Author's Note: I've finally determined that this story hijacks season 5. Technically speaking, Sam was taken April 13, 2001. So canon applies up through the end of Season 4; this mission would have taken place during summer hiatus. Because season 4 ends with Double Jeopardy and Exodus and then season 5 begins with 2 more episodes that make a 4 episode continuous arc, it's probably easiest to assume that those events never happened, and therefore and for our purposes in this story, season 4 shall have effectively ended after entity. However, this is academic as none of that will likely have any bearing on the story. Okay, perhaps Entity, because how could I write this story and not at least go there a little?

Also, it's another beta'd chapter (shh…don't tell). Seriously on top of everything else, there's an entire paragraph in this thing that I had practically nothing to do with. My beta rocks. She does. You should be jealous.

Sam sits quietly brewing dark emotions while Janet places three careful stitches on the side of her hand below her pinky. It's not the stitches that irritate her but Janet's incessant questions.

"How'd you do this to yourself?"

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Is there anything else I should know?"

"No, really, Sam – how'd you do it?"

Sam simply doesn't answer the questions and Janet moves on to Jack.

"Where were you when she did this?"

"Do you know what happened?"

"I think we should keep her in the infirmary overnight," Janet murmurs. Then she apparently decides to leave it up to Jack, " Do you want me to keep her?"

Her eyes fly to Jack's. He assesses her quickly and catalogues the emotions that must be clear on her face. "Nope. We'll be fine at home."

If Janet has any thoughts on the idea that the two of them are going to one home together she, thankfully, keeps them to herself. Sam's hardly dealt with the idea on her own and certainly isn't prepared to justify her behavior to anyone else. It's bad enough people are aware. She's without capacity or desire to explain.

She closes her eyes and takes deep breaths. She pictures the confused look on Jack's face when he helped her up off the bathroom floor and then, later, out of her clothes. She's breaking him. She knows she is. She's been intentionally hurting him though her reasons for doing so continue to shift.

When Janet finishes the stitches she issues an ointment along with her disappointed look. The disappointment isn't entirely unexpected. Sam knows Janet has noticed the distance she's put between them and the doctor is both worried and wounded. Having someone you'd previously assert to be your best friend pull away was hard for anyone. The forced incarceration while recovering could be blamed originally, but no longer. Now Janet's just confused by the disconnection between the two of them and Sam knows she's nowhere near ready to fixing that divide.

If Sam had to put a fine point on it she'd probably say that she's pulling back from any relationship that isn't the one she has with Jack if for no other reason that she still feels like whatever it is they're doing is terribly, completely, against-the-regs wrong. She's mad as hell that she feels that way because she knows that, technically, they're in the clear. Whatever happens can happen. Except – she's not quite sure how she feels anymore. It's clear his feelings for her haven't changed. But she vacillates almost minute-to-minute between needing him in a way that frightens her and wishing he'd drop off the face of the earth and leave her alone for good. Besides, she's spent so long spitting out the old rhetoric that she's actually started to believe it.

And anyway, when she needs him to be close and quiet, he prods and pushes to touch or talk. He pokes and opens old sores. And then, when she's at her absolute worst, when she's sure she's done the thing that will drive him away for good, he pulls her close and holds her while she cries, or breathes or laughs maniacally.

She hates him for it.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Natalie's locking her office door when the Colonel and Sam appear. She quickly notes the grave look on the Colonel's face and the bandage on Sam's hand and turns back towards her office beckoning them in. She's not surprised to see the Colonel accompany Sam to the conversational area of the office and she doesn't object when he sits down.

Natalie sets her bags down and then joins them. "I don't normally treat patients when there are other people in the room. Sam, is it okay to talk with Colonel O'Neill here?"

Sam nods. But doesn't lift her gaze from her lap.

"Okay. Why are you here this evening?"

"Sorry to have caught you so late, Doc," the Colonel tries to object but she waves him off.

"It's fine. Really. Erin's out of town anyway. No need to rush back to an empty house." She tries for a disarming smile.

Sam's eyes snap up to meet Natalie's. "You're married?"

"I am."

"You hadn't mentioned."

"I'm not sure why I would have."

"It's just…whenever I complain about what it's like to be living with someone again you always seem as if you can't empathize."

Natalie notes how the Colonel's eyes lock on Sam's face with a bit of hurt. "I'm sorry you felt like I couldn't empathize. But your therapy is about you and your feelings. It wouldn't be fair for me to impress my own needs and desires onto you. Nor the conditions of my own household, now that I think about it."

"Oh."

"So, what brings you here tonight?"

Colonel O'Neill clearly gives Sam a moment to answer but when she makes no move to her steps in. "She broke all the mirrors in the house tonight. Got three stitches for her efforts."

"Wow. Physically, are you okay?"

Sam holds up her hand and flashes an uncharacteristically easy smile. "Yep. Just three stitches, like he said."

"How are you otherwise?"

Sam gives her a wry look and Natalie smiles in return. "Okay, how about this instead: why'd you break all the mirrors?"

The slight smile drops off Sam's face. "I really don't want to talk about it."

Colonel O'Neill murmurs to Sam but Natalie thinks she hears him say, "Doctors, then home, remember?" They must have made some sort of deal, she figures. Louder he asks her, "Would you like me to go?"

She meets his eyes then and places a hand on his forearm. After staring for a moment she shakes her head, takes a determined breath and turns back to Natalie. "I can't stand to look at myself anymore and I don't know what to do about that. I hate that I have to look at myself. I hate that other people look at me because I can't control what they see. They're either seeing the me I'm not anymore or they're seeing me as I am now and neither one is okay."

Natalie's momentarily taken aback by the verbosity of Sam's statement considering getting her talking had been more akin to pulling teeth since Natalie had taken her on as a client.

"You're not comfortable with who you are now. I get that. Things are still pretty bad, yeah?" Natalie waits and Sam nods. "And what you want more than anything else is to go back to before any of this happened and to be that woman. But you can't be. Right? You can't just undo what's been done to you. As awful as it was, it's important. It's an integral part of who you are as a person now." Again, Sam nods in the pregnant pause. "So having people see you as the old Sam, treat you as her, is painful. Because you want to be her again so badly but it isn't going to happen."

Natalie trains her eyes on Colonel O'Neill. "But there are some people who don't see the old you when they look at you. They see the you of the here and now." The colonel bites his lip and steadfastly refuses to meet Natalie's eyes. "And it's horrible. It's awful. You know what they're seeing when they look at you, don't you?"

"You see me like I was when I was hanging in that cell," Sam says quietly and Natalie is fascinated as the Colonel's eyes snap over to Sam.

He struggles to swallow and visibly takes a moment to collect his thoughts and Natalie wonders if he's going to lie to Sam. "Yeah, Carter, I do." Sam meets the colonel's eyes and Natalie can feel the heat of the fire from four feet away but she's impressed with the colonel pushes on. "I don't want to, but I do. You looked dead when we got there. You were covered in blood and muck. And then I saw you take a breath and it went from the one of the most terrifying sights of my life to," he stops and takes a breath, clenches his fists the reaches out and strokes the delicate bones of her wrists with the side of his index finger before skipping the rest of that thought and forging ahead. "Anyway, I said beautiful when I described you there before. You didn't believe me and I'm not going to force it on you. But watching you take a breath, Sam? It absolutely saved my life and I'm not being melodramatic. You know I don't really do that crap."

Sam's eyes soften for half a heartbeat and then harden again.

"And now? Now all you see are the scars."

His jaw goes slack and his eyes widen until it looks like she's slapped him and Natalie wonders precisely what happened between the two of them that such a statement would have a visceral effect on him.

"That's not true," he says in a voice that makes the hairs on Natalie's arms stand on end. "Yes, I saw your scars. But I saw the rest of you, too."

"And it didn't matter."

"It mattered. But some things matter more. You matter more. More than that. Always."

"You know I might never—"

"I don't care."

Natalie is utterly fascinated and completely confused but she doesn't dare interrupt what is apparently an open, honest and healing conversation between the two of them.

"Could you ever even—"

"I can. I do. Now."

When tears spill out of Sam's eyes, Colonel O'Neill cradles her face in his hands and wipes her tears away with his thumbs. They look into each other's eyes for a moment and then eventually Sam nods.

Jack gives her a crooked smile. "I'm going to go get a cup of coffee. Maybe check my inbox. Come get me when you're done."

"Yeah."

"Okay." He gets up. "Thanks, doc. See ya tomorrow."

Natalie can't help but feel like she's just a bystander in her own office and he's gone before she can even answer.

She slumps back into her chair just now realizing she'd literally been at the edge of her seat. "Well. Okay then. What else you got?"

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Jack's not altogether surprised to find Daniel and Teal'c sitting in the commissary. He grabs a cup of coffee and sits down with them.

"How's Sam?" Daniel asks before Jack can even get the cup halfway to his lips.

"She's fine."

Daniel looks at Jack askance, "She had to get stitches?"

"How did you even know we were here?" Jack evades.

"It's not exactly a big base, Jack."

"Hasn't anybody in this place ever heard about doctor-patient privilege?"

"Hey, Janet's just worried about her friend. Since when don't we share information, anyway?"

Jack exhales with frustration. "Sam should be allowed to have some privacy with this, guys.."

"Yeah? Is that what you're giving her?" Daniel throws his hands up and crooks his index and middle fingers, "Privacy?"

"I've had a long night and I don't want to hit you, Daniel. But I will."

"Your implication was offensive Daniel Jackson," Teal'c interjects and Jack sees steel in the older man's eyes. It's nice to know he wasn't the only one upset by Daniel's insinuation.

"Oh, please," Daniel says in anger. "He keeps her from us. He's moved into her house. How long before he moves into her bed?"

"It wouldn't be any of your business if I had," Jack grinds out. "What's between me and Sam is just that – between us. I don't need your approval. I damn sure don't need your permission. And neither does she."

And even though he half understands what has Daniel's back up he's not really sure where the outrage is coming from. It's not like his staying with Sam is anything new. He's certainly not been saying anything to anybody about sleeping with her. Not just because he hasn't been but also because he's not that kind of guy anyway. He'd have thought the guy he considers his closest friend would know that. So even as he wills his fists into unclenching, he finds himself taking deep breaths and hoping for a little perspective.

"You're seriously out of line Daniel. You'd better have a damn good reason."

While Daniel waxes poetic about the recent machinations of the rumor mill, Jack sips coffee feeling his blood pressure rise.

"I'm going to tell the two of you this and after that I don't want to hear anything anybody else is saying because I just don't give a damn. What happens between Sam and me is between the two of us. Period. I'd remind you that I haven't made a habit of lying to you and neither has she."

"But do you really think now's the right time to start a relationship with her?"

"What makes you think we're starting anything, Daniel?" He pushes away from the table and ignores Daniel's further questions. He told Sam he'd be in his office; he really thinks he ought to be there.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

It's after midnight when he leads Sam through his front door. He drops her bag by the front door – she can decide where she wants to spend the night. She's been over enough to know where the spare room is if that's what she wants. Hell, he remembers one particularly raucous party that had eventually seen her swathed in three layers of sleeping bag and passed out in the old hammock out back. Anyway, he's not pushing.

She walks around slowly and looks things over. He's suddenly embarrassed by how apparent it is that he hasn't really lived here in a while. But an hour later she's got every light on in the house, laundry going and a dust rag in her hand. He sits at the dining room table with a cup of coffee and doesn't try very hard not to smirk at her whirling dervish routine.

"What?" she asks with a scowl when he catches her eye on a trip between the cleaners under the kitchen sink and whatever-the-hell she's trying to clean in the living room.

"You know you're crazy, right?"

"This place is a disaster, Jack."

He just smirks harder and takes a sip of his coffee while she huffs and stalks off.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Later, she brushes her teeth self-consciously as he stands in the doorway of the spare bathroom. "What?" she finally asks around a mouthful of toothbrush and toothpaste.

"You know what I meant earlier, right?"

She spits. "When?"

"In Natalie's office."

"Which part?"

"The part when I said I saw you. I saw all of you Sam - not just the parts you wanted me to see."

She kills some time by rinsing then wiping all the water droplets off the sink and counter-top. "Would it have killed you to say something?

"I kind of thought you'd kill me if I brought up your," he gestures in the general direction of her breasts and she smirks.

"I'm unpredictable."

He grins. "You are."

He turns to go but she stops him. "Thanks for tonight."

"You're welcome."

"Thanks for everything," she says shaking off the levity of their short conversation.

"Thanks for being alive when I showed up to get you."

She bites her lip and blinks back tears but offers him a slight smile and a nod. He taps his fist against the door-frame a couple of times in some sort of secret male code. He shoots her a wink and he's halfway down the hall before she realizes she's grinning like an idiot.

More Author's Notes: I keep forgetting but I wanted to take a moment to address the guest reviews – some of you have posed questions it seems like you'd like answers to but you've left me no way to get in touch. I'm not ignoring you, I promise! If you'd like an answer please sign in when you review. Generally, I don't answer questions en masse here in the notes simply because there are some who don't want to be spoiled for what might be coming or when.

I've also noticed that readers feel empowered to leave more negative reviews when they're anonymous. Negative reviews in and of themselves don't bother me – and if something is bothering you about the fic, I'd like to know about it. I'm not the kind of author that's going to change my plan to suit the readers – I'm writing the story I'm writing, not a "choose your own adventure". But sometimes I could assuage the negative feelings being left by either reassuring the reviewer or by assessing whether or not that reader will likely be happy with the outcome and warning them appropriately. I'm just saying – don't be afraid to sign in even if you've got something negative to say. I've been doing this a while. I have thick skin.

Mostly, and this is a life lesson, have the balls to stand behind whatever you say – even when you think the other person isn't going to like it. In life we have to sign in. We should have to do so on the internet as well.