TITLE: Free

AUTHOR: SelDear

EMAIL: SelDear

SUMMARY: Freedom is always an illusion.

CATEGORY: Angst, Vignette

SPOILERS: Vague S7 ones.

STATUS: complete

SERIES: Abused.

RATING: R

CONTENT WARNING: Mention of abuse, but no actual graphics.

DATE: ???

ARCHIVED: Jackfic, SJD - anywhere else please ask

DISCLAIMER:

(To the tune and rhythm of "His eyes are as green as a fresh-pickled toad." - for my sister Louisa!)

These characters don't belong to this fic-writer,
And this line of writing don't pay;
I wish they were mine - they're really divine,
To archive, please ask me, okay?

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is the final part of the 'Abused' series and was actually written before part II: 'Lot's Wife'. I finished it and posted it and got it out long before I finished 'Lot's Wife', then decided to rework it at the suggestions of the betas. There will be no sequel, so please don't ask for one.

* * * Free * * *

He never reaches for her as she leaves.

He hears her drive away and turns over in the bed, burying his face in 'her' pillow.

The scent of her is strong there, the shampoo she wears, the soap she uses, the salt she sweats.

She will never know what it costs him to let her leave every night. He swore to himself he would never require her to stay all night and he keeps that promise. It means forgoing the pleasure of sleeping beside her, but even if he's not strong enough to leave her alone, he's strong enough to let her go.

One day, she won't come back to him. And he'll deal with that, then.

In the meantime, he stores up the taste of her, the smell and touch and sound of her - hoarding the moments he has against the day he is declared bankrupt at the Bank of Sam Carter and evicted from her life.

And it will come.

Jack's no fool.

It will come.

Around him, the darkness is both friend and enemy. It provides anonymity by night, with none of the harshness of daylight. It hides the horror of his sc arred body - delicate filigreed scars sketched over his back and his belly and his thighs - the artwork of some sadistic bastard in the employ of the Goa'uld who captured him and held him for six months.

Darkness also holds the worst of his memories. The days and nights when he longed for death so passionately that he couldn't breathe, couldn't speak through the agony they inflicted upon him. Darkness holds his ghosts - the shadows that haunt him, taking his breath away, taunting his deepest fears and insecurities.

But the night brings her to him.

He knew it was wrong. Not for the reasons that always held them apart - the rules and regulations of an organisation that only saw them as useful resources, to be sucked dry and spat out when service was done - but for honour and decency and right.

She should walk in the light. Laugh in the light. Love in the light.

Yet she walks into the darkness, afraid but strong; generous in the midst of the knowledge that what he can give her is not what she needs. She comes to him at night, and she comes against him in the bed or on the sofa, against the front door or on the kitchen counter while the spaghetti boils.

She takes him by the hand, and while he is in her sphere, he can face the daylight and the sun, the naked glare of scrutiny by those who care about her and who used to care about him.

He revolts them now; a wounded, scarred, twisted creature that should never have been saved from the pit. How much better that he should have died in captivity than soil the bright earth on which they walk?

They hover around him, uncertain, distressed, pained. They don't know what to say and what not to say. They don't know how to treat him, how to speak to him. Whatever rapport existed in the time before is lost, and neither he nor they know how to renew it.

Only she walks fearlessly into the night - into his soul - leaving her footprints indelibly in his heart like an imprint in cement, rapidly drying.

It feels so right.

Yet he knows it to be wrong.

He climbs out of the bed, across the space where she lay, now warm and empty. A robe, smooth cotton against the roughened scars of his flesh, is flung over his shoulders. There is no-one to see, no-one to care if he flaunts the evil that was done to him. But he clothes himself from habit - and the abiding fear that something lurks in the shadows of the room.

In the kitchen, he brews the coffee to keep him awake until dawn - until the shadows of the night and of his memories recede and he can sleep, at peace with the day.

At first he left her sleeping in his bed because he loved the idea of her there, but he couldn't sleep beside her and he wouldn't inflict his nightmares on her slumbering body.

Then she stopped staying the night.

The percolator chugs and he stares at his reflection in the bare glass of the kitchen window, watching the ghostly outlines of his face fade as steam condenses on the window pane. He is a man fading fast. Not worth her time or her effort. Not worth her future.

He never asked her to stay. He knew he could not.

He turns to look at the photos on the fridge. Smiling, happy people, laughing.

One of the smiling, happy people was him - from the time before. She was another of them, smiling back at him from the photo amidst the other faces, varying degrees of laughter and affection in their expressions.

Now he stands, expressionless, and contemplates the woman who laughs from the photo, captured for all eternity in that one moment. Jack tries to understand her, tries to follow what she does. He tries not to startle her, to not scare her into running. He can see that she doesn't want this. But she gives him this much, whether out of duty or friendship, and he's too selfish to refuse it.

He sleeps very little when she's with him. Mostly because he listens to her breathing until she slips from the bed and goes out from his room, free again.

*Free...*

Jack O'Neill will never be free.

The closest he gets is when she drowses in the bed beside him after sex, after all is done and felt and she stretches out beside him as if she intends to stay. Then he lies there and feels as if he could leap buildings - as long as he had her by his side.

He lies there and hopes that she will fall asleep beside him so he can run his hands over her in open, greedy possession.

She never does.

He feigns sleep, and when she is satisfied that he won't wake, she leaves him.

She leaves him.

He wonders what she thinks about when she comes to him. He wonders what she gave up to give him this much. He wonders what he'll do when she no longer comes at night.

He thinks of things he could do for her, but stifles the ideas as they come. She is free and he will not chain her.

He thinks of things he could do with her, but never speaks of them to her. She is free and he will not chain her.

He thinks of what she does by day - the people she talks to, who watch her life, who bask in her presence.

And all he has is darkness and the emptiness of the bed beside him.

She is free and he *will not* chain her.

His hand shakes as he pours the coffee out. A small pleasure in place of the larger one denied him - the pleasure of her company through the night, the pleasure of her companionship for life. Slowly, he drinks down the thick black substance, feels the caffeine take hold of his system the way she has taken hold of his heart. But he can afford neither that addiction and doesn't have the hope of a cure.

Someone else will listen to her rendition of her day.

Someone else will sit beside her on the lounge watching the hockey replays.

Someone else will wake up to her smile and her contentment in his arms.

Not Jack.

So he never reaches for her when she leaves.

And he never will.

* FIN *

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