Author's Note: This chapter was a labor of a lot of things...none of them love. Okay, that's not quite true. There are two scenes herein that had my heart from the word go. Big love to my beta who kicked my ass when needed (and stroked my ego a few times, too), reminded me what it means to be a writer – it's more blood and sweat than hearts and flowers, folks – and prompted me to put my thick skin back on. I appreciate you, lady!

I've had some fantastically in depth conversations with many of you concerning the subject matter and the psychology of the characters. What a treat! Thanks so much for caring enough to not only let me know you're enjoying the story but to strike up a dialogue.

To those that continue to review but leave me no way to get back with you – many thanks. Your time means a lot to me. And to all those who are simply reading from the shadows, I do hope you continue to enjoy.

~A.

They're sitting on the mats in the gym after a workout that was punishing in its intensity when she finds the courage to ask, "How do you live with it?

"With what, Major Carter?"

"The things you did in Apophis' name?"

Teal'c is quiet so long that she begins to feel heartless for asking him a question to which there is only one correct answer. "I do not live with it. I am aware of what I have done. I am conscious of it. But while that knowledge endures, I do not dwell upon it."

"How do you put something so awful out of your mind?"

"It is not possible to live a productive life if we focus on our mistakes and misfortunes. I choose to let that experience be a part of the past that helped me choose a different future."

"Do you think I can choose a different future?"

He takes several deep breaths and bends deeply through a stretch. "I think it is a very different situation for you."

"But do you think I can?"

"I think you must."

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

"How's the tough case coming along?"

Natalie takes a deep breath, digs her toes into the cooler parts of the sheets and turns tighter into Erin's embrace. "I don't speak her language. I'm not sure I'm actually helping her at all. I feel like I'm relegated to the side lines whenever any of the others are around."

"If the usual methods aren't working, you have to try something else. She deserves your help, Nat. You're good at what you do. You can help her."

"She doesn't need me."

"Do you mean you or do you mean treatment?"

"I don't know." She breathes deeply and pulls the soft scent of the Jasmine lotion that Erin put on after her shower deep into her lungs. "Maybe me."

"If she doesn't have you, what does she have?"

"She has her," Natalie pauses while she considers the best way to describe Colonel O'Neill but finally decides less is more as she protects Sam, "she has someone."

"Is that enough?"

"Maybe for her it is."

"You should hang in there until you know for sure."

"I should." Natalie means it like a statement but she thinks it sounds like a question.

"It's not like you to be so insecure."

"I don't know if I can do this job."

"Of course you can. You've never backed down from a challenge before. And on the days you don't see this patient you come home like you've slayed the dragon. You'll slay this one, too."

"You know that's not really up to me."

"You're a good therapist, Nat, and you're a good doctor. You'll figure this out."

"For her sake, I hope that's true."

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

"I screwed up," Daniel says as he finishes drying a dinner plate and hands it over.

"How?"

"I confronted Jack about his relationship with Sam. I might have implied he was insinuating himself where he shouldn't."

"Wow."

"Yeah." He contemplates the soapy dishwater for a moment. "Also, he knows you sometimes share information about Sam's recovery with me that you shouldn't."

"Oh," Janet says. "Did you tell him why?"

"I told him we've all always shared information."

"But not that we – "

"No."

"Why not?"

"With everything that's been going on, with the way things are between him and Sam – not to mention the things I said, I didn't think it would be good to point out that we...you know."

"Don't live with our heads up our assess?"

He quirks a grin at her. "I wouldn't have put it like that, but yeah."

"It was a lot easier for us. We didn't have the same hurdles they did. The same hurdles they still do."

"I know."

"Then cut him some slack, okay? And apologize."

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

"I owe you an apology."

Jack looks up from the paperwork on his desk and gives Daniel a once over. The man looks contrite enough. "Yeah. You do."

"I didn't really mean what I said."

"Yeah, you did."

Daniel sighs and sinks heavily into a visitor's chair. "Yes. I did."

"The fuck, Daniel?"

Daniel flinches at the crude language Jack knows he hates – that is, of course, the main reason he used it. "I'm worried about her."

"We're all worried about her."

"And I'm not sure she's made enough progress to be worrying about being in a relationship you two have avoided like the plague for a long time now."

Jack pushes back into his chair and leans back enough to feign nonchalance. "Until a few months ago she was a subordinate officer."

"Isn't she still a subordinate officer."

"Yes," Jack concedes, "but she's no longer in my chain of command. If she and I decide to change the nature of our relationship we won't be doing anything wrong."

"If?"

"Yeah. If."

Daniel exhales. "Why'd she have to get stitches?"

Jack studies the younger man and wonders exactly how much is his to tell. He figures he can play this one of two ways – either Daniel's his friend and confidante and he talks about the things that are plaguing him about the demons inside the woman he loves or Daniel's just some guy he works with that he's sometimes friendly with and Jack sends him off to get whatever information he can straight from the source.

"She's not doing so hot, Danny," Jack finally decides to confide.

"What happened?"

"She broke all the mirrors in her house." Jack scrubs a hand over his face and tries to forget the look on her face when he pulled her off her bathroom floor two nights ago. And also that he hasn't slept since then for fear she'll try the same thing at his place after another bad moment.

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"What are we going to do?"

"I don't know what we can do. Be there?"

"That's your plan? Be there?"

"It's a pretty damn good plan."

"It doesn't feel like enough."

"No, it doesn't." And that's the rub of it. It doesn't feel like enough because it isn't enough. But it's all he can do.

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

"The Goa'uld have something we call pain sticks. Imagine a cattle prod with two big prongs like a barbeque fork. And imagine an arc of electricity that rivals the energy burst from the zat we showed you a couple of weeks ago. Then imagine that those prongs were pushed into your skin. And that the outpouring of energy was so huge that it had nowhere to go but out of you through your open orifices. And then understand that they don't just touch it to you once – not when they want to torture you."

Natalie's stomach twists and flops and she's suddenly certain she's going to vomit.

"So they hold the pain stick to you until every part of you is seizing and you can't control your tears or your bladder or your vocal chords. So you're covered in your own fluids and your throat is raw. Then they take the pain stick away and for a brief moment you're sure you're dead because it feels so much better when the energy stops. But in the span of a heartbeat your nerves catch up and the pain races up to your brain and then flares out to your fingertips.

"And now it's like you're on fire. You're burning from the inside out. You're sure you can feel your muscles liquefying and your skin sloughing off against the abrasive clay floor."

Natalie presses her eyes closed and hopes Sam doesn't see the tears that have accumulated there. She's supposed to be detached, after all. Clinical.

"The Jaffa wear naquadah boots. That's a super-dense metal. They kick at you, hit you, take relish in the sound of your bones as they break. So now imagine that it feels like your soft tissues are melting and someone is macerating your flesh with a metal pestle against a gritty mortar. And that treatment, as awful as it sounds, isn't nearly as sadistic as your tormentors are going to get. That the scent of your urine is what carries them home on the wings of a job well done. That they go home and fuck their wives with your blood on their faces.

"And then imagine that they'll do that to you twice a day for weeks and the only thing they'll trade that for is the ability to do the same thing to the inside of you."

Unable to further quell the urge to be sick, Natalie excuses herself with half phrases and mumbled curses. A few biting words from Sam follow her out the door, "Yeah, well, you asked."

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

Three days after her last session with Natalie, Jack's concerned that Sam's still not talking. Not just about the session but about anything. She flat out ignores even direct questions. She won't go near the stove and when he took over the dishes the night before he noticed the water was tepid at best. She's washing clothes in cold water and the dryer is set to the no-heat fluff cycle. It's still cold at night but the electric blanket he gave her sits folded on the trunk at the foot of the guest bed despite the fact that she turns the heat off at night.

The quiet is disconcerting enough but her sudden aversion to both heat and comfort are down right screwing with his head. Or maybe that's the lack of sleep. Either the way the combination has him clinging to the edges of sanity.

When she makes it to yet another bed time without saying a word he decides it's time to force the issue. He snags her hand when she walks by him and he pulls on her until she's forced to stand in front of him where he sits on the couch. "Sam," he starts and finds he doesn't have the words to continue. Any semblance he had of an ability to draw the right words together is lost when he looks into her eyes and sees the pain there.

"Sam?"

"Please don't make me," she says as her chin trembles and tears spill over onto her cheeks.

"I don't want to. I'm going to. We need to talk about it."

He spends a few minutes searching her eyes and running his calloused fingers over the scars on her wrists. She alternates between meeting his eyes with a pained expression that practically begs to talk and then dropping his gaze as if it's all become too much. When she seems to spend more time focused on their hands or his face than she does on the carpet, he suggests a pot of coffee, a few sleeping bags and some time in the old hammock she long ago developed and affinity for. It's too cold and he's too old, but he'll be damned if he's going to deny her something that might get her talking.

She starts by confessing her macabre rehashing of events to Natalie and how she feels awful for going about sharing that information in the way she did. When he nods in understanding his whisker stubble catches the hairs on the crown of her head.

They'd poured some of the coffee into one tall coffee mug that he'd long ago gotten as part of a gift set from someone who never really knew him and they pass it back and forth as she recounts precisely what she said to Natalie and he tries hard to make sure she can't feel him wince. But as she's all but sitting in his lap he's pretty sure he's not hiding from her. Not tonight. But she's not hiding from him either. So that's okay.

Then she says rape in the hushed tones she hadn't bothered with months ago and starts telling him about the sodomy that both preceded and followed the actual act. She describes uses for Goa'uld pain sticks that had previously only existed in the nightmarish parts of his psyche. She talks about being chained to a wall and made to accept what was given in any way it was given. She talks until they empty the thermos he'd carried outside of the rest of the pot's worth of coffee they'd made.

He reassures her of so many things until they have to pull the several layers of sleeping bags up to their ears.

Hours later he watches the sun rise and traces her spine through her sweatshirt and revels in her moist breath against his neck as she pants through bad dreams.

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

The next morning she awakens alone in the hammock. She surprised to find the sun so high in the sky and realizes it must be approaching noon. She makes her way into the house feeling off balance and unsure of everything she'd shared with Jack the night before. She's been stripped bare in a way she hadn't even felt while she'd been captive on Votan. She told him things she swore she'd never tell anyone. In return she'd accepted assurances and declarations she never felt she deserved – even before her captivity.

She makes her way down the hall to the guest bath but is stopped when she encounters a shirtless Jack O'Neill in the hallway. He appears startled as well but all she can focus on is the heat that blooms in her belly when she sees him. She's struck dumb by a flash of arousal she doesn't feel entitled to. Most certainly it's a feeling she's not currently equipped to handle. She catches his eye in the moment before she turns to run and she watches realization dawn over his face. His mouth drops open but she's gone before he can speak.