Jack reached out a hand and touched the metal of the Stargate, hearing the airmen packing up gear behind him ready to go back into storage. By the morning half the staff on base would be shipping out to new assignments – along with himself. The Stargate would be wrapped up and a skeleton crew would be left at the base to watch over things. General West was leaving at the end of the week. Now that Abydos was supposedly destroyed – or at least as far as Jack's report had said.

No one but Jack and a few of the surviving marines knew that Daniel Jackson had in fact survived. That he was now living on another world.

It still blew Jack away. They had travelled to another world.

Jack hadn't planned on coming back though. He'd made up his mind to blow himself up with the planet. His grief over Charlie had almost completely consumed the man that had been one Jack O'Neill. But he'd still been thinking enough to want Sarah to have that pension; the one that gave her a whole lot more money than if he'd just offed himself.

Yeah, he'd planned to go down in a blaze of glory – until he'd spotted Skaara and all of those poor enslaved people.

Jack smoothed his hands over the ancient metal touching the glyph for Earth. He'd lost some good men on Abydos.

And then there was Daniel Jackson; a young kid that Jack should have taken time to get to know better. Sure he'd read the man's records – what there was of them. He'd interviewed him too, finding him to be an awkward, geeky man with way too many brains but not enough street smarts to get through unscathed by the marines on the team. Jack O'Neill - at the time – hadn't given a damn.

Now that he was back he wished he had gotten to know the man.

He hadn't realised that there could be someone in more pain than he had been. Possibly, that realisation was what had shaken him out of his own suicidal grief. Jack tilted his head to the side. Actually, that realisation had definitely been the turning point for him.

Daniel Jackson was - had been the loneliest man on Earth. Jack had only realised how deep the pain had gone with Jackson just as Jackson told him that he wasn't coming back home. There had been a flash of something in Jackson's eyes. A flash that told of a deep all-encompassing desolation that had gone on for most of the young man's life. It didn't take a genius to put the puzzle together. Jack knew he could probably pinpoint that desolation from the moment Jackson had lost his parents - and witnessed it.

Jack took a deep breath. He couldn't imagine how bad it could have been for Jackson – living most of his life alone and with that kind of pain hanging over him. But suicide wasn't something that had been in Jackson's nature.

Jack traced the glyph under his hand slowly. Daniel Jackson had finally found someone to love; someone to rebuild his soul for him just as Jackson had unwittingly managed to do for one Jack O'Neill.

Jack pulled the tarp over the Stargate and walked back down the ramp. It was time for one Jack O'Neill to rebuild his life again – just as one Daniel Jackson was doing on a planet on the other side of the galaxy.