Elizabeth Weir wasn't the kind of women who fell in and out of love lightly.
Her relationship with Simon had taken months to grow to a level of intimacy where she would even consider 'love' to be an option. The fact that he had thrown all of that away and replaced her so quickly hurt her deeply.
So maybe it was her age, or the events that she'd lived through in the past year, that had her heart fluttering at the sound of another's voice.
When she'd first met Jack O'Neill he was the head of SG1. Not your typical military commander, but an excellent one nonetheless. One that demanded ultimate loyalty from his people and gave it in return.
She'd felt completely at ease handing command back to him when she left for Antarctica - which was a lot coming from her.
He'd been nothing but supportive of her role as commander of the Atlantis Expedition, despite the fact that she would have loved to grant Daniel Jackson's request to join the mission.
And then she had gone for more than a year without seeing or really hearing anything from him. He had shown up in her visions, her nightmares, when she was infected with the nanites. A solid support in the storm.
When he had come to Atlantis with Woolsey she wasn't sure what to make of the flutter in her stomach, of the way she reacted to his presence in a room. She barely knew the man for crying out loud.
When the Replicators had shown themselves, when all hell had broken lose and they thought they'd lost him for good, something in her had cracked. A fissure so deep that she understood exactly why SG-1 had always returned in tack, even if not by traditional means. It was an undying need to see him again, to get him back.
Standing back in her office on Atlantis she hadn't been able to suppress the urge to touch him, to hug him. And when her heart skipped a beat as he hesitated before returning the embrace, and he skin tingled under the heat of his gentle touch, she knew that she was falling in love with the man.