Sam was sitting in General McClear’s office at midnight on a Friday through no fault of her own.  She’d been summoned out her of bed—she was less of a social creature than she’d ever been nowadays—to the base with the Air Force providing door to door service.  She hadn’t met anyone else on the way.  It was like everyone had been told to clear the reservation before she returned.  Her apartment was a place she visited instead of lived, but she loved the solitude it gave her in those rare times.  She hadn’t appreciated being ripped from there.

            The general hadn’t appeared in the half hour she’d been waiting and somehow that was worse.  She didn’t know what this was about or who.  Between the clusterfuck that had been Paraguay and her total professional breakdown after Brazil, she couldn’t imagine anything to come could be good.

            And let’s not forget that the Brass hates me, because they really hate me, and that was before they had a valid reason.

            She was worried that the colonel had broken.  It had been clear that he wasn’t totally onboard with putting the Paraguay…incident behind them and she was a little terrified that he’d gone and told someone what had happened.   No one else had known, not even Ferretti and Kawalsky.  They’d sort of decided without words that it hadn’t needed to be acknowledged at the time.  It would have been too hard to explain and remained too hard to put into words that wouldn’t damn them both.

            He’d done what had to be done, had taken the path of least resistance that eventually led to them slinking away into the grimy, tree-addled night.  She’d be the first to say she wished it had gone down another way, but she couldn’t dispute the fact that they’d come home.  It was as unshakable a truth as these last five stressful months. She herself had come and gone, come undone, and put herself back together. In her own mind, she was finally good as new.

            And all that would mean exactly nothing if the colonel’s guilty conscience had gotten the best of him, and eventually the best of them both.

            Sam rubbed her itchy eyes in a futile attempt to substitute friction for a good night’s sleep.  Things might be clearer in the morning, but she’d still be exhausted if she didn’t find her ass between a set of government-issue sheets and soon.

            Just as she was about to call for the general’s aide, the door to his office opened to admit a brigadier that was most certainly not McClear.  She instinctively leapt to attention at the sight of his Class A’s and his polished stars.  She hazarded a guess that she could have seen her reflection in his shoes.  He waited a couple of long minutes before he told to her to relax her stance and Sam saw that for what it was.  He’d wanted to show her who was in charge, as if there’d been any question.

            He waited even longer to wave her back to her still-warm chair and she decided on gut impulse to hate his guts.  Her dad had always told her that the first thing a person ever made you feel was probably the way they’d always make you feel.  The brigadier made her uneasy and she had a feeling that was not about to change.

            “Captain Carter,” he began, pulling a dossier from the center drawer of McClear’s desk as though that was no invasion at all and something he had every right to do.  Sam tried in vain not to bristle.  While she and McClear had never been particularly chummy, she and her team respected him collectively for some hard calls he’d made in the past.  She thought his space deserved more deference than that—not that she, a lowly captain, could say that to a one-star.

            “Yes, sir,” she responded with a purposefully bland expression.  Of all the things she’d learned in Ops, the greatest lesson had been impassivity.

            “Captain,” he repeated again in the most irritating way possible, “would you say you get along well with your teammates on Ops Team One?”

            At least one of Sam’s eyebrows had failed to read the memo on stoicism because it climbed.  Oh, boy. 

“Sir,” she prompted, confused and worriedly so.

            “I ask, Captain, because you were recently seconded to Nellis, your previous post, were you not?”

            Sam ignored her dry mouth and nodded. “Yes, sir.”  She kept her eyes on his eyes though he didn’t condescend to lower his gaze from the center of her forehead.

            “Was there a particular reason for that reassignment, Captain?”

            Sam exhaled easily, tamping down her instinct to cringe.  She was about to bullshit like she’d been born to it.  “A former colleague of mine at Nellis requested my assistance on a project, sir.”

            The general deigned to glance at her and she could see immediately that he didn’t buy it.  “You couldn’t have taken personal time instead, Captain?”

            She tipped her head in deference to his remark while refusing to concede.  “Well, sir, I considered that, but my colleague assured me that what leave I had accrued would be insufficient to assist her with the project.”  She began mentally cataloguing every female researcher she knew from Nellis since she was certain he was about to ask her to name the person.  Please, God, let them go with the flow.

            “So, Colonel O’Neill approved the temporary reassignment of his newest officer to another state for three months?” Which Sam hadn’t completed, but who was she to start splitting hairs?

            She gulped, albeit very quietly.  “Yes, sir.”

            The general laid his hands on the desk and leaned toward her almost imploringly.  “Captain Carter, I may be a long time out of the field but I’m no fool.”

            “Of course not, sir.”  While she was clueless as to how this had become about the general’s perceived intelligence, she was keeping her mouth shut.  Seemed about the best thing she could do right now.

            “My guess is that something happened between you and another member of your team.  Would my guess be correct?”

            Sam sat forward to stare into her superior’s eyes in a wild stab at sincerity.  “General, I’ve told you exactly what happened.  I’m certain that my commanding officer will corroborate everything I’ve said to you.”  She hoped.

            Sitting back, the brigadier regarded her sternly.  “I would normally say that I think you’re being less than truthful, Captain, but it’s clear to me that you’re lying to me whole cloth.” He held up his hand quick, forestalling any attempt Sam would have made to defend herself.  “Be that as it may, I know you’re a good officer. I’ve read your work and, though I don’t always understand it, I trust it.  I’ve known General Carter since before the Iron Curtain came down.  He’s a good man and I have reason to believe he raised a smart daughter.  I have reason to believe that, whatever you may have gotten yourself into you can get yourself out.  Am I wrong in that belief, Captain?”

            Sam’s gaze never wavered; she’d learned better.  “Sir, I’ve told you the truth.”

            In a move startlingly similar to her colonel, the general knocked on the desk’s surface.  “Then, I suppose you won’t have any problems with what I’m about to ask you to do.”

            Instantly, Sam’s gut developed an entirely new level of alertness, describable only as fuck me. It felt like Danger in a few languages, two of which Sam didn’t actually speak.

 “Sir?”

            He didn’t answer, choosing instead to open the dossier he’d brought out and turning it toward her to peruse.  “Read this, sign it, and we’ll talk.”

            Sam picked it up carefully, memories of a brick of trigger-activated C4 landing in her blind spot too vivid to be seven months old coming to the fore.  It could have killed her or maimed her; either way, without intervention, it would definitely have hurt her.  This paper was essentially the same.

            “It’s a Non-Disclosure Agreement, sir.”

            “…Yes.”  Sam heard the variety of sarcastic responses he managed to bite back due to her experience serving with a handful of men who’d probably have his job someday.  It was hard to act like a general when every subordinate sounded like an idiot.  Myself included.

            “Sir, I signed an NDA when I joined Ops Team One over a year ago.”

            “I’m aware of that, Captain. However, the circumstances are quite different now.”

            Sam narrowed her eyes in confusion and suspicion.  “In what way, sir?”

            “Well, for one, this contract pertains only to you, not to you and your team.  Only you will know the details of the mission you’re about to undertake because only you will undertake it.”

            Resolutely disregarding the goose bumps leaping up on her skin, Sam nodded.  “May I ask what the mission is, sir?”

            “Yes, you may—when you sign that form.”  He reached back into McClear’s desk and pulled out a pen.  Sam took it when he offered it, despite the worry settling over her.

            “Sir…is it binding?”  The Samantha Carter of a year and a half ago would never have bothered with that question.  She would have assumed yes and acted from there.  Her team had taught her to assume nothing without reason.  All the reason she had was telling her yes and she badly wanted to be wrong.  What good could come from a solo mission now? Good being the operative, optional word.

            The general pursed his lips.  He seemed thoughtful as opposed to dismissive as she’d expected.  Sam was bolstered, somewhat, by that.  “My advice to you, Captain, would be to think carefully before refusing a mission tendered to you by the Air Force Chief of Staff.”

            She tried to swallow her nerves, but her mouth was a desert and she choked on them instead.

 “The Air Force Chief of Staff chose me, sir?”  She couldn’t imagine why, she was a little afraid to.

            “He approved the mission, lower-ranked officers decided that it should be you.  You’ve impressed quite a few of your superiors.  For that reason, you are being entrusted with the contents of that dossier.  I would suggest you sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement and find out what you’re being asked to do.”

            Licking her chapped lips, Sam decided to take her dignity in hand and ask a crucial question.  “Is it bad, sir?”

Wary hands rubbed together, wafting the scent of cigars and leather in Sam’s direction.  So like her father.

“I can only say that I agree that what’s being asked of you is necessary, a necessary evil if you will.”  And if that didn’t define her life in ways big and small, Sam didn’t know what did.

“Yes, sir,” she replied and signed the paper.

She would probably always be sorry she had.

~!~

            “Sir, I’m not sure I’ll be any good to you out there,” Janet confided in the colonel at mission HQ on the tarmac of Al Taqaddum Airbase in Iraq.  He’d pitched his proverbial tent over the tactical map outlay and was haggling over the particulars of the upcoming mission with the team in low voices.  Sam was uneasy with the lack of ready intel they had at hand; she felt a similar disquiet radiating from the stances of her teammates.

            It felt hinky. None of them were fans of hinky.

            The colonel passed off control of their little round table to Kawalsky and left to reassure their usually collected medical officer.  Sam knew that Janet didn’t go out on ops often, that she preferred to wait at headquarters and see to her role from there, but she didn’t doubt that the other woman was capable.  Almost as deadly as Ferretti with a gun and nothing to sneer at in hand-to-hand, Janet could hold her own in the field.  It wasn’t the situation or the high tension that unnerved her, more so the people she’d have to surround herself with.

            Sam had gotten a hell of a shock when she’d stepped back into her old life to find her best friend playing houseguest with the O’Neills.  Her husband, the husband that Sam had never seen and rarely heard mentioned, had gone a step too far on a long journey of offenses against Janet.  He’d hurt her once several months ago—which explained so much, in her opinion—and had been saved, then, by friends in high places.  He couldn’t be saved by all the lofty generals in the service this time.

            Busted jaw and a shiner to put a prize fighter to shame. And, Janet hadn’t looked so hot either. The diminutive officer had made herself truly felt in that brawl, sheer will to survive compensating for her lack of brute physical strength.

            Lieutenant Colonel Jim Fletcher had been Ops, one of theirs, and as much as Janet might have loved them, they were fundamentally the same type of people as her husband.  As far as she was concerned, their ire just hadn’t shifted in her direction yet.  Sam wished she had the moral authority to tell her otherwise.

            While Sam had been off licking her wounds, Janet had been packing up her life and packing in her marriage.  Not once had the doctor let it bleed into their conversations, which had consisted mostly of Sam’s half-confessions and vague statements about mistakes made.  Her friend hadn’t pushed and Sam hadn’t seen a need to.  Where she’d failed, Sara and the very man she’d been trying to escape had picked up the slack.  She was jealous of the ease that came with that kind of friendship.  She wanted that back.

            Given what she’d agreed to do, she didn’t see how she’d ever earn it.

            Her mission had been short on specifics and high on expectation.  “There is reason to believe that Colonel O’Neill has been compromised. It’s up to you to determine whether or not this is the case and contact General McClear with your findings at the earliest possible occasion.”

            She hadn’t known what to do with that live grenade she’d been volleyed.  She couldn’t hit back and she couldn’t do nothing.  She had consented, effectively agreeing to this asinine assignment.  If there was anything Sam was sure of, beyond her own staggering experience and her own stifled hurt, it was that Jack O’Neill could not be broken.  Not by the Iraqis and not by any of the other groups who’d managed to gouge out a pound of flesh from his lanky frame.  Pock-marked and scarred, he was absolutely loyal to his country and to his men.  It had taken every bit of her training not to tell the brigadier where he and his buddies could shove their professional concern.

            But, what it came down to was the fact that she’d agreed to do this thing and she hadn’t the slightest idea how to go about it.  The colonel was unassailable during a crisis and irreverent during a lull.  She was supposed to not only discern whether he had sold his soul to some extra-governmental group while simultaneously judging his mental and emotional fitness to be in command.  She had trouble deciding whether to be touched at their implicit confidence or struck dumb-terrified that the folks making the big calls were dim-witted enough to think she had any business making these kinds of determinations.  Damn it, Jim, I’m an astrophysicist, not a psychotherapist.

            Somehow, it seemed fitting that the very next Monday had found the team presented with a rescue mission to Iraq.  Sam’s bullshit-o-meter was deep in the red on this one.  The enemies of my friends are exactly who I need to watch out for.  There were few topics that tossed her CO off his game the way the subject of his imprisonment tended to.  It inevitably left him shaken and withdrawn.  She’d glanced the tableau of scarring left behind by his captors’ handiwork; she couldn’t say she’d stand up any better under that onslaught of memories.

            Sam realized that, once again, her thoughts had run away with her.  Lou and Kawalsky had gone back to planning their secondary exit strategy while she navel-gazed like a green Lieutenant.  She carefully insinuated herself back into the debate over taking the secondary insertion team along for the rescue versus meeting up with them at the predetermined rendezvous point.  If this mission had cropped up a few months back, the second team would have been the infamous ‘Fletch’ Fletcher’s command, now it was being headed up by one Colonel Frank Cromwell. This presented an entire world of problems their colonel could have done without, something Sam and the others felt right away.

Although Sam wasn’t intimately familiar with the story of how her colonel had gotten left behind all those years ago, she was well aware that Cromwell had been up to his neck in the f-up.  O’Neill had made that no secret, regardless of Cromwell’s obvious intent to put it behind them.  He’d made every attempt to make amends, but their CO was in no mood to forgive.  I don’t know if you could forgive that, she allowed, though she felt somewhat lacking in expertise on what it was acceptable to forgive.  Talk about a train of thought for another time.

The colonel wrapped up his and the doc’s impromptu pep talk with an affectionate pat on the shoulder.  She looked reassured, if not exactly relieved, but she was Janet and she’d persevere.  That was her calling card, one more thing she and the colonel had in common, other than a past.  It would take all the perseverance they had combined to make this mission impossible into a milk run and, for all her faith in them, Sam just didn’t see that wish coming true.

O’Neill clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention.  “Kids, campers, and,” he glanced disinterestedly at Cromwell and his men, “folks, it’s time for us to head out.  The set-up is as follows: regular Team One, or Alpha Team, is insertion, along with auxiliary personnel, Captain Frasier for medical and Sergeant Siler for tech assist.  I know Carter can handle it, but this time I need her focusing on other things, like holding off potential combatants.  The secondary insertion team, Bravo Team, will be led by Colonel Cromwell; their aux pers will consist of Lieutenant Simmons, our Logistics Officer.  He’ll be in charge of all additional equipment and will be stationed, with Bravo Team, at the rendezvous point.”

Cromwell raised put up his hand to object, the colonel tried to ignore him.  Sam was having an increasingly bad feeling about this.  Sighing the sigh of the put upon, O’Neill gestured for the other man, who was technically his superior, to speak.

“We’re not going in with you?”  This set off a tennis match of unspoken communication between the former comrades that would have given the most accustomed spectator optic whiplash.  At the two-minute mark, Sam had to pause to blink and re-focus.

“No,” her colonel retorted uncompromisingly, “you’re not going with us.  We look like a tourist group as it is. We get any bigger, they natives’re gonna start trying to sell us ugly Hawaiian shirts and cheap postcards in bulk.  You’ll head to rendezvous and wait.”  Cromwell tried to argue, the colonel cut him off, “My operation, my game plan. You don’t like it, you and your Boy Scout troop can take the next hop back to Peterson. Me and my team, we came to do a job, not complain about it.”  Staring right through the older man, O’Neill asked, an obvious challenge, “You in or not?”

The vein at his temple throbbed in time to his pulse, maybe even faster than the muscle in his jaw twitched.  “Yeah, I’m in.”  He laid his arms across his weapon in affected calm while giving Alpha Team a deep onceover.  “You’d better get real familiar with our faces because we’re going to be the ones saving your asses when this goes to hell.”

Snorting, O’Neill murmured, “Oh, yeah, we’re gonna stake our lives on you coming to the rescue.  Nothing could possibly go wrong with that contingency plan.”

“Have you got a problem with me, Colonel,” Cromwell cropped up, sharp and almost as combative.

 “Ya think?” He rolled his eyes.  Everybody knew how little tolerance Jack O’Neill had for stupid questions.

“If you want somebody else-”

“There is nobody else. Period. End of story. Q.E.D.  You’re here because Fletch is an asshole and he’s where assholes go when they get caught being assholes: Leavenworth. You’re our last resort, asshole version 1.0, bit less punchy,” he quipped with a so-so hand gesture.  “Keep it to a minimum and we can all agree to never see each other again once the mission is done and over with.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Cromwell affirmed resentfully, turning away and tapping his second, the ever-smirking Lieutenant Colonel Harry Maybourne, to convene his hand of troops.  Maybourne skulked, and there was no other word for it, right off to find their MIA team members.  Sam hadn’t trusted him from the moment Cromwell had introduced him to the team.  His younger teammates, Captains John Sheppard and Evan Lorne, seemed to agree if their endless efforts to avoid his presence were anything to go by.

Sam sneered at his retreating back and shook her head.  She’d dodged a bullet when getting picked for Peterson’s Ops Team One.  Shriever, Cromwell’s primary post, had gotten second pick of applicants and it looked like the pits to her, not that she was biased or anything.

“Carter,” her colonel summoned, “a word, please.”  He waved her over to a deserted corner of the tent where he met her in his standard closed-off, pissed-off, and squared-away position.  I’m about to get the brunt of his bad mood. Best mission ever.

“Sir, is everything all right?”  She waited at parade rest, old school.

He seemed to relax at her more casual, familiar stance. Giving himself a shake, he flicked an eyebrow at her.  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

Sam felt her eyes widen beyond her ability to stop them.  She’d always had a Cabbage Patch face, it was pretty much her tell.  “I don’t know what you mean, Colonel.”

He lowered his voice as he leaned a bit closer.  She cut off her impulse to recoil at the knees. “Sam, if you don’t want to do this, say so.  I need to know that I can come up behind you without you freezing up.  This is gonna be a close and dirty op. I need you at--”

“--one hundred percent, sir? I’m already there,” she promised him.  “I’m ready when you are to bring our guys home.”  Three Ops officers out of Peterson and a State Department security analyst way out of bounds for the embassy in Baghdad? Easy as pie—if the pie required a nuclear-powered toaster oven to bake it.  But impossible was in their mission statement, she was game.

He met her eyes steadfastly, letting his remorse and pride and gratitude show.  She tried to mirror what he gave her and give it to him in return.  It wasn’t only her faith in him that had been shaken, but his in himself and his command ability. They couldn’t have that.

“Good.  Saddle up, Captain. We head for the drop in twenty.”  She leaned into it when he closed her fingers around her arm.  He’d have her if she stumbled, she still knew that.

“I’ll make it fifteen.”

“That’s what I liked to hear. Give Doc a hand with her pack.  I think she could use a friend.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”  She definitely saw a bit of that old twinkle in his eyes.  She’d missed that.

He slid his hand up to clap her on the shoulder. “Good ma—ah, good.” He grumbled in his usual curmudgeonly fashion, “One of these days, I’m gonna get that right the first time.”  He rubbed at his neck as she hid her smile.

“Sure, you are, sir,” she answered dubiously.  “I’ll help Janet get ready. You do what you have to do.”

“Don’t I always?”  And she couldn’t pretend that the question was about anything else.

She acquiesced one more time. “Yes, sir, you always do.”

“Eighteen minutes, Carter,” he declared upon letting go.

“Thirteen, sir,” she guaranteed.  A girl had to have some secrets, true, but sometimes it was nice to be predictable.

~!~

The secondary team was dropped four kliks outside of Fallujah and their orders would take them roughly two-thirds of the remaining 65 kliks east to Baghdad, where Sam and her team would be undertaking their perilous rescue mission.  They’d split up at the recce site just in case they had tails, and because, as the colonel had so eloquently implied, a big group of non-natives would stand out.

Adversaries or not, the team leaders still favored each other with textbook salutes before parting ways.  This old battleground was theirs, but it didn’t have to be the site of a new tragedy.

Bravo Team would settle into their desert digs, grateful that the night made some difference in the heat that would have fried them during the day.  It was cooler now, as evidenced by all their thick BDUs and close skullcaps.  It’d be several hours, and maybe days, of huddle and observe. 

Sam envied their ability to lay in wait despite knowing that the excitement was exactly where she was headed.  The goose bumps and butterflies couldn’t have been tamed for all the butterfly nets and hot toddies in the hemisphere.  Even when she hated what she did, she lived for times like this.

Definitely could have been worse, she thought, and remembered why she’d fought so hard to keep this livelihood.  This team, this family, she owed them everything she’d become.  Some days she didn’t like that person, others she couldn’t imagine being anyone else. This was one of the latter, she realized as she stared over the vista afforded by the quiet chopper, a modified RAH-66 Comanche prototype, as it transported them to the far outskirts of Baghdad.  They would be approaching from due south in order to give the Bravo Team the greatest possible chance to reach the rendezvous point without disturbance.  If Alpha was detained, it’d be in the hands of the second team to either save their asses or complete the mission in their stead.

Sam had to admit she wouldn’t mind them doing a bit of both.  It’s a rush, but damn is it dangerous.  Radio silence was in effect and the only light came from the stars, underscored by an absentee moon, which shone so close she might have been able to touch them if she just reached out far enough. This was the kind of night about which great stories were written.

She adjusted her beanie to fully cover her blonde locks in the dark of the cabin while her gaze hardly strayed from the sky, another place she still missed. Patting down the cap, she ensured that none of the gold stuff would show.  Her hair still made her uneasy on ops, never having stopped feeling like a bright, honkin’ blip on the enemy’s radar screen.  Silly maybe, but letting it show had hardly ever brought her luck; she wasn’t expecting even this enchanting night to be a change of pace.

With pace in mind, Sam turned to check on Janet to find her hunkered down in the back of the chopper, doggedly analyzing her med kit with the grip of her MP-5 clutched in her non-dominant hand like a talisman of saints.  She didn’t have to be reciting a prayer out loud for Sam to know to see her friend was a little nervous; it didn’t hurt though that she mouthed it instead.

She would have offered the anxious doctor some measure of reassurance had Kawalsky not gotten there first.  It was a light touch on her wrist, coincidentally above where her pulse could be seen pounding out a frantic beat against her long cotton sleeve.  Janet’s gasp was small and contained, nonexistent to someone who didn’t know.  But they knew and they understood and she had a moment, Sam realized, to find her center and compose herself.  It came with the territory and every one of them lived it.

If Fletcher ever set foot near Peterson AFB again, Sam knew it best that she didn’t run across him and that he didn’t run across one of her boys.  They might cringe at needles and redden at the barest passing mention of a prostate or pelvic exam; nonetheless, they loved their doctor.  She was one of theirs, too, after a fashion, one they’d go to bat for.  And wouldn’t flinch, Sam recalled with a suddenly painful clarity.

Knowing that was what they were supposed to be to each other, she didn’t know how she could justify doing something to hurt a member of her team, even under protest.  Because it’s the only thing to do, her upright, rule-abiding conscience supplied. Orders were orders and she was so sick of being backed into corners, she could scream.  She knew what her CO was all about, but whatever beef the Brass had with him ran as deep as his antipathy for Cromwell, if not deeper.  Logic didn’t matter, only the objective.

As she saw him stare expressionlessly at the very shadow-ridden skyline that enthralled her and had once confined him, she worried that someone had fully engineered the perfect mission to bring Jack O’Neill down.

And she couldn’t say a word.

~!~

            Sam thought the funniest thing about instincts was their awful timing.  Never let it be said that a foreboding feeling in the afternoon didn’t come to fruition four days later at breakfast, because she could vouch for that with her own experiences.  She’d known things were about to go wrong since the Friday before the Monday when they’d gotten this mission from Hell.  She’d expected that feeling to be in relation to her own crappy solo gig, but, if that wasn’t enough, someone upstairs had decided to pitch a whole rig of crude oil onto the slope of an already uphill climb.

            All things considered, Colonel O’Neill handled their initial maneuvers with more grace than he’d ever claim for his own.  They got off at the Alpha drop zone and took their leave with a wordless thumbs-up from the pilot.  The city itself was a silent titan over their heads, a stunning picture of darkened domes, spires, and distant empty streets.  Not their destination, so they didn’t dawdle.

 Sam didn’t miss the apprehension that, for a moment, made her teammates’ eyes as unfathomable as the night they claimed to adore on American soil.  Lou and Charlie only had eyes for the ground ahead and the man whose steps seemed devour it.  He didn’t seem to realize he was leaving them behind him, she knew he would have slowed down if he had.

They played a mighty game of catch-up and caught up, all hands in tow.  Charlie moved to the point position while Lou took six, letting Sam, Janet, and Siler fall into flank with the colonel.  The only sign that he noticed came when he decreased speed, even stopping altogether just to breathe.  A shudder went through him that was all muscle twitches and tics and too much at the same time.  Knowing there was nothing they could say, they closed ranks around him and pushed on.  Somebody’s life was depending on this mission and, now that they were here, so did theirs.

They traveled at a brisk pace for two hours until it was just after 0300, the ‘witching hour’ or, as Sam would ever see it now, the hinky hour. They covered the distance around the perimeter of the city in what some might call record time.  It wasn’t fast enough for their CO. Without tiring, he was constantly increasing his foot speed, the urgency of should’ve been there yesterday written all over his face.   Upon realizing that the colonel was psychologically incommunicado, Sam alerted Lou who signaled Kawalsky with a low whistle.

“Colonel,” his 2IC started carefully, “we should probably think about stowing the doc and Siler some place safe. We don’t want them too beat to move when we get the hostages.”  They’d talked about it earlier, but there were definitely things they hadn’t considered.  Like Janet’s stature and the sheer amount of tech Siler was going to have to handle for contingencies. “Sir,” he tried again, this time louder. “Jack.”

The man didn’t say a word, didn’t slow down.  The single-minded resolve to get his people out had overwhelmed his training.  Sam clutched her weapon a little tighter.  Jack O’Neill was not a man she’d ever want to try to detain by hand.  His 2IC had no such fear.  That was the only reason it was so effortless for Charlie to drop back and bring him down. 

Even partly controlled, the landing that resulted kicked up a cloud of dust and Lou stepped up while Sam pulled their auxiliary personnel back a distance.  It wouldn’t due to make any idle watchers curious. Not for the first time, she missed the beige desert fatigues that would have made it that much easier for them to blend in with the barren landscape.

She kept her unassigned charges crouched low, Siler less in need of her instruction than Janet, who was also faring better than anticipated.  Sam’s eyes roved the plain as her temporary team members watched the quiet, intense intervention happening on the cracked ground.  All she caught were snatches of, “You’re okay,” and “It’s almost over,” in voices she’d trust with her own sanity, had trusted with her own life.

His, “Okay, I’m okay,” hurt low like a bad fall.  He wasn’t okay and that was all she’d wanted him to be in front of her.  His old friends pulled him to his feet and dusted him off.  He didn’t hesitate to lean into them and they took his weight.  That’s what we do, she informed herself with a lighter heart.  He wasn’t okay, but he could be.

They could survive this.

When they returned his weapon, he carried it in a firm, kind grip.  He was all there, naturally dark eyes alert and reflecting what little light there was instead of swallowing it up to go who knew where.  It’s a Hell only he can beat. Wasn’t every personal Hell that way?

She pointed silently to her eyes and held up a fist to indicate no visual on hostiles.

He slanted his head at her in acknowledgement and maybe, she thought, a little thanks that she hadn’t scrapped the mission for a moment to see to him.  If he really knew my orders, he’d wish I had.

He didn’t have to know that she’d wanted to.  That wasn’t the kind of Ops officer he’d trained her to be.  He didn’t have to know that she hadn’t been this way when she’d met him and that it wasn’t only in good ways that he’d changed her.  He didn’t have to know anything.

She was good enough.

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