STARGATE SG-1: House Arrest
Summary: Sequel to "Operation Checkmate". It's Jack's turn to be in over his head…
Season: 8
Disclaimer: I don't own the stuff, yadda yadda.
Author's Note: Hope you guys aren't squeamish! This chapter gets a little graphic. Hope it's not too bad for you! Please R&R as always. Thanx. Enjoy!
WARNING: Strong Language!
House Arrest: Chapter 4 – Call My Bluff
Sam sat tied to the chair, still completely unable to free herself from the miles of duct tape wrapped around her wrists. In the quite morning light, she tried once more to move her restraints. They had already rubbed the skin on her wrists raw, but it was the only way she could get away from Simon. As she struggled, she felt the tape cut deeper into her wrists.
"Ah! Damnit!" she cursed, feeling more blood seep over her hand. This was not good, but she wasn't going to give up. Simon was off somewhere else in her house at that moment and she wasn't going to waste the time alone on feeling sorry for herself.
She could hear him pacing about in the spare room, above the living room. He was shouting at someone. Probably someone on the phone. Probably Jack, she thought…
"He's gone!" Jack said, pleased at how much this was going to get at Simon. "We've got him hidden somewhere you'll never find him again."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. "You're bluffing," Simon said simply. "You'd never put Sam on the line like that. I know you Jack. This is no time to be growing a back bone."
"What else was I gonna do? Just leave him there? How do I know you wouldn't just send someone else to kill him, then get rid of both me and Sam?"
Simon was furious, Jack could tell. He was gradually losing his leverage – even if that little point was putting Sam in more danger. If he totally lost hold of everything, there was no telling what he'd do to her. People with nothing to lose tended to be a little… unpredictable.
"Look, the point is," Jack continued. "If you want to get your hands on Frakes, your gonna have to –"
"Don't you dare make demands off me!" Simon snapped, cutting Jack off.
"OK," Jack said simply. "Good luck getting hold of Frakes on you own then."
He hung up and turned to look at the people gathered in his office. Daniel and Barrett looked completely aghast at what he had just done.
"What?" Jack asked innocently.
"Are you trying to get her killed!" Daniel asked, his eyes fixed hard on Jack.
"No," Jack replied. "I'm trying to get her back. Once he realises he can't get hold of Frakes, he might just be up to an exchange."
"An exchange?" Barrett queried. "So he hands Sam over and we just throw Frakes away to be killed?"
Jack rolled his eyes. Did he really have to be the only one with a brain here? (Though it did make a change!).
"No. We tell him our terms," he said. "We say we want her back, then we tell him where Frakes is."
"We take him down at the exchange," Frakes offered, getting the gist of what Jack was saying.
"Thank you!" Jack said, though at the moment, he wasn't happy having his ex-CO around one little bit.
Sam stopped fidgeting. From right above her, she heard an almighty crash. As if something had just been launched at the far wall. It was followed by a series of other deafening thuds as Simon rampaged upstairs.
"Shit!" she heard him curse. "God damnit! FUCK!"
She smiled slightly to herself, thinking of the number of ways Jack could have ticked him off like this. Her reverie was short lived, however, as she soon heard him bounding down the stairs.
Simon burst into the living room, his eyes blazing with fury. He roughly took hold of a clump of her hair and yanked her head upwards.
"Seems Jack's trying to make up some new rules to the game," he said, his voice full of hate.
"Good for him," Sam answered; provoking him further maybe wasn't a good idea, but she didn't care.
As she thought he might, he slapped her hard across the face. So hard, that the chair she was bound to nearly toppled over and she felt the slight metallic taste of blood in her mouth where she had bitten the inside of her own cheek.
Simon pulled her back round to look at him, holding her chin in a vice-like grip.
"If I waned back chat, I'd have bought a fucking parrot," he hissed.
Sam held her tongue.
Finally, he let go of her face. Sam moved her jaw for a moment, checking it wasn't broken. It wasn't. Yet.
She watched as he worked around his various monitors. The screen in front of her suddenly jumped into life. Instead of a view of Jack's living room, it showed several different views of the room she was sat in.
"That's what Jack can see," Simon explained moving to stand in front of her, the Tazer clutched in his hand. It pulsed menacingly, turning Sam pale remembering the pain of 240 volts of electricity pulsing through her knee.
She tried to draw back from him, but there was nowhere for her to go.
"This one's from Jack," he said.
The Tazer made contact with her elbow, sending its charge screaming through her arm. Sam felt as if it was being wrenched from her body one sinew at a time. Every nerve in her arm was screaming in agony, tensing and ripping muscle tissue at the same time. She could feel her skin burning and breaking the longer he held the device to her.
Finally, a scream escaped her lips as the pain became too much for her to bare in silence. Simon switched the Tazer off and Sam gasped for breath, working through the residual pain that was left in her arm.
"It'll take more than that to make him change his mind," she said in short breaths.
"You think so?" Simon said, looking over her. "Well that's just too bad for you."
"You'll have to kill me before you get anywhere near to what you want."
Simon crouched down in front of her and roughly took hold of her Tazer-damaged arm. Sam hissed in pain as his fingers worked their way into every burn.
"Let's hope, for your sake that he comes round before that, eh?" he said.
Sam couldn't speak. The pain he was provoking in her arm was too much to allow her brain to comprehend anything else. As his grip on her loosened, she just held back the urge to throw up.
Before long, he started off on her again. This time picking on her shoulder.
"I'm still not sure about this," Daniel informed Jack as they arrived at his house.
"Simon's got a live feed from Sam's house to my TV. If we want to see what's going on there, this is our best chance of doing it," he replied, sounding very militaristic, and not like himself at all.
"Well that's fine," Daniel reasoned. "But what if he's got your house under surveillance?"
Jack stopped dead in his tracks. He hadn't thought of that. He looked at Daniel for a moment, then turned his attention to the two men behind him.
"Hey, Barrett!" he called. "Get Frakes back to the base, will you?" he barked.
The two of them looked bewildered for a moment.
"Why?" Frakes enquired. "I thought we agreed I was going to help out."
"And I'm sure we'll be able to find something for you to do at the base," Jack answered back. "But if Carnall is watching here, how exactly does that keep you hidden?"
Before Frakes could say anything else, Barrett turned him around and almost forced him back into the car.
Jack, Daniel and Teal'c continued into the house.
"What exactly do you plan to do here, O'Neill?" Teal'c asked once he was inside.
"Well, I think maybe we should take a look for any hidden cameras. Then we need to keep an eye on what's going on at Sam's."
He stepped into the living room after Daniel and nearly fell over him when he stopped dead in the middle of the floor.
Jack followed his friend's eye line to the TV set.
"I didn't touch anything," Daniel said, sounding distant. "It came on by itself."
Jack moved around him and sank onto the couch, seeing the images of Sam writhing in agony from the electricity being pumped into her right shoulder. He wanted to look away, but couldn't. This was meant for him. It should have been him sat in that chair. Not her.
Suddenly the set flicked off and Jack jumped back to reality.
"What you do that for!" Jack snapped at Teal'c, who was stood behind him with the remote.
"We can not help her by simply watching her suffer," he said. "We have things to do here."
Without another word, Teal'c turned and left the room, leaving Jack and Daniel staring at the blank screen.
"He's watching us in here," Daniel said. "He must have seen us coming in and set the TV off."
Jack – still unable to think entirely rationally – nodded. "Then I guess we start in here," he said standing up.
He looked a lot more composed than he felt.
Frakes walked down the long, concrete corridors of the SGC, fascinated that he was actually here at all. He had heard many stories of this place over the years. But none of them compared to actually being there. Not after what they had worked towards for so long.
It didn't bother him that he wasn't able to, at this point, keep an eye on how Jack was coping with Carter's abduction. He had a fair idea of what the scene would look like and it made him laugh at the irony of it all. Who would have thought Jack O'Neill would fall for a scientist! He wondered if the feelings were mutual. Though given her efforts to keep him alive over the last few weeks, he rather suspected they were.
Well, that suited Frakes just fine. It made his job a hell of a lot easier.
The only problem he could see at that moment was that all these damned halls looked the same. He felt like he was going round in circles. How hard was it to find Archives in a place like this!
"General Frakes?" a voice behind him caught his attention.
Frakes turned around to see Airman Walter Harriman stood behind him.
"Sir, can I help you at all?" he asked, looking perplexed.
Frakes glanced around himself wondering what was so wrong with his current location.
"I'm looking for your Archives," he said plainly.
Walter looked at him with an eye of suspicion. "They're on level 14. May I ask why you're looking for them?"
Frakes smiled. "It's something for General O'Neill," he replied cryptically, before turning and heading to the nearest elevator.
Walter watched him leave and couldn't help feeling that he had just given something vital away. There was something about the General that just didn't sit right.
On level 14, Frakes all but locked himself in the room with the thousands of files detailing past activity and experiments that had been conducted on the base.
"Right," he muttered to himself, scanning along for files dated 1994 and after. "Let's see how you've been getting on."
If he was going to be stuck in this town against his will, he was at least going to make use of the time.
Simon had kept his punishment up well into the small hours of the next morning, before Sam passed out from pain and sheer exhaustion. By that point, there was barely an inch of skin on her arms that wasn't bruised or burnt. But she still managed to escape it all into the wonder of unconsciousness.
There, her mind protected itself in the only way it knew how. It reached out through every thought and memory to find something she could cling to for hope. It found two things.
The first was her mother, and the way she had cradled Sam and rocked her back to sleep after a nightmare. It had been a long time since she had been afraid of the dark. At the moment, it was the days that she feared. Night brought her release. Brought her to her mother's welcoming, comforting arms. And she was a child again.
The second was Jack. She dreamed of him saving her. Setting her free from the nightmare she was in.
She dreamed of him smiling at her. She dreamed of him loving her. Kissing away all the hurt in her life. She dreamed of waking in his arms and kissing him good morning.
She dreamed of him begging for her forgiveness for what was happening. And of her smiling at him and telling him it wasn't his fault. She dreamed of his embrace shielding her from the world.
She dreamed of his eyes watching over her as she made her way through her ordeal. She dreamed of him telling her it would be alright. That he would be with her till it was over. That he would come for her. That he would protect her. Always that he would protect her. He was her knight in shining armour (or camouflage Army Fatigues at least).
'Hold on,' he told her.
And she intended to. It was all she knew how to do, but hearing it from him made her more determined. Simon was going to pay for what he was doing to her. He was going to make sure of that!
In the world of her subconscious, morning never came and she could stay in this reverie for ever. But reality always ripped through her dreams and threw her back into daylight. Back to Simon.
"Rise and shine, sleepy head," Simon cooed.
Sam sluggishly opened her eyes, but was still too exhausted to actually stay awake. Her eyes quickly shut again.
Simon scowled slightly and threw the ice-cold bucket of water he was holding at her. Its contents washed over her, startling her back to consciousness. Her lungs contracted in shock, aggravating her wound. But she didn't have enough time to bring her mind back from its disoriented state. Simon swung the empty bucket around and slammed it into the side of her head.
It dazed her but didn't knock her out fully, though she wished it had.
"Sleep well?" Simon asked with no sympathy in his voice what so ever.
Sam pulled her dwindling strength together and was able to hold back a wave of tears that threatened to give her away for the broken wreck he had reduced her to. She couldn't give him that satisfaction.
Author's Note: I think that's the worst of the torture over (I'll warn you if there's more graphic stuff to come!). Please review! Thanx.