For notes, warnings and disclaimers see chapter 1

Chapter 7: Vying for Possession
(Jack's POV)

I'm still wondering what the heck am I supposed to do to reach Carter here. I guess I can understand why she didn't say anything and why she is still so reluctant to talk about any of this but at the same time I freely admit that I am more than a little tired of this whole situation. I just want to have all this shit out in the open so that we can deal with it once and for all because the truth is that right now I feel like whenever we start making some progress we just get dumped on again and that is frustrating the hell out of me. I want my team back together the way it used to be... or rather the way I thought it was. That is the part I can't quite wrap my head around, the fact that it was all a lie.

Carter's been keeping secrets almost from the beginning and that is something I'm still having a hard time trying to come to terms with... in fact, if it had been up to her, she would still be keeping those secrets and that bothers me. She never intended for us to find out about any of this, she never chose to trust us, and that's the most disturbing part... okay, so maybe not the most disturbing one, there seems to be quite a bit of competition for that particular 'honor'.

I guess the question now is how do we move forward, how do we rebuild the trust... or build it in the first place.

One thing I know for sure is that SG-1 is the finest command I've ever had, even if our merry little gang of snake-killers is more than a little odd. My team is half civilian, for crying out loud, and --as if that weren't enough-- half of it is made of geeks and scientists. Heck, the one I have the most in common with in terms of background is literally an alien and yet somehow it all works out... except when it doesn't.

The bottom line is that I trust my team to watch my six and I thought they trusted me to do the same. I guess that's why this whole mess has hit me so hard... that and the fact that --no matter what they say-- this happened on my watch. When Carter said that maybe we should turn back while we were ahead I should have trusted her gut rather than allow myself to be led by Daniel's curiosity... especially because I already knew how likely he was to turn his back on a threat because something else had caught his eye. Daniel is not military and there are certain things I can't honestly expect him to understand but I have been doing this long enough to know that gambling with my team's safety --especially when there is a choice-- is never the thing to do... or at least that is something I should have learned a long time ago.

Of course, the problem is that while I have no choice but to file this whole mess under 'lessons learned' and try to move on, it is not quite that simple. Right now my most pressing concern is to figure out a way for us to deal with the fallout from this one... or rather to figure out a way to help Carter deal with it. I understand why she just wants to forget, in fact that is something I can certainly relate to. Unfortunately the fact that I can relate to her desire to forget also means that I am all too aware of just how well that approach doesn't work.

The bottom line is that in this whole mess Carter got a really raw deal. She went through hell, then she had no choice but to conceal what had happened to her --or so she thought-- and even now there's no real way for her to get the support she needs and that bothers me. I know Daniel and Janet are doing their best to help her but while I have a lot of faith in both of them, sometimes I wonder if their best is going to be enough this time around... especially after what I read in the general's office.

That is something I suspect will be feeding my nightmares for a very long time to come and if I have a problem with it I don't even want to try to imagine what Carter has been going through these past few months. As far as I was concerned what I had been told before today had been bad enough but obviously it had only scratched the surface... and that brings me back to what still amounts to a pretty long list of unanswered questions that are likely to remain just that.

The fact is that while I'm aware that what I know about what happened on Simarka is vague at best and that is a problem, it is not a problem I can ever hope to overcome. In fact there's no way I can come even close. There's no way I can ask for any kind of details and I know it, but at the same time without those details I won't know what I'm up against and --whether I like it or not-- that gap is likely to remain a threat, something that can come back to haunt us with no warning whatsoever, for a very long time. Unfortunately there is virtually nothing I can do to change that so I'm just going to have to deal. I need to know that Carter is going to be okay and --even though I haven't seen anything to suggest that she won't-- I'm still not sure of just what it would take to convince me of that fact.

I know that is my problem --not hers-- but, as I told Carter a couple of minutes ago, we are supposed to be a team, so I guess that --in a twisted kind of way-- that makes it our problem.