Author's Note: This is a companion piece to Forged in Hellfire, but as with all the stories in The Fire Collection you can read them in any order you like.

Inside the mountain, the need to crawl inside him is a fire fed by the air she breathes. She walks around on the pin-pointed precipice of the next wrong thing while he's doing things she's not supposed to know about in Belize. She'd always liked Belize. Until an email marking a mission. And she could hate him for that because at least the first time she'd gotten a map, a visceral piece of him to hold against the onslaught of all the things she wasn't supposed to be feeling.

Instead of hating him she goes ahead and aches for him. Right, wrong, doesn't matter. Maybe it never did. Not when it comes to him. She can quote the regs backward and forward and her reputation for following them is almost legendary. So if, from time to time, she's slick to her knuckles when he talks about Monday morning briefings, or if he tightens his hand around himself while she talks at him about things he pretends not to care about, and if they both do those things in a way that keeps it between them, well, she figures it might not be right but it's okay.

She feels him strongly in the hallways he usually haunts while pretending to be hiding from paperwork but really conducting his own sort of well-being checks revealing, covertly and maybe to her alone, just how he cares for the people under his command. It makes him surreal to her. How can the same man who grinds some approximation of her name between his molars be the same man who does a missionary walk? While he was in Iraq, late one night, she walked a path through those very halls taking comfort in knowing she did, at least once, step squarely in footprints he'd left somewhere in the quantum fabric of their timeline.

When it was Iraq she'd been worried about him but she'd known where to go to find him when he was finally back to being someone she could vaguely recognize. Since then they've been figuring out exactly how much burning room they need between them. She likes to think it was a monumental shift brought on by a road trip, but if she's honest with herself she can trace the exact moment she decided that regs or no regs he belonged inside her to the moment he'd dropped a gold Indian lighter into the console of her car. That event turned out to be the butterfly that flapped its wings and before she knew it she was the kind of woman who pushed her own luck and forced his hand until, in the weeks before he left for Belize, between them existed a stark sort of reality in which they stayed as far away from each other as they could while the smoke pressed down around them.

Because, it was that very grinding of her name - a sound created in the depths of his belly and shredded against the sharp edges of his tongue - that altered her reality. That, coupled with the lighter, created a perfect storm that allowed for a phone call from Scottsdale, Arizona in the middle of the afternoon that had her pushing closed the door of her lab and breaking his name up into consonants in her mouth. He'd come hard and harsh. It left her feeling heavy and empty and abandoned. What she discovered then and what she continues to try to wrap her mind around is that she just doesn't mind; and the soft parts of her that speak in colors are able to say words to him that might be able to help.

It's probably true that they're beyond help.

She starts thinking about him in terms of when not if and one day, maybe becomes god, right now. She starts sliding down a grade so steep she can't find purchase but she's sliding into him so it doesn't seem to matter. She pushes. He lets her. He yields to her, offering just enough resistance to keep them from combusting and she wonders if it's age, wisdom or some kind of detachment that gives him that ability. Thirty, though she'd planned it, didn't come with an innate ability to make the right choices. Nor had the intervening years. Watching him, sometimes, she's afraid it doesn't come with any of the forties either, but then he holds enough distance between them to keep them mostly legal and she knows he knows something she doesn't.

She confesses to him the things she'd never confessed to anyone else including the abyss she stares into after every one of their interactions. While he left her feeling full - if still achingly empty - the wide spaces in front of her were vast and dense with responsibilities. It's that vast space, and the fact that she shared its existence within her with him that keeps them from turning the whole damn thing upside down. She's sure, by now, one night of two drinks would have them falling into a wall together.

The chaos inside her drives her to the desert she'd traversed with him early, before they'd really blown the whole thing to hell. Under a night sky that guarantees the mustard landscape will stay cloaked in the royal purple of bruises she can't appreciate. Across a tinny, crackly connection, everything spills out of her. Somewhere, at some time, the sweet ache of the thing between them morphed into something raw and hungry and, finally, just painful. The tightening of her body that used to feel hungry now feels clutching.

When she tells him she doesn't know who she is anymore, his breath catches and he's said, "I know, I'm sorry," before she can tell him that it doesn't matter. He goes on to tell her things she knows the most important of which is, that despite everything they're putting each other through, they're still the only ones who know which is, when you think about, goddamned impressive. It sounds like a justification but she knows him well enough to know it isn't. He doesn't do things if he thinks they need justification; he waits until things are necessary if not inevitable and while it creates an air of plausible deniability in warfare it leave a tangle of unknowns inside of her.

Like, what happens next? And, how long can this go on?

She finds out later. First, they take a patrol walk together while Teal'c and Daniel roast some sort of tree nut that reminds them both of desert living but reminds Sam of little more than the smell of her grandmother's basement. She says something sibilant and before she can blink he has her pressed up against the mountain face with a boulder digging into the back of her left thigh and his hand high up on her ribcage threatening her breast. His tongue flicks against her ear, then his breath rushes across her sensitive skin. She forces her pelvis away from the cold rock into the cradle of his hips and he's so hard she's already reaching for his waistband when he says her name in a way that is far more Colonel O'Neill than Jack.

He's right. But she begs him anyway with liquid, salty words like, hot, wet, empty, and he pushes his thigh high up between her legs as he adjusts himself and she finds herself laughing hysterically against his chest because really, what the fuck are they doing?

He starts to chuckle, too, and the side of his thumb grazes the heavy cup of her breast. He presses his thigh up into her further and the soft, sweet way he backs her down leaves her buzzing.

The second time, they're alone in his truck - something they're able to orchestrate more often and with a hazy, scary sort of rationalization that seems to make perfect sense to the people around them. Thunder is a near constant rumble and the night is split by degrees with each bolt of lightning that streaks across the sky. They sit at a train crossing and she's counted thirty eight cars when the storm, the deep vibrations of the train, the warmth of the truck, the pulling of a saxophone on the radio and the deep scent of his aftershave in the cab crash together inside of her and she's rubbing her palms across her thighs and speaking before she realizes what she's doing.

"God, if you don't touch me, I'll-"

He stops her. He's right to, but she's nearly gone with the buildup she's created in her head and she's warm and slippery, open and receptive and a slow roll of her hips against the crushed fabric of the bucket seat is just almost enough.

He watches her through heavy eyes that tell her everything she needs to know. That tell her he's still recovering from a night against an alien mountain.

The train passes and when the truck is moving again, she's okay.

It's another one of the metaphors they're seeing everywhere lately. They're keeping score. When she adds this one to the list she earns a cup of coffee, the good kind, and when he brings it to her the next morning in her lab, they're both back on an even keel. It's possible to smile at him and mean it and she realizes that even if the room's on fire, the house is going to be fine.