A/N: It's Wednesday! And here is the update as promised! Enjoy!


The following days were tense, and Jack's gut remained in a tight knot for the duration.

Not only did he worry about the woman he'd escorted in, but her case officers managed to have one last hurrah before being officially remanded back to whatever desk they usually drove, giving him another headache on top of the migraine he already had.

Not two hours after being released from surgery, a private medical transport arrived at the hospital, declaring that they'd been ordered to move Jennifer to a private medical facility. They even presented the doctors with a federal mandate, but the hospital wasn't stupid. And fortunately for Jennifer, her attendings weren't the limp noodles the marshals had expected them to be.

All medical personnel involved with her care staunchly refused to allow her to be moved, a stance reinforced by the fact that she crashed even as the marshals' goons were trying to strong arm them into relinquishing their patient.

She'd been rushed right back to the OR without giving the malingerers a second glance, their Hippocratic oath the doctors' personal shield against the might of the federal government. And even after they managed to stabilize her a second time, her surgeons refused to release her for transport until they were confident she would survive the trip.

Which they weren't, for almost five days. And in those five days, Jennifer's face swelled to such proportions that her identity was obscured beyond recognition, which appeased the feds enough to back off some. Jack understood the concern—it'd be hard to slap a non-disclosure agreement on an entire building.

But his priority was the woman clinging to life in the ICU. From the moment he'd gotten that phone call, Jennifer had become his responsibility. If no one else was going to care about her, at least he would.

That's what he told himself.

It was several days before the doctors dared to even hope for survival beyond the hour. They cleared the ICU of all other patients, and a protection detail—too little too late, in Jack's opinion—was posted at each of the exits. The official story was that she was a confidential witness, some muckety-muck testifier whose identity had to remain secret at all costs. They'd tried to remove him as well, but Jack didn't dare leave, and they didn't dare push the issue. He spent every moment the doctor's gave him at her side. But despite his dedication, he nearly lost her.

It was only by the grace of god that General Landry got him clearance to remain involved in her care. And eventually, it was the General who authorized him to ride along to the new location when the transfer was eventually made. That call came at the eleventh hour, when the security detail was busy barring him from getting into the physician's transport after his charge.

But when the lead marshal's hand went to his ear, listening to the orders being routed to him, Jack barely spared the man a triumphant smirk before he climbed in next to Jennifer. Her newly commissioned doctor joined him, and then they were off. He spent the three hour ride holding Jennifer's hand—the one that was only lightly bandaged.

She was so heartbreakingly fragile that it was the only part of her he was willing to risk touching. A ventilator still breathed for her, her right arm was immobilized by bandages and a sling, and he couldn't even begin to count the wires and tubes that continued to keep her alive.

In the tense hours trapped in the back of the transport, his mind inappropriately jumped to one of Charlie's first Halloweens, when Sara had dressed him as a mummy. It wasn't funny, not even to him, but she was so heavily swathed in bandages that he just couldn't keep his thoughts from wandering into the dangerous territory that was his sense of humor.

She hadn't once regained consciousness since her surgery—since she'd been found, really—and had yet to so much as twitch. Every time he glanced at her too-still form, his gut wrenched painfully, but he refused to give up hope. She would recover from this. He would not consider the fact she might permanently remain so unnervingly unresponsive. He refused to believe that her eyes would never open again.

He remained with her at the new hospital. It was roomier than the county hospital, giving him plenty of room to sit at her bedside. More than that, he was unwilling to trust her protection to anyone else. He half expected the two weasels who'd been assigned her protection to show up at the new facility—a government-run facility complete with guards and security clearances for all—but he'd been surprised when it was General Landry himself who knocked on the door almost 48 hours after the transfer.

"Should've known you'd still be here, Colonel," the older man drawled from the doorway, interrupting Jack's lazy stream of thoughts as he'd lingered in the realm between sleep and awake. Jack looked up to meet the General's somewhat amused gaze.

Any other time, his expression would have seemed kindly, or amiable, but at that moment Jack felt only that now-familiar rage at the fact that Landry seemed so unaffected by the woman lying comatose on the bed in front of them.

"I don't know where else you'd expect me to be, General," he finally settled for, tucking his anger far out of sight.

"What I mean is that I familiarized myself with Colonel Carter's long list of violations regarding her WITSEC agreement—"

"What violations?" Jack interrupted sharply, twisting in his chair to look at the retired General.

Landry eyed him, then sighed softly. "I know her last location was Chicago—her handlers should've known she wouldn't be able to stay away from you. The Air Force apologizes for any inconvenience she may have caused you—"

"Inconvenience?" Jack ran a hand over his face in an attempt to smooth away some of his anger and frustration. It didn't really work. "General, with all due respect, Colonel Carter has kept within the confines of her WITSEC agreement with expert precision. She didn't seek me out…"

Landry's brow arched skeptically. "Then how did you end up at the hospital with her, Colonel?"

Jack sighed. "She called me."

"Which is a direct violation of the agreement—"

"An agreement that says she gets federal and personal protection in exchange for her cooperation. That's the part of the agreement that was violated, General, or didn't you read the part of the report where she was attacked and abducted by a stalker? A stalker her handlers knew about!"

"I read that," the General acquiesced. "We'd hoped he wouldn't be a problem…"

Jack blinked. "You knew?" Landry's eyes answered that for him. "For how long?"

"Since she was put into the program. We've been aware of Mission Commander Carter's less savory admirers since before her death. We figured they would have moved on since the shuttle failure. We now know that Pete Shanahan remained persistent."

"And you didn't tell her? Didn't you think it was something she had the right to know about?"

The General's shoulders squared under the not so subtle reprimand. "There was no reason to alarm her prematurely—"

"So when were you gonna let her know? When he sent his first note? When he left the first gift on her front step? How about when he broke into her house and tore it to pieces looking for the bugs your stooges put in it? Or maybe when she wakes up from her coma, you'll see fit to tell her why she was allowed to be targeted by a known threat—"

"Do not overstep your bounds, Colonel," Landry inserted deftly, his tone that of a seasoned officer on the brink of writing up insubordination charges. "She still had your phone number, which she acquired against the stipulations of her protection agreement."

"A number she used only once, when her life was in imminent danger," Jack countered, undaunted. "And I gave her that number. She didn't steal it or obtain it through illegal means."

Landry paused. "Are you telling me you sought her out?"

"Hell, no. Sir," he added belatedly. "I ran into her on a train one night, and a few weeks later I saw her again at a coffee shop. I helped her out of a situation with the locals, took her home—and gave her my number if the guy who trashed her house ever came back."

A sigh answered him. "And yet you didn't see fit to inform her handlers that the perpetrator had escalated?"

"You mean those sleazebags? I never once saw those idiots. Not on the train, or at the coffee shop, or at her house. She asked me not to tell them, and I doubted I'd get anywhere looking for their information myself, so I didn't. That's why I gave her my number. And I'm glad I did, because if I hadn't she'd be dead at the bottom of a ravine, and the way you stuffed shirts up in Washington have it, no one else in the world would have known—"

"You are coming very close to insubordination, Colonel," Landry warned, "and last I checked, you approved of the decision keep the three of them separate. Or are you beginning to change your mind regarding your convictions?"

"I'm not about to let my kid die, if that's what you're implying," Jack returned with a growl. "But maybe separating them from the only people they know wasn't the best solution."

"What do you mean?"

"General, they were heroes in their world. They deserve better than being relegated to second-class citizens."

"They are a security risk, Colonel O'Neill—"

"And who says this isn't exactly what we accused them of doing?" The thoughts that had been circling his brain for the past week came spilling out. Jack's own guilt sparked, and his anger only threw gasoline on the flame. "We're terrified that they'll reinstate their own timeline and erase the lives of everyone on the planet. But right now, what we're doing, sir… We've erased everything they ever were. And Samantha Carter got the shit end of the stick. She's a hero, sir. She deserves more than this."

"Son…"

"No, sir. If Colonel Samantha Carter had died, then she would have died faceless and nameless, without anyone knowing her story. Isn't that what we find so dangerous about them? That we'll be the ones dying without our stories told?"

The General had no answer. Jack returned to his seat, his head heavy as he ran a hand over tired eyes. His gaze drifted back to the woman lying on the bed, the sound of the ever steady ventilator suddenly deafening in the issuing silence.

"They're a security risk, Colonel," Landry reiterated finally. "That's the bottom line. If we allow them regular contact, they'll want to figure out a way to reinstate their own timeline. We have a duty to everyone on this planet to not let that happen."

"I know," Jack answered, his voice low with regret. "But… it doesn't feel right."

It felt like his black ops days, before he had given up that life for a training gig. He'd been glad to leave behind that sinking feeling in his gut each time he'd taken a life, feeling part of his soul bleed away with each kill, knowing that the name of the greater good didn't quite deny culpability.

"I want to stay here," he said finally, firmly. "Make me an honorary Marshal or something, because there's no way I'm letting those jokers have her again."

The General seemed surprised by the request masked by declaration. He considered it for a moment, weighing the benefits against the detractions.

At first glance, it seemed dangerous to allow the Colonel his request. He was already becoming sympathetic to the woman's story, and that in itself was a threat. But at the same time, Landry knew O'Neill had a vested interest in this world, this timeline, and he also knew that the Colonel would sooner cut out his own heart than let harm come to that boy of his.

And, he reasoned, building a rapport with Colonel Carter could end up being beneficial to them, even if it was through Colonel Jack O'Neill. Who knew? Maybe this knock to the head will have made her a little friendlier towards authority.

Tact stung his mind at the uncouth thought, but he shrugged it off. They needed an edge, and if it ended up being this woman, then so be it.

"I'll make some calls," he acquiesced, drawing the other man's gaze back up to him. "Until then you're on temporary orders to oversee protection detail for Jennifer Blaine, federal witness to a classified case."

A tense breath issued from O'Neill, almost visibly deflating him in relief. "Thank you, sir," Jack said, his voice tired.

"Don't thank me yet, Colonel. This mess is going to get worse before it gets better, and you just requested yourself into the lion's den."