Author's Note: My laptop broke down, and I lost all the work that I had done on this chapter. My dad had a guy retrieve it for me, thanks Dad! I know that it has been a while since my last update, but I'll try to turn them out faster.

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Jack awoke, his head pounding as if something had it in a vice.

'Awe man,' he thought, 'what happened this time?' He was pretty sure that he now had a huge lump on the back of his head; though from what, he wasn't quite certain. His side was also killing him; it had felt like the stitches had been reopened. The last pain medication he had taken was shortly before they had arrived at Kinsey's house, and although he normally didn't depend on pain meds, he really wished he had some with him right then. He lifted his arm so he could rub the back of his neck to try and get out some of the kinks that had settled when he had been unconscious, but his arm never made it there. He tugged again, trying to ascertain why it wasn't doing what he wanted it to do until he realized that his arms were handcuffed behind his back.

'Okay. That's not good,' he thought.

He opened his eyes to have a look at his surroundings, but was met with blackness. Wherever he was, it was very dark…and cramped he realized when he was suddenly bounced upwards, where he hit his head on something that felt (and sounded) a lot like metal. Slowly becoming more alert as he pulled out of the haziness of unconsciousness, he was aware that he was moving, or to be more accurate: being moved. He heard the soothing sound of wind rushing by at a great speed; he felt tiny bumps every now and then, and realized with sudden clarity that he was in the trunk of a car.

'Crap, that's sooooo not good,' he corrected himself. He felt like shit, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The trunk was too small for him to move around in so he couldn't disable the taillights, especially with his arms tied behind his back, literally, and this car didn't have the handy, glow-in-the-dark 'pull this tab if you've accidentally locked yourself in your trunk' cord. There was nothing he could do but wait. After all, he was a patient man…not!

His thoughts had wandered to what Mac was doing, and where he was. The last thing he had known was that Mac had somehow disappeared, and the terror he remembered he had felt once more washed through him. He was being taken away from any chance he had of finding and going after his brother. There was no way he was going to let that happen.

As in vain and useless as it was, he began kicking and screaming, letting out pent-up rage at their situation.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Jack felt the change of movement and immediately knew when the car had turned onto the rocky, gravel road. His emotional release, if you would call it that, had left him wiped, and was so glad when the car stopped that he was finally going to be able to face something other than the darkness and his own thoughts.

He heard the driver's car door slam shut and the sound of footsteps as they moved away from the vehicle. 'No, come back you coward, let me out!' It seemed like he would have to wait a little longer in the cramped space, which was the last thing he wanted to do.

Jack had long since lost the feeling in his legs, and was worried about being able to move when the time came. His knees weren't the best, and tended to freeze up if the weren't moved often enough, and being stuffed in a trunk for who knows how long certainly fit the bill. He was about to start kicking and screaming again like a three year old; whatever it took to get him out of that damned trunk. He would much rather be somewhere where he at least had a chance to either fight back or escape, but he heard muffled voices and two sets of footsteps now approaching.

He couldn't hear exactly what they were saying, but by the sound of it, he could tell that they were distinctly male.

The scraping of metal on metal from the key entering the lock gave Jack the cue that his captors were going to let him out.

Bright light flooded the enclosed area, but Jack stubbornly refused to close his eyes, instead blinking rapidly as they teared from the onslaught.

"Get out!" yelled a harsh voice, one that he didn't recognize. He tried to see who it was, but his eyes hadn't adjusted yet. He started to do what he was told, but as he'd predicted: his knees had frozen up; they just hadn't been the same since that mission.

Apparently, he hadn't been moving fast enough, because the new guy grabbed him roughly under the arms and dragged him out of the trunk with surprising strength.

"Ow!" that had hurt.

With his arms still cuffed behind him, there was no way to steady himself when he legs gave out and dropped him like a sack of potatoes to lie in an ungainly heap on the ground.

"Get up!" snarled the familiar weasel-like voice, dripping with disgust.

"Well Senator, and I use that title loosely, it would help if you uncuffed me."

Kinsey snorted and turned his back, heading toward a building that looked like a miniature warehouse. The other guy, which Jack had now nicknamed Dumbo, as he could now see the man's unusually large ears, kicked him and gestured for him to follow.

Jack got up, and forced his wobbly legs under him to carry him after Kinsey. To his annoyance, a lone pebble had imprinted itself on his cheek, and he tried the whole way to the entrance to shrug it off. He almost let out a triumphant little 'woohoo' when he succeeded.

Once inside, he turned around to face his captors. His lips were formed in what was to be a sarcastic retort when something was slammed into his gut. Hard. Normally it wouldn't have, but the force of the impact sent him to his knees, having connected partially with his still unhealed stab wound.

'This is starting to become a habit,' he thought.

While he was preoccupied with trying to start breathing again, Dumbo had dragged him across the floor, and recuffed him to a thick pipe running vertically along a wall.

Coming from the shadows like the coward he was, Kinsey walked up to Dumbo with a false air of authority.

"What are you doing? Get it over with now, kill him."

Dumbo looked over at the Senator, an expression on his face that unsettled Jack's stomach. They weren't even bothering to lower their voices. They wanted him to know exactly what they had in store for him.

"Senator Kinsey, you called me here on short notice expecting me to clean up after you," the voice was cold as ice, and upon hearing it, a shiver ran down both men's spines, "but you lower being that you are, you don't understand that I do only that which I feel like. And I don't believe that I feel like wasting such a useful specimen." He turned his head toward Jack and slowly began to walk over, "Oh no…I have something much better in mind than simple death," he was now only a foot in front of Jack, an arrogant expression that Jack had seen working for the SGC too often, plastered on his face, "much, much better…"

And his eyes glowed.

Jack's blood froze in his veins, and he could have sworn that his heart had missed a beat. He was certain that he had just been sentenced to a fate that he wouldn't have wished on his worst enemies, a fate that had happened to him in his most horrible nightmares where he had woken up screaming with the sheets damp from a cold sweat.

And for the first time in a long while, Colonel Jonathon J O'Neill USAF was frightened for himself.

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Happy Birthday Fiddlefishgal! And once again, thanks Dad! This one's for ya'll.