Jack shifted uncomfortably in the chair as he stared across the desk at MacKenzie. He didn't want to be there and he knew the other man knew it. "I know this is low on your priority list, Colonel O'Neill, but you can't be cleared for duty until I've had a chance to assess your mental state."

It was on the tip of Jack's tongue to tell him that was fine because he didn't want to be cleared for duty, but that would just get back to the General and piss the other man off to a degree Jack didn't want to experience. "My mental state is fine," he opted for instead.

"So you're sleeping fine?"

"As well as can be expected."

"I wouldn't expect you to be sleeping very well at all," MacKenzie observed.

"I was sleeping just fine," Jack muttered, but the doctor caught it.

"Until what happened? Until you were ordered to end your relationship with Major Carter?"

The man was no slouch, Jack would give him that. "Yeah, she made it easier to sleep," Jack admitted.

"Any thoughts on why that is?"

"Was."

"Okay."

"No. I don't want to discuss my relationship – or lack thereof – with Carter."

"Do you think you'll be able to serve with her now that you've been ordered to end your personal relationship?"

Jack resisted the urge to point out that he didn't think he was going to be able to serve at all which was why he wanted to retire. "My short relationship with Carter will not affect my command of the team," that much he could promise. If he was going to have command issues, it wasn't going to have anything to do with the fact that he'd made out with Carter at some point.

"So, if that's not going to be a problem, let's talk about what might be. Let's talk about your time on P3R-289."

"What more do you want to know?" Jack asked resignedly. He knew he wasn't going to get out of talking about it, the most he could manage was not volunteering information the shrink wasn't looking for.

"You said the drug made you hallucinate new hells you never imagined. Tell me about those."

Jack closed his eyes against the onslaught of images that flashed through his brain. "I kill my team."

"You personally? Or you simply allow them to fall to harm?"

"No, doc, I personally pull the trigger."

"And what are the circumstances leading up to that?"

"No circumstances. They're standing in front of me and I shoot them, one after the other. Over and over."

"You mean the hallucination repeats or you shoot them multiple times?"

"Yes," Jack said simply, for both are true. He flinched at the memory, rapid-fire bang! bang! two bullets into Sam's forehead, it turned his stomach and he was suddenly wary of vomiting all over MacKenzie's office.

It was always the same, the three of them standing in a row. Teal'c, Daniel, Sam. At least it wasn't the same as it was when he was on Astarte's planet when he'd also been killing Sara and Charlie. No, since he'd been home the nightmare had changed, morphed to be just his team – the last remaining people on earth who counted on him for protection. Teal'c and Daniel, the men who'd become brothers. Sam, the woman who'd become so much more.

"Tell me what you're seeing," MacKenzie said, cutting into the images rolling through Jack's mind.

"Teal'c, dead. Daniel, dead. Sam," he choked, then corrected, aware he was giving too much away, "Carter, dead."

"You know what you dream isn't going to come to pass. You're not going to kill your teammates."

"Not like that," Jack conceded. "But I'm going to get them killed out there."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not the same leader they had before."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not!"

"Why not?"

"Because... because," Jack clenched his fists against his thighs, "because I'm weaker now!" he exploded.

"Why do you think you're weaker?"

Jack clenched his teeth. He didn't have any intention of speaking further. He'd already given more than he intended to. He knew he had steel in his eyes when he met the gaze of the doctor so he wasn't surprised when MacKenzie closed the folder on his lap, apparently aware they weren't making any further progress that day.

Which was fine by Jack. He didn't want to talk about the Blood of Sokar and the hallucinations or the dreams he'd been having since he'd been home. He didn't want to talk about his time as Astarte's personal servant and how that impacted his fledgling relationship with Carter. He didn't want to talk about his relationship with Carter. He didn't want to talk about any of it.

He'd agreed to therapy grudgingly knowing that if he didn't at least attempt to comply he'd be in hot water with the General. And he'd done some talking so far, he couldn't be faulted for that, he'd just reached his limit for the day. Admitting he was weak was a tough thing to do, despite the fact that he felt it down to his very core.

He hadn't voiced that particular feeling up to this point, though, because he was afraid of the implications. It was one thing to feel like he was unable to lead his team, it was another to feel that way because he knew he had a weakness within him. A deep and abiding weakness that was a pit of emotion so soft and unburied now that he felt like his only choice moving forward was to cover it over with an act of emotionlessness that might just save them all.

He could actually feel the soft spots inside him tarring over as he collected himself. The things he felt for Carter were shoved away and boxed up and covered over. The raw spots that were open and oozing that spoke of Charlie were packed with gauze, bandaged over then cemented clean. He felt it all happening inside him, felt the steel slide into his backbone.

"We're done for today," he told MacKenzie, his tone brooking no argument.

"You're still not cleared for active duty, Colonel. I'm not convinced you're in fighting shape."

"You will be," Jack said, as he pushed himself to his feet. "Just not today."

MacKenzie sighed. "I'll see you this time on Thursday."

Jack just nodded once sharply and left the room.

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

Sam chopped a squash into inelegant pieces as she recalled her session with Doctor MacKenzie earlier that day.

"Maybe you should let me do that," Janet said and gently took the knife out of Sam's hand and bumped her aside with her hip.

Sam smiled ruefully and let Janet take over the task and watched as her friend chopped the next vegetable into uniform cubes.

"You saw MacKenzie today?" Janet surmised.

"Yeah."

"And?"

"He asked me about my personal relationship with Jack."

"Well... yeah. Considering that it's likely going to affect your future missions, I can see why he'd want to make sure everything was fine on that front." She hesitated. "Is it?"

"Yes," Sam said a little defensively, "of course."

Janet gave Sam an intense look.

"What? It's not like my feelings have changed. I've been dealing with this for a long time. It's just... now he knows."

"And that changes things."

"Not that much. And not if he's going to compartmentalize the way you think he will."

"I think he'll have to," Janet said gently. "The colonel has a lot going on right now."

"You think of all people I don't know that?"

"Fair point." Janet moved on to the onions.

Sam watched as Janet made quick work of the vegetables and she really thought they were going to move on to other subjects when Janet didn't continue the line of questioning right away. On one hand, she was fine talking about Jack with her friend, but on the other, it was difficult to explain the situation without going into details that Sam felt were incredibly personal. So, she wasn't sure whether to be disappointed or relieved when Janet pulled a bottle of wine out of the fridge and poured two generous glasses before pointing Sam onto one of the bar stools. It was clear Sam was to settle in.

"So, did anything else happen between you two or do you think just his knowing how you feel is going to affect your working relationship? Because honestly, Sam, the colonel's got it pretty together – there's got to be more to it than that."

"He had it more together," Sam pointed out. "Before he was tortured to the brink of his sanity."

"Even you have to admit he's doing pretty well considering."

"He's bottling it all up! The only person he was talking to was me and now we're avoiding each other," she said with a humorless laugh.

"Which gives me even more reason to believe that something happened between you. If it was just a matter of him knowing how you felt there wouldn't be any reason to keep your distance from one another, right?"

"He's doing it for me. It's too hard, it hurts too much, knowing what I almost had, what I did have. Even if it was just for a week."

"A lot can happen in a week," Janet pointed out.

"I already told you nothing happened."

"No, you alluded to the fact that you didn't have sex. There's a lot between nothing and sex."

Sam blushed. It felt strange to tell her friend there was kissing, High-School-strange, immature-like.

"That doesn't look like nothing," Janet said with a smirk.

"Let's just say the man kisses with his whole body," Sam said, feeling her blush deepen. But it was the best she could come up with that didn't actually involve telling Janet that every time they kissed he got hard and he'd press his arousal into her. That was knowledge and a feeling that Sam was going to hold safe and close and use to keep her warm when things got just a little too lonesome.

"And there was the sleeping together," Janet pointed out. "That's pretty intimate."

"I've been sleeping with him offworld for years."

"My guess is, it was different."

"Hmm," Sam said in an agreeing-sort of tone. "He's a close sleeper," she said idly, remembering the feel of his arms around her, his shoulder beneath her head, his chest beneath her hand. She felt herself slip away to his bed.

"Oh, sweetie," Janet said softly pulling her back to her kitchen.

Sam felt herself tear up, sad all over again for what she'd lost, sad for him and what he was enduring alone, sad for the way things had to be. She took a gulp of her wine and let the cold white swirl around in her mouth before she swallowed it down. "I'm fine," she said, more for her own benefit than for Janet's.

"Yeah you are," Janet said in solidarity and toasted Sam with her glass. "What else did MacKenzie want to talk about?" she asked, clearly anxious to change the topic.

"He asked me about killing Astarte," Sam said quietly. "I didn't have to kill her," Sam confessed, quickly.

Janet just nodded slowly. "So why did you?"

"Because she was..." Sam was transported back to that bedroom and watching Astarte rocking herself over Jack's prone body, her long dark hair cascading down her naked back.

"She was what?"

Sam exhaled through pursed lips. "He was being raped, Janet."

Janet formed her mouth into a round O, her eyes wide and it occurred to Sam that while she knew what had happened to him she hadn't known exactly what Sam had walked in on.

"I couldn't stop myself," Sam said. "And I don't feel bad about it."

"If the tables had been turned," Janet said slowly, "I think any one of the guys would have done the same."

"You're saying I didn't do it because of my feelings for him?"

"I'm saying that if you did, that wasn't the only reason."

"MacKenzie seems to think I should be having issues with this."

"But you're not?"

"Not at all," Sam said, shaking her head.

"Well, just because you aren't now, while you're still angry, doesn't mean you won't in the future. You may, eventually, have to deal with this, even if it's not right now."

"You don't think it says something horrible about me that I don't feel remorse?"

Janet sighed. "Under the circumstances, no. But if you do start to, that doesn't make you a bad person, either, okay?"

Sam took a sip of her wine to give her time to collect her thoughts. "Jack hasn't mentioned it."

"Are you surprised?"

"Not really," she said with a half shrug. "And now he won't," she said forlornly. She was sad, but she was also a little pissed because he had been talking to her, he had been processing what had happened to him. And the powers that be had put a halt to that because they thought he'd be better off on SG-1. While she had complete faith in him as her colonel, after listening to his reasoning and knowing how badly he wanted retirement, she wasn't so sure they were right. Forcing him to talk to MacKenzie wasn't going to go well. He'd say only what needed to be said to clear himself and he'd never fully work through the things that haunted him the most. He'd just box them back up the way he had before and who knew how it would harden him this time?

"You're worried about him," Janet said softly.

"Of course I am."

"The colonel is a strong man."

"I'm afraid that he'll heal without enough bend this time and that when something pushes him, he'll break."

"Why this time?"

"Because this was the worst. This was everything all at once, over and over. This was his family, his team..."

"You."

"Yes," she conceded. "And me, for what difference that might make."

"Sam," Janet snapped, "stop it. Do you think he decided to give things a shot with you out of pity? Or boredom? He did it because he felt something for you, too. Just because his feelings for you weren't as strong as yours were for him doesn't mean that he didn't have them. You've got to stop treating this like he was humoring you."

"What difference does it make now?" Sam asked seriously.

"Because I honestly don't think this is over."

"I can't hold out hope, Jan, it hurts too much."

"Well, I'm your best friend. I guess it's up to me to hold out hope for you." Janet said with a cock-eyed smile, then she drained her glass and turned back to the food preparation. She picked up a potato and started to peel.

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

Jack stripped the sheets off his bed – the ones he'd shared with Sam. He balled them up and tossed them into the corner before grabbing the pillow she'd barely used for the use of his shoulder and stripped the pillowcase off it as well. When he'd finished with the pillows he began remaking the bed with a sharp, economy of movement that would have made any drill sergeant proud.

He cast a glance at her overnight bag in the chair in the corner. He was attempting to usher her out of his home but her bag on the chair and the memory of her perched on his bathroom counter were doing little to help him purge her presence. With disgust he plucked her worn t-shirt up off his bedside table and shoved it into her bag and zipped the thing up. He shouldered it and carried it out of the room and down the hall and dropped it on the floor next to the front door. He'd take it to her on base.

In the kitchen he poured himself a glass of whiskey as he realized what a spectacularly bad idea it was to walk through the halls with her overnight bag and to hand it over to her in a place with security cameras everywhere. It was as good as admitting that they were sleeping together when they weren't. Hadn't been. Whatever.

The fact remained, he needed to get it the hell out of his bedroom. It wasn't helping, having her so close. But he could picture the crushed look on her face when he handed it over. It wasn't the bag, really, but what it represented. And he may have tucked his feelings for her away inside himself, but it didn't mean he was anxious to go out of his way to hurt her. He wanted to actively avoid her not actively be an ass to her. Though being an ass was likely going to be his default setting for a while. Daniel should really love that. Jack snorted into his glass.

He had a job to do, something to focus on that wasn't her, and for that he was grateful. He hoped she had enough to do to pull her focus, too. But of course she did, he thought as he remembered exactly who she was and what she did on that base. He, on the other hand, had a job to do to convince MacKenzie that he was fit for active duty. Which meant, sleep or no sleep, he had to appear like he was sleeping. He had to appear solid. And, most importantly, he needed to appear that he agreed with the powers that be that he could lead his team effectively. More to the point, he needed to get his shit together so he could lead his team effectively enough to avoid getting them killed on their next excursion. Which, he wasn't afraid to admit, he hoped would be a bit of a cake walk. It had been a while since they'd all been out together, they could use something simple to get back into the swing of things.

A knock on his door had his stomach turning somersaults until he realized that it wasn't her knock. At the door he pushed her bag aside with his foot and pulled it open to reveal Daniel standing there looking pensive. Daniel's eyes fell to the tumbler in Jack's hand and Jack was suddenly conscious that it was only mid-morning. "I take it that's not iced tea," Daniel said by way of greeting, a flat look taking over the pensiveness that had been in his eyes only a moment before.

Jack grimaced and lifted the glass to his lips to make a point.

Daniel's shrewd eyes swept the entryway and fell onto the overnight bag by the door. "Going somewhere?"

"No," Jack said simply.

"I didn't think so," Daniel said evenly. "Because I'm pretty sure that bag is Sam's."

"What's your point?"

"No point," Daniel said and raised his hands in surrender. "Can I come in?"

Jack took a step back and tacitly invited the younger man into the house.

"What's got you in a mood today?" Daniel asked, leading the way into the living room.

Jack trailed him slowly, stopping at the top of the steps that led down into the room. "My mood isn't any different today than any other day."

"You've been doing pretty well," Daniel countered, "but you seem to be... ill-tempered... today. Based on the, you know, scowl and scotch."

Jack didn't correct him on the liquor in the glass. "I'm not ill-tempered."

"Then what's with the scowl?"

Jack felt said scowl deepen, he couldn't deny its presence. "I'm just... dealing with some things."

"You want to talk about it?"

"No, I don't want to talk about it," Jack snarled.

Daniel raised an eyebrow Teal'c would have been proud of. Jack didn't encourage him by saying anything further. He wanted to ask how Sam was doing, but he didn't. He wasn't so sure Daniel would know, but he suspected that the two scientists had begun to work things out as he'd seen them in proximity a couple of times and it hadn't looked like Sam had wanted to kill Daniel.

Daniel canted his head, "What?"

"Nothing."

"You've got something on your mind."

"That's hardly ever true."

"It's true right now."

"Drop it, Daniel."

"Ask me about Sam," Daniel prodded.

As much as he wanted to, he had to point out, "Aren't you supposed to be staying out of all of this?"

"Yes," he said simply. "But there's staying out of something and there's watching two people hurt needlessly. And you're clearly in as much pain as she is."

"Clearly?"

"You're drinking at ten-thirty in the morning," Daniel pointed out. "You'll remember I knew you before, Jack. I know what the drinking means."

"I'm not suicidal, Daniel," Jack said roughly.

"Good," he said definitively. "But you're not exactly happy, either."

"I'm managing."

"That sounds great," Daniel said sarcastically.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to actually talk to me about how you're feeling!"

"Not gonna happen."

"You've got to talk to somebody."

Jack flashed to his conversations with Sam. He'd had somebody to talk to. Somebody he trusted. And the powers that be had taken that away from him because they thought they knew better about how to help him. About how to move forward. "I'm talking to MacKenzie," Jack said.

Daniel looked half shocked. "Okay."

"It's mandatory. To be declared fit for active duty."

"Just... try to get something out of it, okay?"

"I'm doing what I have to do, no more."

Daniel nodded. "I'd expect that from you."

Jack drained his glass. "So... are we done here?"

Daniel sighed. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Okay. You can see yourself out," Jack said and wandered into the kitchen for a refill. Hell, it was five o'clock somewhere.