If he was honest, he missed the visits to her lab with no real excuse, missed the jokes and flirtatious banter that had up to now pretty much defined his relationship with Sam Carter. He'd stopped timing his elevator rides to the surface to 'accidentally' bump into her. He ate jello with Teal'c and sometimes Daniel. He no longer stole glances at her during briefings, when she had often been, to him at least, at her most beautiful; completely absorbed and focused on her work, her science.
Damage limitation became his watchwords: he was polite, friendly even, but he would not, could not, cross the line anymore between subordinate and CO. They could be colleagues, stiff and awkward around one another, but not friends.
He supposed this was 'closure' or maybe 'moving on' but it didn't feel that way. It felt like existing rather than living.
Before he knew it he'd be watching black and white films shown only in the early hours of the morning. He'd find himself empathising with their raincoat-wearing, steely faced heroes; waving their true loves away onto endless trains wreathed in clouds of steam and then there would be no hope for him.
It was a dreary Wednesday afternoon, always a bad time for him because SG-7 had their briefing at 10:05 and he had to spend an hour Not Looking At Her. He was playing with crumpled pieces of paper; the remnants of the drafts of a report he had shockingly managed to complete early. Surreptitiously trying to juggle under his desk so the staff in the control room couldn't see what he was engaged with he jumped in shock as the klaxons began to wail. He dropped the paper balls guiltily.
There was a palpable straightening of slumped shoulders and wrinkled uniforms as he ambled into the control room; actions which made him fell both proud and a little ashamed.
"It's an unknown address, General," Sergeant Davis said, as O'Neill came to a stop behind him.
"Close the iris."
Perhaps it was because he was the only person standing upright at the time, but as the iris close across the shimmering event horizon, he thought the ripples moved oddly, almost like the water of a pond after a stone has been thrown--
--The projectile, with mere millimeters of clearance, shot through the 'gate straight towards the glass window of the control room. It was a needle thin bolt of shining metal, possibly steel but travelling at such a velocity it was impossible to tell. O'Neill had just enough time to think not again, let alone order the blast doors closed when the projectile hit the glass, shattering the toughened glass as if it were the fine dusting of sugar on Carter's wedding cake.
As the fragments fell to the floor, making less of a tinkle and more of a smashing noise, the bolt pierced O'Neill's body; the force of the blow throwing him backwards across the room. His head cracked sickeningly against the concrete of the wall and the world was very suddenly switched off.
Light permeated the gloom of unconsciousness at last.
He exhaled and the pain assailed him. "I really hate Wednesdays," he breathed.
"Actually it's Friday."
For a moment a sudden overwhelming panic surged through him. He thought the voice came from withing his own head; that they had implanted him with a Tok'ra again to save his life--
Then his vision cleared, his brain making sense of what had occurred and a pinkish blur at his feet resolved itself into Daniel. The archeologist was sitting at the end of an infirmary bed. He was smiling broadly.
O'Neill tried to check the date on his watch but his arms were pinned to his sides by... by his blankets. He blinked. He'd heard the phrase 'weak as a kitten' but this was ridiculous...
"I could have sworn it was Wednesday when I last checked." O'Neill's voice was the slightest of whispers, breath to carry words being difficult to draw.
Daniel stood and moved to the side of the bed. There were dark patches under his eyes and an angry red mark on the bridge of his nose from where he had pushed his glasses into place far too vigorously, or perhaps repetitively. "You've been out quite a while. Nine days in fact."
"Something hit me."
"Yeah. Uh, Doctor Brightman will fill you in on the specifics, not sure if you're up to hearing it right now-"
"I thought that couldn't happen anymore."
Daniel looked momentarily awkward. "Well, technically it can't. There was the slight delay in iris activation and a projectile only ten millimeters in diameter aimed squarely for the center of the 'gate... The iris nearly closed on it."
O'Neill simply sighed in reply.
"You nearly didn't make it," Daniel continued, "You were in surgery for nine hours."
If it had been possible, O'Neill would have shrugged. "For a bolt ten millimeters in diameter?"
Daniel paused for a moment, and then dragged his chair over to the side of the bed and sat down. "I probably shouldn't be the one to tell you all this..."
"Cut the crap and tell me what the hell happened," O'Neill responded, pain making him even shorter tempered than normal.
"Okay." He drew in a breath and then began to speak in a flat monotone. "The bullet pierced your chest, just above your abdomen. It then... uh... released spines to embed itself within your body rather than passing straight through your chest cavity. When they removed it, there were over thirty separate spines that were growing internally.
"Your left lung collapsed as a result of those protrusions. Twice. They had to do a lot of surgical repair work to your diaphragm and your stomach wall. You were lucky not to have your intestines pierced. You have five broken ribs. Your collarbone was fractured when you hit the wall. You have a concussion. Doctor Brightman has yet to completely rule out pelvic damage."
He stopped to draw in a deeper breath. "And then we realised it had released some sort of organism into your bloodstream."
O'Neill's eyes were closed.
"Your wounds weren't healing properly. Your immune system wasn't responding to what Doctor Brightman believed to be a genetically modified organism which was using red blood cells to replicate. Eventually, you were going to suffocate to death. She just couldn't work out why it wasn't happening already."
O'Neill opened his eyes. Daniel's eyes were glazed, his face tight with the effort to control emotion. O'Neill realised that stupidly he felt guilty, guilty for putting his friend through what had obviously been a living hell.
"It turned out the trace elements of naquada in your blood from your blending with Kanan. The metal was... attracting the organisms and binding with them irreversibly and your liver was breaking them down.
"But there wasn't enough naquada in your system to cure you. Doctor Brightman tried injecting you with small amounts of the element but nothing happened. Eventually the only theory anyone could come up with was that the naquada present in a symbiote must be, in some way we can't identify, different to the pure element. The doctor thought it might be the purification process we use to extract it from ore. There was nothing we could do."
Daniel's gaze had now dropped to his shoes and O'Neill felt moved to speak. "So... what happened? You must have come up with something."
Daniel nodded. "Sam came up with the idea."
"Sam?" O'Neill found himself interrupting, "Carter? Carter's been here?" He tried to keep the hope out of his voice.
Daniel gave him a disbelieving look. "Been here? Jack, she's not left your bedside for nine days. Doctor Brightman had to order her to get some rest, and even then she only complied after she collapsed on the way here to see you."
O'Neill was uncharacteristically silent.
Daniel continued. "Sam thought the naquada in her blood might work. Brightman wasn't sure it was worth it, that the amount of blood Sam would need to give would be too much. Sam still wanted to try."
"A blood transfusion?"
Daniel nodded. "Effectively. They took as much blood as was safe from her... and then some. You responded well. Sam became anaemic. Doctor Brightman refused to take anymore but Sam insisted, they thought one more transfusion would save you. It did. Sam had to have a transfusion herself she became so anaemic, but she's going to be okay."
There was as close to silence as ever there can be in an infirmary, the bleeping of machines obliterating the quiet.