AN Hi guys. I struggled to figure out how to get into this chapter so I've kinda been putting it off. Sorry. Anyway it's been nagging in the back of my mind for a bit I figured I'd see how it turned out. Hope it works. Anyway on with the story...

Again I must admit that the ideas for the institute belong to Eoin Colfer and Viking books and MGM owns anything to do with Stargate.

Chapter 7 - Musings

Three weeks later...

Jack woke early in the morning, before the alarms. He rolled over; looking out of the end of his pipe so he could see all members of his team. He felt the guilt settle into his stomach as he usually did. Despite the fact that Teal'c could easily break a man in half and Carter was a force to be reckoned with when she chose to be and Daniel...well anyway, he always felt that it was his job to keep them from harm. Now watching the three sleeping, he felt the failure weighing on him.

They had been in the institute three weeks and it was starting to show. Daniel and Carter were both pale. Carter had lost weight and recently he hadn't been able to look her in the eye. She always looked at him with such trust and it broke his heart because he still couldn't see a way to get them out of here, so he simply avoided looking.

They had scouted the hall and watched the corridors as they were marshaled from place to place. Everywhere seemed to be airtight. Escaping at night was a no go thanks to the electric tiles covering the walls and floors. They were watched in the bathrooms, guards placed outside the steel shower stalls. Jack was sure his skin must be blue from the water by now. Carter reported the womens bathrooms to be no better.

He stretched, letting out a groan as the skin on his arms complained at the movement. Looking at his skin in the light outside his tube, he grimaced. Both his arms were red raw in various patches. Yesterday they had been testing deodorants. His skin had been burnt dry by one particularly nasty brand sprayed onto one part of his arm and sectioned off with black tape. His knee was giving him hell from the ten kilometers he had run on the treadmill.

Daniel was not trained for prolonged exercise – on the walk from the labs back to the sleeping hall, Teal'c and Jack had held most of the exhausted man's weight. The marshals didn't care as long as nobody spoke and nobody collapsed. Jack couldn't help but feel nervous that this had happened more and more recently. Now he could hear Daniel's snores from the pipe beside his.

Looking across the gap he could see the top of Teal'c head and Carters adorable bed head. He couldn't help grinning. He loved when her hair grew too long to be within regulations. It had a habit of curling or flicking out in odd places, giving her a permanently ruffled look. His eyes moved to her sleeping face and he felt the guilt returning full tilt. She had bags under her eyes and her face was pale and tense, even in sleep. All in all, she did not look healthy and he suspected he did not look much better himself.

An air horn sounded, reverberating in the large hall. Sleepy mutterings filled the room as the inhabitants of the institute woke. It was always the most depressing part of the day, when one had to leave behind the sweet life of dreaming and return to the reality of constant pain with no hope of escape.

Across from him Teal'c spun in his tube to face Jack.

"Good morning O'Neill"

"No Teal'c it isn't a good morning." he sighed "The last 'good morning' I had was the one we left the SGC."

"Indeed."

Sam sat listening to the conversation while rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. It wasn't often that Jack admitted to them about how depressed a situation offworld made him. He always insisted that there was a way out, that things could be worse. It went a long way to explaining why he often went over the top in complaining about small inconveniences.

It surprised her to hear him sound so negative right now but she couldn't blame him. He had been a lot quieter over the last few days, the cheeky, humor that she was soused to seeing in him seemed to have been extinguished by the institute. The worst part of all of it was that she was kept from comforting him as she would like to by the boundaries put between them by the air force. She wanted to soothe him; hold him and tell him that they would be OK, but it wasn't appropriate.

She wondered how he would react if she tried. She had so often come close to throwing the rule book out of the window but had pulled herself back from the edge because of the uncertainty of how he felt about her. One of the few things she was sure of in her life was the fact that she loved him. She had tried and failed to put her finger on the point when it happened but she knew that it was him that made her keep going when she was close to giving up;it was him that convinced her things would be OK when it seemed that they couldn't be worse and it was him that meant she could never love anybody else. She hated that. She was trapped in stalemate: unable to give herself to anybody else until she knew how he felt about her and unable to find out because of those pesky regulations.

Realizing she was straying down a forbidden train of thought she blinked several times and looked over the edge of her pipe, watching the floor to see when the charge was turned off. Moments later, the blue sparks between the tiles disappeared and the door at the far end of the hall clanked loudly as the bolts were retracted. A marshal appeared, dropping a large plastic bag on the floor by the door. He left locking the door behind him and another air horn sounded as the ladders began descending.

AN I know that not much happens in this chapter...at all, but I will post again soon and this bit went on for longer than I thought and I wanted to get something posted for you. Feel free to give me a kick in the pants about updates, it'll make me write faster :D