*Author's Note: This is an old fic I never posted by itself. I wrote it as part of a fic I co-wrote with someone about a year or so ago, and I have rewritten it. It takes place right after Jack and Irina's first meeting in "Cipher," but I wrote it after Irina told Jack in "Passage II" about what had happened to her after she left him. As always, the characters do not belong to me but to JJ Abrams, ABC, Touchstone Television, and Bad Robot Productions. Rating: PG-13.

MUZAFARABAD

No one knows about the nightmares - except maybe the guards who watch the monitors on the cameras in my cell. I don't have them often anymore, and they're too hazy to remember; but I find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, shivering, with just a vague sensation of suffocating, or falling, or being chased - it varies. It had already happened twice in the three weeks since I've been here; and last night, after seeing Jack for the first time in 20 years, it happened again.

The days are harder. The memories crowd around me like demons in a medieval painting, and at times I can barely keep from screaming. Mediation helps, but it can only do so much.

Muzafarabad - Thank God I never hear that name in this country. It probably sounds like a "Star Wars" character to most people here. For me, it's just another name for hell.

As soon as I set foot on Russian soil again after being recalled 20 years ago, I was arrested and taken to a prison outside of Moscow. I never did learn its name. I wasn't there long, and I was kept in isolation. Then I was taken to Muzafarabad. It was there that it began - the beatings, the tasers and electrodes touched to every part of my body, being tied in one position for hours at a time - no one, except maybe the Chinese, make such an art of torture as we Russians do.

They wanted to know why I had been so reluctant to leave Jack, and why I had borne him a child. I told them I had not kept back anything I had learned from him, and that he had never become suspicious of me. They had taken care of that themselves, I said, by forcing me to leave him. That remark earned me three broken ribs and a trip to a tiny cinder block cell called "the cooler." It was winter, and I came dangerously close to hypothermia.

Soon after that, a new guard came to the prison -- a loutish mountain of a man by the name of Grinkov. When I saw him leering openly at me in the exercise yard shortly after his arrival, I knew I was in trouble. He came to my cell for the first time that night, and nearly every night he was on duty after that. At first, I tried to fight him off, but he would have been too much even for Jack himself to handle, and soon I just gave up. I would close my eyes and try to pretend it was Jack. That was difficult, because Jack's breath had never stunk of cheap vodka and greasy food - not to mention the fact that he, unlike Grinkov, showered regularly. Mercifully, Grinkov was eventually transferred. Years later, I hunted him down and killed him. The look of recognition when he saw me again - this time with a gun in my hand - gave me a sense of grim satisfaction.

Jack, of course, has no idea. Would it matter if he did?

tearfully horrible, yet written so expertly. is there more to this? just wondering