Part III

Before he tackled Carter, Jack needed to fortify himself with a good meal. That not being a practical option while he was confined to the mountain, he settled for a commissary meal. At least it narrowly beat infirmary slop or MREs.

Unfortunately, the commissary meant people. And while at least that gave his unwanted SF prom date half a chance at blending in with the crowd, it seemed that was too little far too late. Everyone was staring, and he was ninety-eight percent sure it wasn't just his own self-consciousness.

Of course, everyone had been staring pretty much non-stop since the Baal thing, and before that there had been a few nervous looks on the tail of his semi-legendary bawling out of several wannabe Daniel replacements.

Deserved bawling out. Jack stood by his original opinion on working with scientists. He didn't know how he'd managed to luck out twice on the trot when SG-1 was formed, but clearly he was still paying for it karmically.

But this wasn't that kind of staring. This was... actually, he had no idea what the hell this was. This wasn't 'Colonel O'Neill's going to flip out and gun us all down any moment' staring. It wasn't even the much more dreaded pity staring. This was 'back from the dead' level staring.

What the hell had happened to him, and how publicly?

The room didn't quite drop to silence when he walked in, but only because some jerk scientist was too busy haranguing the staff about lemon chicken to notice the general hush. Just about every face that Jack recognised was looking at his like it had just crawled out of the sarcophagus. It was enough to make a boy self-conscious. He surreptitiously scraped a thumb over his jaw as he joined the line, just to make sure the nurses hadn't gotten creative with his facial hair while he was at their mercy.

The crowd had the sense to recover from their fumbled conversations, but Jack could still feel the eyes on his back. He was freshly and keenly aware of the absence of Teal'c. There was nothing quite like six foot four of solid Jaffa to encourage people to develop a whole new attitude to privacy.

Teal'c had been shadowing - or rather, overshadowing - Jack around the base ever since he'd returned from his dramatically fubared stay with the Tok'ra. So why wasn't he around now? Carter had said he'd gone off-world, but she hadn't said why. Some threat to Rya'c or Bra'tac? If so, Jack owed her an ear-bashing for hanging around at his bedside instead of going with Teal'c.

Not that he would actually deliver it. Carter had enough guilt to be going on with, and she clearly hadn't taken this latest setback well. He just didn't like the thought of Teal'c being out there without proper backup, dammit. Contrary to his own belief, Teal'c was only ninety-nine percent invincible. And as Daniel had proved, that one percent always caught up with you in the end.

Jack didn't know where Jonas had gotten to, either, but that, he cared less about. If someone had discreetly but firmly discouraged him from turning up at Jack's bedside with an inane smile and effusive well-wishes, then Jack figured he owed them a fruit basket. He could tolerate Quinn's demeanour on a mission, but socialising with someone who was that damn happy about everything was exhausting.

And he was already pretty exhausted. Tiredness tugged, a reminder that he wasn't yet fully recovered from whatever had put him in the infirmary, and the pressure of all the unwanted attention made him want to crawl off into a dark corner somewhere. Being himself, of course, he therefore sat down in the middle of the commissary and ate his meal with casual indifference.

Sometimes he suspected that the only reason he'd survived this long was masochistic stubbornness.

That was why, when he rose and unhurriedly left, he didn't head back to the bed that was beckoning, but instead turned toward Carter's lab. It was guaranteed that she'd be there. In times of angst and distress, Carter took things apart.

Also in times of anger, times of excitement, times of boredom, and times of mellowed out joy at the nature of the universe. Any excuse, she'd be in there. Sometimes Jack envied the way she and D- she could just bury herself in work. God knew there was nothing in his paperwork he could ever find fascinating enough to blot the bad times out.

Not that Carter seemed to be having much success with that this time. She was oblivious to his presence as he leaned against the doorframe and watched for a while, but it clearly wasn't down to an excess of concentration. Even he could see she was fumbling things and trying to fit pieces in back-to-front.

She jumped far more than usual when she finally spotted him. "Sir!" She looked like she couldn't quite decide whether to smile or look alarmed, and settled for a wavery expression in between. "I didn't realise you were out of the infirmary."

"Oh, yes." He bounced on his toes. "Out and..." Jack wasn't sure he liked where this sentence was heading, and yet couldn't quite divert it to any better course, "-proud." He tilted his chin up, daring Carter to comment.

She smiled more genuinely, and ducked her head behind her computer screen. "It's good to have you back, sir."

He hated to break up a nice moment, but it was too good an opportunity to catch her off guard. "Exactly how long have I been gone?" he drawled.

She flinched a little, but got the game face up fast. "Sir..."

Carter had many different intonations of his title. This one meant that she wasn't going to tell him squat, but felt guilty about it.

Jack stepped inside the lab and closed the door. "Carter, I'll lay this out. I have no idea how I ended up in that infirmary bed. They've got me handcuffed to a shrink who's spouting Kinsey's latest crap about a suicide attempt, and somehow even good old George is buying it. So I need your help here, Carter. What. Happened?" By the end of the demand he'd graduated to pacing and wild arm flailing.

Carter stood her ground, though she paled considerably. "I'm sorry, sir, I can't tell you," she said miserably.

"This is Andrews' orders, isn't it?" He was sure that the shrink was up to his neck in whatever plot was going on. "Dammit, Carter. Throw me a bone here, because this isn't adding up. I'm supposed to have been so badly injured, and there's not a scratch on me?" He spread his hands, and tried not to let on about the split-second, unexpected flashback to Baal's sarcophagus. "What exactly am I supposed to have done?"

Carter wouldn't meet his eyes. "I used the Goa'uld healing device," she admitted. "There was no time, sir, Janet couldn't-" She broke off abruptly, looking like she was about to cry.

Well... hell.

That was an unpleasantly plausible explanation, but Jack still fought against it. He lowered his eyebrows, pressing for the flaw in the story. "I thought you couldn't use it? When Daniel-"

He stopped, already sorry that he'd gone there. Carter looked like she'd been slapped.

"Sir..." she said despairingly, and this time it was the confusing one, the one that he usually interpreted as 'please get out so I can have this breakdown in private' but might in fact mean the exact opposite.

He never knew what to do with an emotional Carter. The instincts he had were all wrong.

Jack raised his hands and physically backed off, signalling his apology without actually having to address the subject. But he held her gaze sincerely. "Carter... this isn't real," he said, as much a promise as a refutation. He willed her to believe him.

She gave him a fragile smile that creased her teary eyes. "I just want you to be okay, sir," she said softly.

And he respected her too much to give a facile promise about that, so he just smiled wryly in return and left.

The sarcophagus opens onto-

Sunshine.

No. God, not-

The old house.

No.

Sara. Hugging. Happy. He never forgets that. That big, bright blaze of happy, the kind that gets you right in the stomach, before-

No.

There's no gunshot this time, but he's in the house, and this isn't how it happened in real life because he doesn't know how this happened in real life, there's no memory between the shot and seeing Charlie, no journey.

But this time he's travelling down the hall, he's almost at the door, and he knows that when he opens it he'll see-

Daniel. Stepping out in front of him, blocking the way. Face as sad and still as it's never been.

There's no gratitude, only anger. Because what's behind that door doesn't change, doesn't go away if you don't open it, and he has no right, no right.

"You weren't here!" And Jack's itching to swing, but you can't hurt empty space.

Empty space full of sad blue. "Neither were you," Daniel says, and pushes him back by the shoulders.

The world falls away.

Jack awoke sweating and trembling. It took him long, disoriented moments to work out where he was. In the field, he could have been dead.

He sat up and ran his hands over his face. "Crap," he said out loud, more for the reassurance of speech than out of any feeling it would be adequate.

Nightmares were nothing new. Usually, though, they had the decency to stay in their own separate nightmare pockets and not go blending together on him.

The trick with bad memories, Jack had found, was to seal each one in its own individual box, and never, ever step back and take inventory of how many boxes you had. Nobody could cope with remembering dying a dozen deaths. But you could handle it if you only remembered them one at a time.

He had a horrible feeling his boxes were on the verge of overflowing.

His SF minder was going to think he had some kind of an obsessive thing for showering, but it was that or show up at the infirmary stinking of sweat and fear. He barely had time to towel his hair before dashing down to make his 0900 appointment.

Not that the Doc appreciated it. She ran through yet another neuro check - penlight, naturally, included - with a curtness that passed through professionally brisk and made its way out into angry. And Jack, who was still shaken enough that the idea his brain might have leaked out his ears in the night didn't quite seem entirely ludicrous, wasn't even misbehaving.

"You pissed at me, Doc?" he asked quietly. He had to angle his head low to have a chance at meeting her eyes.

She didn't let him, but took a sharp sigh to compose herself before raising her head.

"I'm not annoyed with you, Colonel," she said, and he guessed he believed that. Fraiser was a straight shooter, and if she had a beef, she'd tell him. Loudly and at length. "Just at the situation."

She wouldn't elaborate on that, and he knew that it was pointless trying to make her.

The commissary was less crowded at breakfast, because some of the people in this mountain actually had lives, and those that didn't snatched their food at the asscrack of dawn instead of the lazy side of 0900. There were only a couple of airmen around beside his ever-present hand-holder, and while he could feel their stares they had the sense to look away if he glanced their way. He dared to think he might make it through his oatmeal in peace.

Apparently, the day he learned that lesson about tempting fate was not going to be today.

An empty commissary meant a wide open field for that asshole Andrews to slime up and give him an over-bright smile. "Colonel. Good to see you up and looking so much better."

Jack glowered over his spoonful of oatmeal. "It's funny that you say that, because all of a sudden, my stomach just turned over."

He just kept right on smiling. "I've made you an appointment for eleven o'clock. I'm looking forward to having a chance to talk with you." He dropped a card on the tabletop, leaving Jack with a choice of put up and shut up or start an argument in front of some very interested witnesses. At least one of whom was likely to report his lack of cooperation back to Hammond.

Yay, fun.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," he said, and smiled nastily.

The real reason he hated shrinks was that they were impervious to sarcasm. "Colonel," Andrews said with a polite nod, and withdrew.

Jack used his card to scrape up a few stray blobs of oatmeal from the tabletop.

He couldn't skip out after giving his word to Hammond, but at least he could arrange to be fashionably late. Unfortunately, his bodyguard had other ideas. At five minutes shy of zero hour, he got a knock from a nervous young airman.

"Uh, sir? I thought I should remind you that you have to see Doctor Andrews at 1100 hours, sir."

"Oh, you did, did you?" Jack showed his teeth, but didn't get much satisfaction from the resultant cower.

He thought about sending Hammond an email to request he be excused psychiatric assessment on the grounds that it made him depressed, but he had a feeling that might just backfire.

He guessed it was shrinky time.

Andrews had installed himself in an office in the butt-end of nowhere, which Jack liked to assume was thanks to Hammond's personal opinion of the man, but was probably due to discretion. Like the entire mountain wasn't already aware that he'd been sent down here. He trusted Hammond's word that the official records would uphold his honour, but the rumour mill obeyed its own laws.

Still, it wasn't like people thinking he was nuts was hot news.

"What, no couch?" Jack said as he walked in. Andrews gave him a thin smile like he was pretending to have a sense of humour. He had his fingertips pressed together, but that lost its effect from other people once you'd seen Teal'c do it.

"Colonel," he said simply. "I appreciate that you don't want to be here. And I hope you're right, and that you're healthy enough that this is a mere formality. But I can't help feeling that you're in denial about the severity of your situation."

Jack snagged a chair, not because he wanted to stay but because making him stand up in front of a desk was only the General's prerogative. "There is no situation. This is a setup. I know it and you know it."

Andrews sat back in his chair, like Jack had somehow given away the first point of the game. "But how can you possibly know that, Colonel, when you yourself don't remember what happened?"

He narrowed his eyes in disbelief. "I know! I know myself. I know what I'm capable of." He thought of gunshots and nuclear weapons, and willed himself not to blink.

Jack knew that he was capable of taking his own life - just as he knew, with gut deep certainty, that he hadn't tried to do it. The difficult part was going to be proving that truth without ever stating the reasoning behind it.

Because, "I wouldn't do that to Carter right now," probably wasn't going to get him signed off on a one way ticket to mental healthsville.

"Perhaps." Andrews had a sympathetic gloss to his eye that made Jack want to get up and punch him. "But Colonel, we're all capable of doing things that seem out of character for us at extremes of stress and emotion. And nobody could argue that the things you've been through are anything less than extreme."

And there Jack was stuck for a response, because if he tried to be flip about Baal this soon, he wasn't going to land the dismount.

When in doubt, attack. "You know, I'm hearing a lot of talk about what I supposedly did, but I've yet to see a single scrap of proof that anything happened at all. So far as I know I could have slipped in the shower."

Andrews sighed heavily, and reached for a laptop that was sat at the edge of the desk facing away from them. "Colonel. I want you to know that showing you this is against my better judgement. But I don't think we're going to move forward until you break past this block of denial."

He started something going with the keyboard, then turned the screen to face Jack. Jack found himself looking at black and white security footage. Soundless, as most of the cameras were in non-vital locations.

This one was about as non-vital as they got: his own office. Not the sort of place that needed to be bugged to pick up scintillating conversation, since he completed all his paperwork in the commissary unless he was avoiding people.

He'd been working in his office quite a lot lately.

He watched his CCTV self walk into the room. He was no expert at reading his own body language, but his instincts started tingling right away. There was a directness of purpose to the way the O'Neill in the video moved. When he entered the paperwork zone, procrastination was usually his middle name.

He watched himself move directly to the desk, sit down, and immediately pull out the drawer. It was obvious just from the angle of his arm what he was reaching in for.

There was no hesitation in this, either. No deep deliberation, no beat of regret or uncertainty. A decision already made.

Gun out. Barrel to the temple.

Fire.

Jack couldn't tell if the feed cut out a microsecond too late, or the aftermath he thought he'd seen was just vivid imagination.

He licked dry lips.

"Good fake," he attempted to say, and found that his voice was almost entirely gone.