Author's Note: Okay, everyone! Once I again I have a new thing for you all to look at (although it was brought up in the yahoo group, but it could have been missed in passing) So if you have time, go to my profile and check it out.

OOOOOOOOOOO

"Who would we tell?" Sam asked him gently.

"Shawn. Hayden. The Commandant of the-"

"We won't tell anyone, Ian," Sam interrupted, resting her hand on his cheek.

He looked over at her, and swallowed hard, wiping his nose with the back of hand. Then he looked back down at the table.

"I... um... I dream about those invisible guys..."

"The invisible guys?" Sam asked, looking over at Jack, who knew who he was talking about immediately.

"The ones that came to the academy," Jack said, making it more of a statement than a question, but Ian nodded anyways.

"Yeah."

"What are they doing, Ian?"

"Chasing me..." his voice was a whisper, and his face – what they could see of it – was still dreadfully pale. "Me and Shawn... they're chasing us, and we never get away..." He looked up at Jack, and O'Neill saw the fear there in his eyes. "You never get there in time in my dreams."

"Then your dreams are wrong, Ian," Jack told him. "I did get there. We got there. Although you were doing fairly well, you know – even before we showed up."

Ian shook his head.

"We were going to die, Jack... and you know it. I never would have known who it was, or why they were after us, or the reason – I know you told me it was coincidence, but I know that was a lie... they were there for a reason, and they weren't simple thieves who had stolen high tech technology..."

Which had been the cover story Jack had given Ian and River. Shawn was told the truth as soon as Jack had separated him from his roommates, but there hadn't been any reason at all to tell the other two the truth – and far more reasons to lie to them. He'd explained the invisibility to them saying it was a new military project that had been stolen, and he'd thought they'd accepted it – but obviously Ian, at least, had decided that it wasn't the truth. He wondered if River had been thinking about it, too. And caught in the lie, Jack wasn't sure what to say.

"So you dream about them?" Sam asked, pulling Ian's attention away from Jack.

He nodded, looking back down at his hands, and looking for all the world as if he was ashamed of this fact.

"How long have you been having these nightmares?"

"They started while I was in the infirmary – the night after the... attack. It wasn't bad, at first... I was able to focus more on the part where I knew what they looked like – when they were in the room and I came up behind them." He took a shuddering breath, and shrugged. "Later on, it switched to being chased, and it got worse from there."

"Why didn't you say something, Ian?" Sam asked, reaching out and resting her hand on the back of his neck. Of course it got worse. The boy was intelligent, and probably had a fine imagination - as most intelligent people did. Which would have added to his nightmares considerably.

"To who?"

Good point. Who was he going to tell? It was up to the academy advisors to make sure that their students weren't having any troubles, and since she knew how good he was at putting up a front – and was probably even better at it at school – there was undoubtedly no sign of the nightmares by day. And no way he'd turn to Shawn or River – since those two were the first ones he'd told them they couldn't tell – which meant they were the last ones he wanted to know.

"You fought back against them, Ian," Jack told him. "You know you saved Shawn's life by hitting that one with the tray..."

"I didn't save him, Jack. I prolonged the inevitable. You saved him. But if you hadn't shown up, it-"

"I showed up – and you did save him. You saved yourself and my son from them. I simply finished them off." With a lot of help from Teal'c and the dogs.

"Would it help if you knew what they really were?" Sam asked. She'd caught the tremor in his voice when he'd told Jack that part, and had noticed it was the only time he'd managed to make a long statement without looking away – which showed how much of a telling point that was to him. "And why they were there?"

Jack looked at Sam over Ian's shoulder. She wasn't going to tell – was she? Sam didn't catch his eye, though. She was looking at Ian, who wasn't looking at either of them.

Ian sniffed, and shook his head.

"They can't be real," he said, finally. "I looked up everything I could on any kind of invisibility technology – even what I could find in the theoretical department. We're no where near capable of making things invisible... We're not even close to the theory."

"What if we are?" Jack asked.

Ian looked at him.

"Tell me the theory of making something invisible, Jack. Besides the age old bending the light spectrums around an object to convince the eye it isn't seeing what's really there theory – because I know that one isn't possible."

"You're that certain?" Sam asked.

"I'm positive."

Well, he was right. They weren't anywhere near that advanced. Of course, the Ashrak – and several other races out there were – but Ian didn't know about them. He knew about Thor, but from what Shawn had told Jack and Sam, Ian had pretty much decided that Thor was some kind of automaton experiment that the government was working on – he wasn't real, just designed to look like an alien. Of course, there was-

"What about technology to beam people around to different places?" Jack asked, interrupting Sam's train of thought. "We obviously have that – you've had it used on yourself – that's real enough."

"I haven't worked it out yet," Ian admitted. Of course, it hadn't even been a week since the whole Kinsey affair, so he hadn't had a lot of time to work on it – he was a genius, but he wasn't that good. "Do we have it?"

"No." Sam told him. "We don't. Someone else does."

"Sam..." Jack's voice was low and almost a warning.

She turned to him, taking her eyes off Ian.

"You can't tell-"

"It's our fault that he's having these nightmares, Jack," she said. "He's suffering because you couldn't tell him the truth when the Ashrak came after Shawn, and I'm not going to let it continue..."

"General Hammond-"

"Is about to be woken up," she said, standing up and heading for the phone. "He's an Air Force officer – and I know that you have plans for him that are going to include him learning certain hidden truths – so he might as well find out early." And if it stopped the nightmares, well, that was the whole idea, right?

She waited for him to argue, but Jack knew she was right about everything she was saying, so he just nodded.

She picked up the phone and hit the speed dial button.