READER WARNING:

WIP

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Title: The Glass String of A Steel Kite

Wordsmith: mor_tru

Email: mor_tru@yahoo.com

Category: GEN/Action/Adventure/HC

Archived: To our website.

Status: WIP

Pairings: None

Spoilers: None

Season/Sequel: Another story from the ‘Jack – The Early Years’ series.

Ratings: R

Content Warning: Language and violence because Special Forces don’t pull punches.

Summary: Black Op missions don’t always go off as planned, and not all memories remain compartmentalized.

Author’s Notes: WIP

Disclaimers: There’s a real fine line between what’s theirs and what’s ours, and although the characters belong to them, all the words and our imagination make this story ours.

Date: First upload 1/2005

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The Glass String of A Steel Kite

mor_tru

~~~~~oOo~~~~~

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

~~~oOo~~~

‘So much for the element of surprise!’ echoes in the dark gut-wrenching him out of one reality to body-slam him back into another.

Panicked, O’Neill jackknifes awake; one hand clutching at a protesting rib while the other searches for a weapon his mind said should’ve been there. A flood of sweat runs down his neck and chest as he fights every instinct to roll off the bed and take to the floor for cover.

This is the eighth night in a string of restless nights and still that phrase persists - the words circle endlessly like so many sharks looking to feed on the shards of his conscience. They hang like a paradox in the dark, taunting him with memories that should’ve stayed silent. Instead, they ricochet from the recesses of his mind, leaving him sick and disconnected and wondering where in the world he really is.

Disgusted, O’Neill flops back against the pillow and wills his hand and his gut to relax as he takes in a long slow deep breath. ‘Remember where you are ya moron. Remember where the fuck you are!’ he admonishes himself and glances over at the clock by the bed.

It’s 4 A.M, Goddamit! 4 A.M.! And the blurry display of eerie green light goads him with images from that other world seen only through the eyepiece of night vision goggles. He turns away and stares up at the ceiling, irritation making his throat tight with those unwelcome intrusions that bridge his two realities in what should’ve been the safe and dark ambiguity of the room.

“In the dark night of the soul it’s always 4 A.M.,” he whispers out into the quiet.

But Fitzgerald’s words bring small comfort other than the realization he’s not alone with the black shadows of the mind. F. Scott may have coined this emptiness but it didn’t make the drowning in it any easier. Because he’s swimming against the currents of the surreal, out of phase with ‘who he is’ and ‘who he isn’t’, hoping like hell there’s a safe shore in sight.

‘Then again, maybe it has more to do with the McEllan’s?’ Because one thing is for damn sure, he and that bottle have been at it since the afternoon and right then the two phases of his life are banging heads. Each arguing about who is in the here-and-now as images swamp his brain and elbow to the front for attention. And always it seems when it turns to 4 A.M., he finds himself holding onto the glass string of a steel kite, his soul swamped by the violent currents of the world’s inhumanities. At this hour, there’s no other choice but to watch the ceiling fan unscrew the roof while he sifts his way through tangled thoughts. Sometimes the dark just isn’t dark enough. Lately, it seems, it never is. All he can do is try to figure out what went wrong so that he can make sense of the seemingly insensible.

Overhead, the whop-whop-whop of the fan sends a cold breeze down over the center of the bed. The chill moves the beads of sweat and they itch their way down his ribs irritating the row of fresh stitches. Misery, the cold sonnovabitch and always a lover of good company, has a railroad track of staples riding down the outside of his right knee and a butterfly holding his right eyebrow together. All n' all, the right side of his body had taken a real good beating on this last go-out. But it could’ve been a lot worse - the shrapnel could’ve met him face-on and the piece that furrowed its way along his ribs could’ve center punched instead.

“Could’ve...” he mouthed contemptuously, “...but the fucker didn’t.”

Meanwhile, memories continue to drift up, swept away on the edges of the fan blades, his naked vulnerabilities flung out across the ceiling like a spread pattern from a automatic weapon. Inside his head, the rest of the room just keeps on spinning. Inside his soul, the kindness that defines who he really is begins to surface, battered and bleeding.

Then suddenly his back is no longer against the mattress but on the hard metal plates of a Black Hawk helicopter. The vibration of its rotors is an engine noise that travels through the hull and across the floor and it’s real – man, it’s real! It jars at his brain. He sees nothing around him because the medic’s face is in his and the guy is yelling above the roar, “We gotcha! We gotcha!"

Caught up in the blender of activity sweeping in through the open hatches, O’Neill chokes on the dust. Both door gunners lay down suppressing fire and the noise magnifies and reverberates through his skull. Incoming rounds tonk-tonk-tonk distinctively against the metal hull and through it all he can hear a clear ‘fuck-you!’ punctuate the roar as another burst is added to the outgoing response. Two fists are in the front of his vest; someone is dragging him further into the bird. He feels the heels of his boots scrape across the grid floor and the awareness of it radiates up through his bones and pulls at his focus. There’s a knee jammed against his leg and the butt-end of a weapon is digging at his hip. He’s suffocating in the closeness as the team rush aboard and crowd around him.

‘Breath ya moron, breath!’ The voice in his head keeps yelling as the taste of metal fills his mouth from blood trickling down the back of his throat. He wants to vomit but can’t because he’s too busy just trying to take the next goddamn breath. Then he feels the flat of a hand pressing into his belt buckle and the pressure of it is strangely calming. It pins him to the deck and keeps him orientated as the bird bucks and rides out its own downdraft - hovering in impatient agitation and ready to dust-off the instant the last man scrambles into its open bay. Through it all O’Neill feels the sharp burn in his side, a knee screaming in the distance and blood stinging his eyes.

He’s fading.

Then the ceiling fan roars to life and the bird shoots straight up, taking him off the bed into the night sky to a place eighteen days before.

~~~~~oOo~~~~~

Sometimes Intel is so hot it’s smoking...