Confession 3-8-05

By BadgerGater

Email: [email protected]

Episode: None

Season: Early 7

Spoilers: Abyss, Fallen & Homecoming

Category: Drama, missing scene, totally Gen

Pairing: None

Summary: Dr. Fraiser discovers a dark secret about Colonel O'Neill

Rating: Anyone, though I'd suggest not for kids

Warnings: Sad, and dark

Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, Gekko Productions; all the powers that be, not me; This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement intended. The story is the property of the author and may not be posted without the author's consent.

Author's Pledge: All Badgergater fics are honestly and accurately labeled as to content, warnings and pairings.

Author's Note: For Margo, Sis and all those who feedback. Special thanks to Cokie for the beta.

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Confession

By BadgerGater

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I think we all noticed the change, at least those of us who knew him well.

Or maybe it was just me. He'd always been more open with me. Wait, I take that back. He's not ever actually *open with anyone. Open isn't the right word; less closed might be a better explanation. But regardless of how I define it, he's not a man who reveals himself. Oh sure, you see what he wants to see, you see his façade, but you don't see 'him.' He makes sure of that. And that's why what happened scared me so much.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't scared *of* him, though believe me, knowing what I know about his past, he's someone a lot of people ought to be scared of.

I was scared *for* him.

And I still am.

I care a lot about Colonel O'Neill.

Now, I'm a doctor, and I care about all my patients, about all the people I work with here. This place is a high pressure, highly intense and often physically dangerous workplace. We're defending the whole planet.

But of all my patients, the Colonel is special.

On the outside, he can be brash, rude, antagonizing, infuriating and often, an annoying ass. Usually, he's the last person you want to deal with. And that's on his better days.

And yet, I have also seen the other side of him, and I make a few allowances for that. Maybe that's because, unlike most people here, I know about some of the things that have made him who and what he is. I've glimpsed a few of the reasons why he's built up those walls and raised those defenses. I admire his ability to survive, to cope and to go on; I respect his devotion to his people and his duty. God forbid, but if I'm telling the truth here, I have to admit the military, the whole planet, would be better off if there were a lot more like him.

I have seen him agonize over his failures, hide his despair behind humor, and conceal his compassion behind gruff bluntness. I've seen the anguish in his eyes, and I've heard his nightmares.

I know I'm alive, that the whole Earth is intact, because of his courage, his skills, his instincts, and his unswerving dedication to duty, regardless of the personal consequences.

I've seen a few of those personal consequences, too.

He's a man I respect very much.

And worry about him even more.

Especially after all that's happened to him recently.

Not many people around here know much about what happened (and yes, that's partly by his own stubborn insistence), and very few of those, if any, know the *whole* truth.

A lot of people on the base know that, still reeling from what we believed was the death of his friend and teammate Daniel Jackson; on the verge of dying himself, he'd been kidnapped by the Tok'ra Kanan, dragged off across the universe, and captured by a Goa'uld named Baal.

Baal tortured him.

Most people here know that much, the SGC has a very effective grapevine. What they don't know, because he doesn't tell them and barely revealed to me and General Hammond, was that he was tortured to death, and revived in a sarcophagus. Over and over again. Even for me, it's a guess, but I know it was at least half a dozen times. I suspect it was much more.

No one but me and a few carefully chosen members of my medical staff, along with the General, saw him struggle to recover from what the sarcophagus did to him, the addiction.

It was a horrible sight, to see a man so strong brought so low.

But he made it, thanks to the sheer, flat-out, pig-headed stubbornness of a type he has in abundance. That's what got him through it and brought him back to being himself.

Or so I'd thought.

He'd seemed so normal, or at least as normal as Colonel O'Neill ever gets, because we all know he has his own inimitable and more than slightly odd style. It's just who he is, and when you acknowledge that, you begin to understand him. Note that I said begin, because no one really gets him, including, I'm pretty sure, him.

Sad to say, I myself didn't realize what was really going on with him.

I didn't realize it was pretense, a sham, an act.

Not for a very long time. Not until it had gone on for a very long time.

And, to be honest, I probably would never have figured it out for myself. He's that good of an actor. I guess that's why he was so good in Special Ops, that ability to keep his secrets, hide the truth, deflect even the most insistent questions, and elude the most astute observers.

Mostly, I think it was wishful thinking on our part. We were all so glad to have him back, we just all wanted him to be okay, that we looked past the signs.

The SGC needed him to be okay.

And I made myself believe he *was* okay.

Looking back, in hindsight, the signs *were* there. Subtle. Understated. But there.

If only I'd looked, really looked.

Not that it would have made much difference, I suppose, because there was nothing all my medical skills were ever going to do to help him. Nothing I as a doctor *can* ever do to help him.

I doubt there's anything any kind of modern medicine could have or can do for him, because quite frankly, no human has been through what he's been through. He'd be one for the textbooks, if what we do wasn't so top secret, so unbelievable and utterly unexplainable to the rest of the world, that no one would believe it even if we *could* tell his story.

I know, it sounds like a lot of excuses for my failing him, for all of us failing to see.

In the end I discovered his secret quite by accident. Maybe he'd have eventually told me, or someone, anyway, so I hope.

But I doubt it. In fact, I'm sure of it. After all, he carried the knowledge around with him, bottled up inside him, for nearly a year, since he escaped from Baal's fortress and found his way back home to us.

We all thought he was doing fine, until Daniel's return.

That's when I noticed something was odd, just slightly enough off to make me realize something was not quite right with him, though I couldn't put my finger on it.

I started watching him more closely, but I wouldn't have figured it out except for what happened last night...

/-----x-----x-----\

I was on the base late, which isn't at all unusual. I was tired, but a good tired. The newly returned Daniel had just cleared all his tests, and I'd sent him off to the VIP quarters for the night. Heading back to the infirmary, I walked past O'Neill's office.

His door was open, but the lights were off. I paused, and looked inside.

At first, I didn't see him. He was sitting in the shadows, silent and still.

"Colonel?" I called softly.

He didn't answer.

I took a step into the room, worry suddenly spiking. "Sir, are you all right?"

In a very small voice, one that trembled, he answered, to my amazement, "No."

If he hadn't been at his nadir at that moment, wallowing in his lowest ebb, with nowhere left to go, I don't think he'd have revealed anything.

And yes, I am honored that he revealed his secret to me. His trust is something he holds close, something that must be earned, and even then, is meted out in tiny measure.

Maybe last night he was so desperate to unburden himself that he'd have told anyone.

No, I don't think so. He's not that way. It was hard enough for him to tell me, I can't imagine he would have ever uttered the words to someone he didn't trust completely.

I stepped further into his office. Once my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I could see he was sitting behind his desk, his head in his hands, a sliver of light from the doorway highlighting his silver hair. I knelt beside the chair. "Colonel, is there something wrong?"

He pushed his chair back a little and raised his face. His eyes were as bleak and empty as I'd ever seen them. He shook his head, and looked away, rubbing a hand over his face. "Daniel really is back, isn't he? That's the real Daniel, not some clone or something?"

"Yes, Sir, as far as I can tell, from every test I could think of running, it's the real Daniel," I reassured him.

"I *am glad," he said, his tone strange.

"We all are, Sir," I reassured him.

He was staring down at the floor, but his hands were resting on his thighs, his fingers knotting and unknotting in behavior so obviously nervous that I wondered if it was the real Jack O'Neill in front of me. Sure, his hands are always moving, but not like that.

"I'm glad," he said, again.

"Yes, Colonel," I encouraged, puzzled by what was going on. "We can all see that."

He raised his eyes to meet mine for a fleeting second. "You can?"

"Certainly."

"That's good, then," he seemed oddly reassured. "Good. Real good."

The oddness of his behavior, and the weird conversation, were beginning to bother me, just as, over the past forty-eight hours since Daniel had been found, something about the Colonel's reaction had troubled me.

"I'm angry at him, about Abydos," O'Neill admitted. "About... other things that happened. Back..." one hand waved in the air. "But I'm glad. I'm glad."

Why was he saying that, over and over? And then it hit me. "Why are you trying so hard to convince yourself?" I blurted out, unthinking. It was something I'd never have said if I'd taken a minute to consider it, but I didn't, thank goodness.

His hands weren't moving now, his fingers were wrapped so tightly together I thought the long slender digits would crack. "Because..." he took a deep breath and threw me a look that was so obviously a plea for help that I was stunned. There was fear in his eyes, something I hadn't seen since that long ago time when he'd been slowly overwhelmed by the Ancient's device, when he'd been

fighting to hang onto his own identity and with it, his sanity.

Jack O'Neill scared is a terrifying sight.

"Colonel?"

"Because..." his voice was a whisper so faint I strained to hear his words. "Because I know how I feel. How I should feel," he corrected. "But I don't *feel* it." He raised his eyes to meet mine, the pleading look still there, needing my help. "I don't... feel..." again, a hand waved in the air as he searched for the words, or the courage to say them. "I know how I should feel. I do. I know what happy feels like, but I'm not. I think... I think that a part of me is gone."

"Gone?"

He nodded, studying the floor once more. "The box, that box..."

"The sarcophagus?"

He nodded again. "Teal'c said it destroys the soul. It takes away who you are. Daniel warned me, too, that... that if it went on, there'd be nothing left." He shuddered. "First the snake, and then the box."

"The snake?" Damn that Kanan.

"It tried to get in, get at me, get inside *me*, and I couldn't let it. I just fought, so long, so hard, that all I could do was hide inside my own head. And then it was gone and Baal was there. And the box..." he raised his head. "It empties you."

"Colonel?"

"It leaves only death. And darkness. Daniel--" he stopped.

"Daniel?" How did Daniel fit into all this?

Jack's smile was hollow and tight. "He wouldn't help me escape. He wouldn't help me end it. So I died, and died, and I begged him to help me but he wouldn't help, even though he knew what the box was doing to me, that the box was destroying *me*--" The Colonel stopped, and took a deep breath. "And he was right." His look was of a soul shattered. "I feel things, but I don't really feel them. It's like a shadow, it's there, and I know what it is and how I'm supposed to act, what it should feel like, but I can't really feel it. Everything is muted, dim, pale." He looked at me, his eyes dark as night. "*It's* not right. *I'm* not right."

I put a hand on his arm, and felt the trembling. "Sir, maybe it was time you talked to Dr. MacKenzie about...

"MacKenzie?" he laughed hollowly. "That quack? No way."

"You've talked to him before."

"I told him what he wanted to hear."

"You need to talk about this."

"I am talking about it. To you." He threw me another pleading look that nearly broke my heart.

"Colonel, I'm not a professional," I backpedaled.

"You're a doctor."

"I'm an MD, yes, but not a psychiatrist."

"If I talk to MacKenzie, they'll throw me out. This is all I've got," he confessed, very, very softly.

Knowing I was treading on dangerous ground, I said, kindly, "Maybe being here isn't good for you."

"And somewhere else would be?"

Damn. I knew he was right. What had happened to him, no one would understand, no one *could* understand. Even here, even for those of us who knew what he'd been through, we couldn't imagine the truth of it. And if he wasn't here, in the SGC, he had no one out there, no family, no place to go, and he knew it, and I knew it.

He needed this place, and us. As a doctor, I knew I should write this up and have him spend time with a specialist. And as his doctor, and his friend, I knew sending him away, denying him this place and these people, would destroy him.

"Colonel," I paused, thinking of what I could say that would help him.

His eyes met mine, and the despair in their depths made me want to cry.

I took hold of his hand, and held on.

Silence reigned for a long time. Finally, he took a very deep, deep breath, held it and expelled it slowly.

"That was some pity party," he said at last, very softly, the words tinged with sarcasm. He didn't look at me. "What I said..." he waved a hand in the air uncertainly.

"We all need to unburden sometimes. Even hard-assed Colonels," I kept my tone light. "Will you be okay?"

He shrugged. "As ever."

"I could give you something to help you sleep."

He recoiled. "No. No. I'll be okay."

I paused a moment, and thought carefully about my words. "I really wish you would talk to a professional."

He was staring at me, silently.

"But I don't suppose you will," I added, resigned to his stubborn silence. "I don't have any answers for you, Colonel. I wish I did, but I have a feeling that no one does. All I can say is, I think you're being too hard on yourself."

He snorted derisively.

"You said you don't feel things. But what I've just seen here, Colonel, in the last few minutes, is someone who feels things very acutely. I don't think your feelings are gone, I just think you've taught yourself to mute them, or ignore them. That's what got you through what happened to you." Even I didn't want to refer to his torture at the hands of Baal. At the same time, I knew that he'd learned long ago, before I ever met him, to build walls around his feelings. "It's hard to let go of that, but the fact that you know something is wrong, that's the start to fixing it, Colonel. It means you are okay. Not perfect, but okay."

That seemed to reassure him. He took a deep breath, and found a tentative smile.

"Colonel, you are connected to us here, and those connections are important. I understand that. And I want you to remember that anytime you need to talk about this, or anything else, you can talk to me."

He sighed and sat up straighter.

"You'll be okay?"

He nodded. "Thanks Doc, for, you know," once again he waved a hand in the air.

I patted his arm and turned to leave, stopping at the doorway. "You're a good man, Sir. Annoying sometimes," I smiled, "but good. When you try. So keep trying, okay?"

"Okay," he said softly, and I knew he would be, even if he didn't think so right then.

Thank God for his stubbornness, I thought as I headed down the corridor.

/-------finish--------\