A/N: Sorry for the long wait. Once again, thank you to Linzi for being such a wonderful and supportive beta.

Chapter 3

John awoke to find himself in a small cell not unlike the interrogation room. This cell was smaller and the cold grey stone walls seemed to press in on him, suffocating him. Unlike the interrogation chamber, this room had one window; a narrow, horizontal slit barely a hand span in diameter, set high up in the wall. There were no lights, but the soft beam of sunshine invading the gloomy room cast enough light to see by. He looked around, taking note of his new accommodations.

The little chamber had a high roof, like the other room, but John estimated it was barely eight foot in either direction. The floor was covered in some sort of dried long rushes, grotty and smelling of mildew in the cold, damp air. Two buckets stood in one corner, and by lifting himself up onto one elbow he could see that one was empty, and the other contained water with a few bits of the straw floating forlornly on the top. The wall opposite the window held a large, rusted iron door; a huge slab of thick steel with large hinges anchoring it to the stone. He looked at it with a cold feeling of defeat in the pit of his stomach.

Pushing the bleak feelings to the back of his mind, John rose shakily to his feet and tried to jump high enough to see out of the small window. The movement sent pain rocketing through him, and he bolted to the corner and emptied his stomach in the small slops bucket. He looked back at the embrasure. The clear azure sky seemed to taunt him, re-enforce his captivity. He turned his back on it.

He did a quick inventory on himself. His entire body ached and he felt, well, he felt like he'd been electrocuted. His limbs felt weak and heavy and his chest burned and stung painfully. His wrists and ankles had scabbed over from where the restraints had sliced into them when he'd struggled; he must have been out for a few hours for them to dry and begin to heal. Whether he'd been unconscious that long from the drug or from exhaustion was anyone's guess.

His head was throbbing, fit to explode. He walked over to the two buckets and, trying to ignore the vomit in the slop bucket, he scooped some water out of the second bucket and drank some of the cool, gritty liquid. He took off the remnants of his cut shirt and dipped a corner into the water and gently wiped away the dried blood. He shivered in the chilly temperature and put his jacket back on his bare torso. As he did, he noticed the four burn marks where the electrodes had been attached. No wonder his chest hurt so much. He dabbed them softly with the damp shirt, hissing through gritted teeth as he took what small measure was available to him to clean the wounds and stave off infection. He walked back over to the window and sat with his back against the wall, facing the door. He drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, hunching into his jacket. Elizabeth and his team would know what had happened by now, and would be coming for him soon. Composing himself, eyes never leaving the door, John sat back and waited.

oOo

The passage of several hours saw John impatiently striding back and forth in the small cell, avoiding the walls by sense of their looming presence in the pitch black. It had been dark for several hours. His hopes of jumping the guard that delivered his food had dwindled slowly as the hours passed and the hollow sense of emptiness in his stomach increased. He gauged that it must be close to midnight, and the final lingering hopes of the cell door opening finally dissipated. He turned sharply at the wall and took three steps across the limited enclosure before stopping at the next wall. He leaned his forehead against the greasy stone and closed his eyes against the feelings of helplessness. His head snapped up and his eyes flew open, blazing in sudden anger. He leapt over to the door and slammed his fist against the heavy iron plate.

"Hey!" He slammed his fist into the door again, not feeling the pain of the impact. "Come on!" John strode back to the wall and kicked it savagely before turning and sliding down it, head in his hands.

oOo

John regretfully awoke out of a fitful slumber. He rolled over on the rotting straw and looked up at the sliver of sky outside the window. Heavy, dark grey clouds released their weighty burdens, and John tried not to dwell on the impression that the sky was weeping. He slowly rose and stood under the window, relishing the cold, damp breeze that smelt of rain and fresh air and gave him momentary respite from the stench of the waste bucket and his own rank, stale sweat.

His second night in the prison cell had been much worse than the first. For some reason, John found the days were much more tolerable. The illusion of some scant measure of security offered by daylight allowed him to sleep in fits and starts. At the very least it offered him light, allowed him to see his surroundings and gave him the visual impetus to distract his mind somewhat.

Nights; those were bad. The dense blackness in his cell seemed to have a weight that pressed down on him. Scuttling sounds and the chittering of unseen nocturnal creatures made him curl up uneasily. Distant sounds of the living carried further in the still night air, and left him aching with loneliness and yearning to hear a friendly voice.

The darkness before sleep had always been an uncomfortable time for him when, lying warm under the heavy blankets, his mind would wander into areas that he wouldn't allow it to go during the day. Eventually the soft seduction of sleep would allow him to leave those thoughts behind him.

Here, denied of sleep by restlessness borne of captivity and his fitful dozes during the day, those unwelcome thoughts were inescapable. His mind would drift over experiences that were locked and barred within his memory during the daylight hours. The dark stone cell would trigger a memory of the Wraith Kolya had allowed to feed on him, a memory made all the more tangible by the incessant pain from the burns on his chest.

Hunger would stab at him, and his mind would be taken back to the desert, crouched in the meagre cover offered by a small scattering of rocks as his stomach growled and Holland quipped that if he flew all this way to find him, he could at least have gone through a MacDonald's drive through on the way past. That memory, like any reminder of that time, would lead inevitably to the vivid, gut wrenching memory of holding Holland's body in his arms, feeling the sticky warmth of blood and worse soak into his fatigues as he cradled the ruin of his friend's head against his chest and listened to the harsh, angry voices of the approaching Taliban soldiers.

With effort, John forcibly thrust the images into the small recesses at the back of his mind. He was experienced enough to know that the isolation and starvation were another form of torture, equally as vicious as and possibly more dangerous than the electrocution had been. His body was weakened by the interrogation, and two days confined in a small space with no food was sapping his strength and slowly eroding his willpower. And as his physical strength waned, fear and stress attacked his mind, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to his own demons. He stood silently watching the rain falling, and told himself that the fine spray blown in through the narrow embrasure was accountable for the wetness he felt on his face.