A/N well here we are again, ready for the second half of this story. Sorry that it's taken so long to bring out the first chapter but it will be all worth it in the end. This picks up about 2 months after the first half finished. Updates will be somewhat sporadic as I find my momentum again.

Anyways, enjoy

Jay shuffled awkwardly in the armchair. She still had a distinct aversion to anything soft, they made her feel nervous, but it was the only seat that had a good view of the door and the window. The door because that was one of her rules: watch the door. The window because sometimes she liked looking outside. A couple of metres away, in another armchair, was Dr Meaden. She was watching Jay intently.

Jay wiped her hand across her face, trying to relieve her exhaustion. She hadn't slept for more than a few hours in the last three days. In the three days since it all went wrong. She hadn't meant to hurt Emily. She'd just been so scared, her brain had tricked her, tricked itself. So now she was locked up again, in some kind of psychiatric facility.

He was holding her down, keeping her captive within her own body. He dragged his knife along her skin, leaving dancing red lines in its wake. She screamed and tried to fight him but he was too strong. He was shaking her. It hurt.

It hurt. It hurt.

"JJ" He said. "JJ" His attack was suddenly weaker. She took her chance.

She twisted his wrist, snapping it and forcing him to release his hold on the knife. Grabbing the knife, she jammed it into his side. He screamed out in pain. Without a second's hesitation her hands found his throat as she used her knees to flip him over.

She hated the monster that she had become but right now it was all that was keeping her alive. She tightened her grip on his throat, squeezing with everything she had left.

His eyes widened in terror, but as she watched they change colour. The irises were no longer grey, they were brown.

"JJ" she choked out.

She knew that voice. She knew those eyes.

Someone was yelling. "JJ stop! Get off of her!"

Suddenly they wrapped their arms around her waist and pulled her away, throwing her backwards. She gasped in pain as her body hit the wall. Scrambling away, she curled into a ball and closed her eyes trying to protect herself from the blows she knew were coming.

Instead, strong arms encircled her, holding her close. She tried to squirm away but he held fast. "It's okay" He whispered, "It was just a nightmare."

She opened her eyes. It was Crow. He was rocking her back and forth and she clung to him like a lifeline.

"Shhhh, I've got you. I've got you." He murmured. She nodded in reply but her eyes widened in horror as she saw the two people on the other side of the room. It was Morgan and Emily. Morgan was kneeling next to her, his face a picture of concern, as she gasped for breath. She was cradling her wrist in her lap, her face white with pain.

What had she done? Oh God, what had she done?

"JJ?"

Jay looked up, but refused to meet the doctor's eye. "My name is Mutt." She growled irritably.

The doctor ignored her transgression. "Have you been taking your medication?" She asked the question with a gentle voice but there was a stern hint to it.

Jay shot her a look as if to say 'Of course I have. The orderlies watch me take it three timesa day.'

The doctor seemed to buy her non-verbal retort.

The look was lying though. It hadn't taken the two of them- Crow and herself- long to work out that the orderlies don't check very thoroughly to see whether they actually swallowed the pills from the little paper cups. They didn't jam their fingers into the Ghosts' mouths and rub all around their gums and beneath their tongues to check the pills were well and truly gone.

Half way through their second day, they had started cheeking them, especially the pain pills. Neither liked how they made their minds feel foggy and weighed down. Neither had any difficulty dealing with the pain; it was a fact of everyday life for them. At least there were no physical side effects.

She hated the peach coloured pill that she was supposed to take each morning. Atripla, they called it. Whatever it did, it made her feel nauseas and gave her a thumping headache for the rest of the day. Crow was supposed to be taking the same one but, like her, it was another pill that they hid within the stuffing of their mattresses.

Dr Meaden switched to English. "How have you been sleeping?"

Jay chewed on the inside of her lip. She hadn't. When they were living in one of Morgan's revamps with him and Emily, they had kept to the same routine as before. One would keep watch over the other whilst the other slept for six hours, then they swapped over. It hadn't been perfect but it had worked for a couple of weeks. In the third week, the nightmares got so bad they had taken it in turns taking sleeping pills. That was why Crow hadn't woken up in time to stop her from almost killing Emily.

It hadn't been Crow's fault of course; she was supposed to be watching him, but she had been so tired that she had also fallen asleep. She felt guilty about that.

It was much worse now though. The psychiatric hospital they were in now didn't allow them to share a room. And for some reason, no matter how tired she felt, she couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time before she woke up screaming again.

She had started sleeping under the bed, with her back jammed up against the wall. It made her feel safer, and reminded her of home. It was a little cramped but not much worse than she was used to.

Dr Meaden kept switching backwards and forth between English and Russian, presumably in an effort to reacclimatise Jay to listening and responding to English without overwhelming her. Jay thought that perhaps it was working, because whilst she was gripped by fear on hearing her former language, sometimes to the point of nausea, it didn't paralyse her in the same way it had before. That said, she refused to speak it. That was a line she would not cross.

"Are your nightmares getting any better?"

The answer to that was a definite no. They varied more than they had whilst she was owned by the Lieutenant but that had in no way diminished their intensity. Instead of simply the memories of her life within the Traders, where it was her fear of Washington that dominated her thoughts, now her brain had twisted them into something yet more horrific.

The first had been two nights after they had gone to live in Morgan's revamp. She had watched as they tortured a man, so that she would be forced to kill him. Her first kill. Except it wasn't the nameless man from Washington who so bravely closed his eyes when she had begged him to. It was Morgan, and he had stared her down throughout the entire ordeal.

She had only slept for two hours but even Crow couldn't calm her down enough to sleep again.

The following night it had been Garcia. Somehow still dressed in pink as she was lead into the Cage, she had been shaking so hard she could barely stand.

"No." She muttered quietly.

Dr Meaden looked stunned that she had answered, even if it was just a single syllable. It was more than she had said in the last three days. "What do you see in your nightmares?"

"The people I murdered." She replied bluntly, hoping to shock the other woman into changing her line of questioning. She was unsuccessful. The doctor did at least have the decency to look shocked, but she mostly looked sympathetic.

"I'm sorry, that must be very painful for you." She said gently. Back to the English. Jay couldn't help but tense a little on hearing it. The doctor, ever perceptive, noticed it.

"How did it make you feel, being forced to kill other human beings?"

"I don't want to talk about it" Jay replied, a hint of fear tingeing her voice, she didn't want her reluctance to discuss them to be interpreted as disobedience. She knew that she should try to open up to her, even if only because being signed off by her was the only way she would ever be released from here.

She also knew that the only thing she hated more than the memories, was the emptiness that filled her whenever she thought back to those kills. A long time ago she would have felt something, a deep seated anguish, but now she felt nothing. It terrified her.

Dr Meaden appeared to be waiting for her to speak still, as though she was aware of the little battle taking place within her mind.

"The first time, I couldn't eat for three days. I was so disgusted by what I had done." Her voice was little more than a strained whisper. "Every time I closed my eyes, I would see him again, as he lay dying in my arms, telling me that he was afraid."

"I can't even begin to imagine how horrific that experience was." Dr Meaden said, shaking her head sadly.

Jay drew her knees to her chest and looked out the window; it was overcast outside but the colours still amazed her. She was so used to seeing black, grey or red that the green of the trees or occasional blur of a bird flying by helped to calm her.

"The next time was different. It was an actual fight. Kill or be killed. It happened so fast I didn't really have time to think. It took two days for me to stop washing my hands, desperately trying to get the blood off. It was only there in my mind, but that didn't stop me seeing it. Feeling it."

She stopped, unconsciously rubbing around her fingernails in an attempt to remove the blood that had dried there.

"When you see blood in the movies, or make fake blood for Halloween, you don't realise how warm it is. You don't think about the smell, or how it clings to your clothes and skin for days after." She mused absentmindedly, still rubbing around her nails.

She snapped back into the present, not daring to allow her mind to drift off. "It wasn't until about a month later that I realised. Every time I killed, it got a little easier. Every time, it hurt a little less, I was a little less sickened by it all. Until eventually, I felt nothing at all. Somehow, feeling nothing was both better and worse."

The doctor's eyes were glistening with tears. She didn't allow them to fall, but they were definitely there.

"That's when you know that you're truly a Ghost. That's when the part of you that made you human dies. With that knowledge comes a terrible sense of relief; you know that you don't need to fight for your humanity anymore, because it's gone. You lost. All you've got driving you on then is knowing that if you stop, their deaths will mean nothing." She returned her gaze to the outside. There was a blackbird on the grass, pecking at the dirt, presumably for worms.

"Is that why you never thought about killing yourself?" Dr Meaden asked gently, her eyes probing her for some kind of reaction.

Jay's lip upturned into a grim smile. Oh she had definitely thought about it. She had wanted to, as much as she hated herself for it. She just hadn't done it.

There had been moments before she had lost consciousness in Red fights when she had prayed never to wake up. She always had, be it minutes or hours later, but surely there was a limit to the number of times someone could be knocked out without it being permanent?

That was what had happened to Bantam. She couldn't help but envy him, or at least she had at the time. She wasn't sure how she felt about it now.

Regardless, if she was ever going to get out of here, Dr Meaden needed to believe that she didn't present a danger to herself or to others, so she just nodded slightly. "Yes."

Jay glanced up at the clock. Between her refusal to speak and the doctor's incessant questions, it had finally reached 11.30am. That meant the session was over. She was itching just to run out the door but she didn't dare do so. She waited anxiously for Dr Meaden to give her permission. The doctor had seen her look to the clock.

She bit her lip. The other woman was looking at her intently, as though trying to decide whether to ask one final question.

"Do you like rules?" She asked after a minute or two.

The question took Jay by surprise. But her answer was an easy one. "Yes" She said.

"Why is that?" the doctor asked, although Jay suspected she already knew the answer.

"Because then you know what you are allowed to do, and what you're not allowed to do. They make things clear." She replied simply. Rules were good. Follow the rules, do as you're told, don't get beaten so often. Break the rules, disobey commands, be punished for it. It was one of the few simple concepts in her life, one that she clung to.

"Over the weekend, I want you to start writing down your own rules. They can be anything you want. They can be rules to make you feel comfortable and safe, or they can be little things that just make life a bit easier. It's up to you. Try to avoid using the rules that the men who abducted you used. These should be your rules, and it will be your choice whether you keep to them or break them. Can you do that?" She asked gently.

Jay shrugged half-heartedly. It was 11.34, she didn't want to be here.

Dr Meaden smiled, then opened her desk drawer and withdrew a couple of items. A small notepad and a biro. "Here, these are for you, so that you can write them down." She held them out to her. Jay tentatively reached out to take them, still deeply suspicious of being given anything. The doctor smiled at her encouragingly. "Okay then, I'll see you again on Monday." She said brightly.

Relieved to have finally been released, it was all Jay could do not to run for the door.

A/N well i hope you enjoyed dipping back into the Ghost Trader world. Please leave a review, as I always I love getting your input/feedback :D