hallway of rooms and, just when he thought the worst, hearing a hoarse sort of groan.

He'd found her, and she was alive.

She hadn't acknowledged him even once on the trip back to the now-damaged gate. But that was alright with him because he could hear her increasingly labored breaths in his ear, feel her tight grip on his supporting arm around her middle. Alive. That was all that mattered.

Back at the base, she'd undergone intensive physical and psychological evaluations, making sure that what had happened to Teal'c all those years ago with Apophis hadn't happened again. The psychological tests had been especially grueling, no doubt due to the small silver disc that had been found and removed from her right temple that resembled a memory recall device. Jack read the reports in awe: no physical injuries, save the graze on her cheek received in her escape and the little prick at her temple where the disc had been attached to her skin, and no brain washing. He couldn't quite believe it then.

He still can't believe it now.

But his eyes show him a perfectly healthy, if exhausted, woman sleeping below, and the only thing wrong seems to be her broken voice. Jack shakes his head and rises from his chair. There's more to this situation than meets the eye, but it will be a while before all of the fallout becomes apparent.

The thought leaves a bitter aftertaste that refuses to leave.

-----

The nightmares aren't the worst part. They're terrible, undoubtedly, ripping screams from her still-healing throat and leaving her tangled in her sheets, covered in a sheen of cold sweat. But even once she's awoken they don't stop; the images flash before her eyes like a grotesque private slideshow and her skin crawls as if Ba'al was in her bedroom with her, his mouth whispering things into her ear. Sometimes the dreams feature people she knows and sometimes they don't, people from her memory mixing with ones from lives she never lived in a confusing, horrifying, inescapable spectacle. There is always pain, always blood… always death. And there's never anything she can do to change it.

But as bad as the nightmares are for Sam, the thing that's worse is that she can't tell anyone. Not just about the dreams, because those alone wouldn't be so terribly bad – she's sure they'll pass with time. What she can't say is that every time someone accidentally brushes her hand in the lab, every time a friend gives her a reassuring pat on the shoulder, all she wants to do is run away. She wants to stop her skin from crawling, wants to stop the urge to vomit from overwhelming her, wants to stop the instinct to lash out from controlling her reactions.

She doesn't know quite how Ba'al managed to do this to her; he barely laid a hand on her, truth be told. But he has, somehow. And it has ruined her.

If anyone notices she's a little more distant, they don't say anything. Perhaps they assume she's recovering, perhaps that is why they don't push her to talk like they have in the past. Perhaps they even think that she got lucky and nothing happened, other than being strapped to a chair in a dark room for two weeks. She does nothing to discourage these trains of thought, heading back to her experiments in her lab as soon as her forced vacation is over. To everyone, she seems the same as ever.

Except to the general. To Jack.

His gaze when he checks in on her is worried, though he tries to hide it. He lingers longer when they bump into each other, which happens more frequently than it has since he first accepted the position of commander of the base. And he delays putting her back on active duty. Sam knows that she should be irritated at his decision, and when she's around Daniel and Teal'c she can almost bring herself to be so. But when they leave her to go back to their own work, it's possible, and even easy, for Sam to admit to herself that gate travel might not be the best thing for her right now.

Because, once she has the hang of it, it's easy to hide, and to pretend that nothing is wrong.

-----

Whatever he's expecting, it isn't this.

He's been on guard for weeks since he got Sam out of Ba'al's little prison deal. That she didn't want to talk about her experiences directly afterwards didn't surprise him in the least; he would have acted similarly had he been in her place, except with possibly the inclusion of a few more curt, grating remarks. But her continued silence… it makes him worry. Though she claims ignorance, he knows that she knows exactly what was done to her; Ba'al is far too adept at torture for her not to remember every single detail of each and every session. Jack knows this from experience. So whatever Ba'al did to her in those weeks must have scarred her far more deeply than any physical weapon ever could have done.

But knowing what he knows about Carter, he doesn't expect her to turn up on his doorstep at ten to midnight. There she is, though, a zipper hoodie thrown over what he presumes are her pajamas, hair unkempt, shivering slightly in the cold night breeze. The thing Jack notices most, however, are her eyes: they're red, swollen, yet dry. He's seen her like this before: she's been crying.

"I hit him," she whispers. "He came up behind me to give me a hug and I hit him."

Jack knows who the 'he' is in her sentence, and he'd be kidding himself if he said he didn't feel the least bit of bitterness at the mention of him, but he ignores the feeling as always. Instead, he worries himself with what else she has said. He's about to ask more questions when he notices she's not just shivering – she's positively shaking.

"Come in," he says quietly. Without thinking, his hand starts to reach out to guide her inside, but he catches the flinch amongst the shaking and he instead simply opens the door a little wider. She steps over the threshold and heads straight for the quilt haphazardly draped over the back of his couch. With it pulled over her shoulders and her knees tucked up against her chest, she reminds Jack of a child just woken up from a nightmare. He supposes this might not be far from the truth, in this case.

They sit on the couch, silent, the sliver of a moon that's out tonight the only light in the room. He waits, anxious but patient, and while it takes a while, his efforts are rewarded. "Do you know? Ba'al barely touched me for all the time I was… there," she begins, now-dry eyes focusing on some indeterminate spot on the opposite wall. "But now… now I can barely stand anyone touching me. That's why I hit Pete. I think… I think I broke one of his ribs… oh God, I think I broke one of his ribs!"

"Shhh… Carter, calm down. He'll be okay." Maybe, he can't help but add in his mind; he's been on the receiving end of a few of Carter's punches before and he's had the bruises to show for it. "What happened?" Jack's not sure if he means tonight or all those weeks ago, but he figures the ambiguity gives Sam the freedom she needs now.

He watches her carefully in the moonlight. There's not a lot of it, but there's enough to see her mask slip for a moment. She looks as if she's going to completely break down there on his couch, but she doesn't. For now. "He didn't touch me, but… but he was in… in my head. Ba'al was in my head. He…" she chokes on the words and swallows hard. "He manipulated my thoughts, my memories, everything. All because he thought he could uncover information to defeat the rest of the System Lords, as well as us, for good." She turns and looks at him, this time grinning. It is a frightening grin: equal parts feral, sardonic, and wretched. "I didn't give him anything. But what he did… I… I still see the visions he created in my dreams. I still hear his voice in my head."

It takes all of his strength and common sense not to reach across the sofa and pull this woman into a hug. It pains him to have to sit and listen to this and not do anything to comfort her, but he realizes it must be even more painful for her to sit and talk about it. He realizes this because he's been in her position before on multiple occasions. Maybe this is why she has come here tonight, maybe she knows he will be a sympathetic ear. But maybe there's more to it than just that he's been in her shoes before. He really hopes there is.

Jack is pulled back to reality by her voice. "It's been hard, coming back and trying to act like everything's fine. I thought… I thought I would get over it. By myself. But it's been nearly a month since I came back and things seem even worse than before. And tonight… I don't know, I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm just so tired, Jack. So tired…"

She doesn't say any more after that, and Jack doesn't push for more either. He knows what she has just done was hard for her, possibly even harder than holding out against Ba'al for all that time. But he's glad that she is finally able to talk about what happened, and even more so that he is the one she trusted most to hear her out.

-----

Sam is quite certain she has survived tougher battles than this. But no matter how many times she tells herself this, she can't get rid of the queasy, fluttery sensation in her gut or make her palms stop sweating inside her jacket pockets. To her ears, even her footsteps on the asphalt of the parking lot sound hesitant, as if she's walking towards an execution block or a lions' den.

She's more than a little ashamed that the front entrance to her new therapist's office has such an effect on her. This is probably why, when she mentioned she would be taking a little more vacation, she declined to tell anyone except for a select few where she was going or what she was planning on doing. As far as almost everyone on base is concerned, this vacation is nothing more than a chance to catch up on the sleep that has been eluding her for so many weeks.

"Interesting taste in curtains," comments the voice of her sole companion for the trip. Sam feels the corners of her mouth turn upwards against her will, and a small bubble of laughter quickly dissipates a bit of the tight ball of anxiety in her chest. "I hope that Dr. Flowglow didn't pick them out herself. Because you know how I feel about people with poor taste in curtains."

"Dr. Flaugherty," Sam corrects immediately, and she glances over at Jack just in time to catch his eyes. He breaks the gaze almost immediately, focusing instead on the windows visible from the parking lot. "And I don't see what her decorating sense has to do with her abilities as a doctor. She's bound to be better than Mackenzie."

"Carter, it has everything to do with her abilities as a doctor." And at this, she giggles. A falsely stern glare in her direction silences her, but her silly repressed sort of smile remains.

She knows what he's doing: lightening the mood, drawing her attention away from her fears with silly, inane comments while he checks on her to make sure she's not on the verge of going catatonic. Just a few weeks ago, she would have felt patronized and would have insisted he stop, but right now she can't help but enjoy the attention and concern.

Ever since that night when she wound up on his doorstep, things have been different between them. They've always been close; closer than they should have been, but never quite close enough. Sam supposes it should scare her, how easily she and Jack have gone from 'General' and 'Colonel' to 'Jack' and 'Sam', but it doesn't. If anything, it feels natural, as if they've been like this for years. After their talk that night, it was Jack who let her sleep on his couch, Jack who respected her boundaries without needing to ask what they were in the first place, Jack who initially smoothed things out with Pete (thankfully, his ribs were only bruised – she had only talked to him face to face once after that, however, and that was to say goodbye).

And Jack is the reason she's standing where she is now. Without him, Sam's not sure she would have been able to work up enough courage to take the first step and find someone to help her sort through the mess Ba'al made of her mind.

He turns and looks at her again, this time with an expression clearly asking whether or not she's ready to go in. The expression transforms into one of quiet confusion when he sees her meeting his gaze; she's smiling that small, shy, brilliant smile for which she is known and she's secretly pleased to see it throws him a little. Jack starts to look nervous as Sam takes a few steps, putting herself only a few inches away from him.

Sam quickly decides she likes being able to do this to him without worrying about some vague sense of guilt. Not that the reasons for that sense have disappeared. More like they seem quite insignificant compared to everything else in her life right now.

She knows he hasn't so much as laid a finger on her since that night; for such a tactile, kinesthetic person, she realizes it's a Herculean feat not to touch her shoulder in comfort or even simply brush her hand in passing. So Sam rationalizes what she does next as a sort of reward for him, as well as a test for her.

Reaching down, she takes his hand in hers. And this time, she doesn't flinch.

The image of Jack's crooked grin stays in her mind for the rest of the day.