disclaimer: I own nothing
Warnings: This story contains brain damage and the accidental and purposeful mistreatment of a person with brain damage, which is why I decided to put the M rating. Later chapters will contain some self-harm/suicidal thoughts/actions and the general angst and hardships that come with recovering from traumatic brain injuries.
Author's Note: I was debating about posting this, because I have so many other projects going on right now, but I thought, why not? The first chapter and the first part of chapter two are just sitting there, saying 'Post me! Post me!'. So here we go. My first attempt at M. And it was beta'd! Yeah!
Enjoy!
Colonel Jack O'Neill was sitting on his roof in Colorado Springs, wishing that he could escape to his cabin in Minnesota to go fishing.
He wouldn't actually do such a thing, even though he had time to do so right now. Even though it meant that he might actually be able to escape the thing that sometimes he just didn't want to face. It had been three months.
Shouldn't something have happened by now? Either bad or good?
Even the bad thing happening would have been better than staying in limbo. Not a damn thing happened in limbo. You got up and every day was. Exactly. The. Same. It was a routine when something like this should never have been a part of a routine, let alone have a routine revolve around it to begin with.
SG-1 was low on the mission list these days. Of course they were, when they were one member down. Refusing a replacement, because replacing was replacing and none of them could deal with that. Even if the word used was 'temporary'. Because they all knew that temporary was most likely being used to make them feel better instead of anything else.
Jack stared out over the yard, not even pretending to be using the telescope he had used a pretense to sit up here alone, away from the phone. It wasn't like anyone would know the difference anyway.
He let out a deep breath. The last time he had felt like this...he wasn't certain anymore. His first reaction would have been Charlie, but he didn't think that was it. When they had thought Daniel had been killed? When Carter had been taken over by Jolinar? There were so many times now that the people he loved were in danger and he didn't know what to do with it anymore.
But this was different. It was different because it was Carter. His smart, funny, had-a-strong-sense-of-duty second-in-command. Because for the last three months she had been in the worse limbo of all.
A coma.
Jack had a hard time reconciling this. His image of Carter did not include her laying deathly still in a bed, hooked up to machines. For almost four months.
He scowled to himself, because that was the only way he was going to let himself let out emotion. Carter shouldn't have been in a coma. It was his fault. He had gotten shot. He had slowed them down. She had brought up the rear to protect the rest of them. And she had almost given her life to protect them.
She still might. They didn't know. Every day, more or less, it was a trudge through the Air Force hospital because Fraiser had moved her out of the SGC, to see her. To see that she was still hooked up to the machines. To see if she was still alive. To see if it would be the day she woke up.
Carter was alive. Jack tried to remind himself that was what mattered. She was alive. She was breathing on her own. She hadn't opened her eyes. She didn't talk. As far as Jack was aware, she only moved sporadically. Not by her own choice. Fraiser had assured them that that little movement was a good sign, that Carter responded to things, but Jack didn't see the good in this. Carter was in a coma. She had been for nearly four months. It was his fault.
Daniel said it wasn't. But Jack knew otherwise.
.
SG-1 had been coming in hot that day.
Some of the locals had been friendly. The majority had seen them as horrible, unholy aliens. They hadn't even given them the chance to leave. They had been along the 'shoot first and ask questions later' variety. SG-1 had fallen back to the gate under fire.
Jack had been hit in the leg. He'd gone tumbling to the ground when the alien bullet had gone in. Teal'c had yanked him to his feet and supported him as they kept running. Daniel, always quick on his feet and usually the one to dial the gate, had been flying along ahead of them. They wouldn't be safe if he didn't get to the DHD, after all. If he couldn't dial them home.
Carter had been bringing up the rear, with Jack and Teal'c occupied. She had the iris transmitter, but she didn't need to be the one to dial the gate to use it. Their slight headstart was rapidly evaporating, hindered by Jack.
Daniel had reached the DHD, dialing Earth. Jack and Teal'c had stopped beside him. One problem, as Carter came up, hitting the code on the transmitter, was the positioning of the gate to the DHD. The DHD stood on a small cliff above the gate, no higher than ten feet. There was no way that the would have time to run down the path to it, not without getting shot. At this angle, though, they had been able to jump. And jump they had.
Daniel had gone first. Jack had tried to order Carter through next, but she had refused, covering them. He and Teal'c had jumped together. They had managed to keep their feet, stumbling through the gate. They had hurried out of the way, Jack limping as his leg bled all over the place. Carter hadn't come through. He had stood on the ramp, waiting.
Then she had. She had come flying through, body angle completely wrong for having jumped properly. She had hit the ramp limply and rolled down to the bottom, deathly still. Blood on her head. Blood pouring out of her head, from a bullet wound punched straight through her forehead.
Jack had gone running for her then, forgetting his own injury. He had cradled her head in his lap, disbelief at what he was seeing as the iris closed. More disbelief had run through him when he had seen the rise and fall of her chest.
Amazingly, Carter was alive. Even a bullet to the brain couldn't keep her down. The medical team had rushed in, taken her away. Jack had run after them and then been barred from the room. He'd had to be tended to.
Once he had been and they had debriefed, he, Teal'c, and Daniel had held vigil outside the infirmary. Jack had paced and paced that corridor, the gray unending and driving him crazy. They had been telling themselves that Carter would be okay. But none of them had really believed it. Because a penetrating head injury was almost always fatal. Carter had survived the first few minutes and literally fallen right into medical care.
Daniel had said things about how strong Carter was. How good the medical care here was. Everything that someone needed to say. Jack hadn't cared. He had paced and paced, not resting his leg like he was supposed to and not caring that he wasn't. Because he couldn't just sit still while Carter was having her brain patched up. While a bullet was being pulled out of that amazing brain. While she might have been dying.
Teal'c had stayed silent. Jack hadn't cared. He hadn't really wanted to hear anything to begin with. His pants had been stiff with Carter's blood, but even taking the time to go and change them was time that he couldn't take. Because Fraiser might come out at any moment and tell them if Carter was alive or dead and he couldn't miss that. He couldn't hear that information secondhand.
It had seemed like forever before Fraiser came out. She was still wearing the scrubs she had used during the surgery. There was blood on them. Jack's stomach had lurched at that and he had wished that he had been able to tell something from the look on her face. But Fraiser was pretty good at keeping those things inside, not being the sort of doctor that gave away things like that with her expressions.
She had told them that Carter had survived the surgery. That she was in the SGC's version of the ICU. Jack had felt so relieved by that, that his knees had nearly given out. Not that they needed much help to do so.
They had been allowed to visit Carter. At first, they had expected her to wake up. Then she hadn't. It hadn't taken long for Fraiser and the other doctors to determine that Sam was in a coma. The news had stunned them.
Carter had been shot in the head. She had survived. Now she was in a coma?
It hadn't felt real. It couldn't be real. But the proof had been right in front of them, no matter how much they had wanted to deny it.
.
Jack dragged a hand over his face. He felt the stubble under his hand. He needed to shave. He needed to do a lot of things.
Carter was in a coma.
He should do something.
The problem was, for all the training he had, for all the things that he had been through, Jack couldn't do a damn thing. He may have been Carter's commanding officer, but he couldn't order her to wake up. All he could do was sit beside her and try to prompt and bribe and threaten her into waking up. He had tried ordering her, when he had been alone with her. It hadn't worked.
Now every day he could, he went to the Air Force Hospital with Daniel and Teal'c to see her. To see that she was still breathing. To see that she was still asleep.
Jack hated that he wanted something to happen, either way. He was on team 'waking up', of course. But Carter wasn't the kind of person that was meant to stay in a coma for years and years. If she was going die, he wished that she would just do it. He hated that. But he did.
In all honesty, he hated going to the hospital. It reminded him too much of Charlie. Charlie had shot himself in the head with Jack's personal sidearm. He had made it to the hospital. He had died there.
Going to see Carter reminded him of what had happened to Charlie. It reminded him of what could have happened to Charlie. It made the two events merge in his mind. He hated Carter for that. He had realized that within three weeks. He hated her for going through something similar enough to trigger his memories. That wasn't fair, Jack knew. He hadn't told anyone, though he was pretty sure that Daniel suspected.
Jack hadn't talked to anyone about that. He didn't want to go baring his emotions and all that. He had done the bare minimum when it came to seeing the shrink. He had been approved and cleared. But Fraiser had been the one bold enough to tell him that he needed to talk about it more. To understand that it was more than Carter.
It was mostly Carter. But he couldn't deny that his past was coming up again. Jack hated that it did. He would never forget Charlie or what had happened to him, but he wished that it would stop coming up so prominently in his life. Especially when this involved another person. Carter was who mattered right now. Not the past that he had been wrestling with and regretting for the past few years.
It wasn't the first time he had been worried about Carter either.
"You really out did yourself this time, didn't you, Carter?" he muttered to himself.
He stayed up on the roof for a while longer. Then he descended the ladder. Hesitated, debating between the car and the house, and headed inside the house. He was considering grabbing a beer and knocking it back, but he would be heading to the hospital soon enough. He, Daniel, and Teal'c had already agreed to meet there later. Daniel would be driving Teal'c, so that was something that Jack didn't have to worry about.
That didn't change the fact that he needed something to do with his time. He had already tried the driving around aimlessly thing. It hadn't worked. He had wanted it to work. Because it would have been nice if Jack had been able to get out of his own head for a little while.
Because being in his head was about the worst place that Jack could be right now. He was well aware of it. Daniel and Teal'c where aware of it too. But there wasn't much that any of them could do about it right now. He kept going over that last mission. The beginning. Before it had gone wrong.
SG-1 was walking down the corridor towards the gate room, Carter bouncing in to join them a few moments behind because men and women got ready separately. She was pulling her engineer's cap firmly over her hair.
"Late again, Carter." Jack remarked, just to give her a hard time.
She gave him a look, that familiar, slightly amused look with the curving of her lips that wasn't quite a smile.
Beside Jack, Daniel was talking about what had been seen over the MALP. Not a whole lot -mostly a cliff, a small one with a path- but the stones that were around the Stargate had some fancy long-dead language carved on them and Daniel was over the moon about it.
Jack thought about teasing him more about that, but decided to be nice. There would be plenty of time on the planet for it anyway. He was looking forward to it.
Daniel continued talking, Carter continued bouncing, and Teal'c remained stoically silent, but taking it all in. It was his team, ready to go beyond the Gate and into the unknown.
He wouldn't have it any other way.
They walked into the gate room, where the Stargate stood inactive. Jack turned on his heel to look towards the control room. Hammond stood behind Walter's chair, watching them.
"Dial her up!" Jack called to Walter.
On cue, the gate engaged and began to spin.
"Chevron one encoded."
Jack turned his attention back to his team as Daniel and Carter got into a small scuffle. He had no idea what had happened between the two of them when his attention had been gone, but they could have saved it for when their general wasn't watching.
"Knock it off, kids."
"Chevron two encoded."
Daniel and Carter broke apart, both looking a little sheepish. Carter straightened her hat and, in a total kid move, popped Daniel in the gut with her elbow when she thought Jack wasn't looking. It wasn't hard, but Daniel scowled and rubbed his gut.
"Keep it up and you'll be in time out when we get to the planet, Major." Jack said, tone warning, words teasing.
Even if he were a hard-ass commanding officer, he wouldn't have actually inflicted any punishment on to Carter on the planet. Partly because giving his second-in-command, who was a full grown woman, a time out bordered on the strange and possibly creepy.
"Chevron three encoded."
Carter grinned. Teal'c, however, arched an eyebrow and looked between Jack and Carter.
"What is this 'time out', Colonel O'Neill?" he asked.
"It's a punishment, Teal'c. For kids. They misbehave, they have to sit in a designated spot and do nothing for a few minutes. Cool their heads. Think about it." he explained, wondering how Teal'c had a kid and didn't know this.
What did the Jaffa have instead of time out? Was it 'spend some time in silence and pray to your god'? Jack decided that he didn't want to know the answer to that.
"Chevron four encoded."
"I thought about what I did to Daniel before I did it." Carter volunteered.
Daniel may have been the most vulnerable of the group, in the department of physical abilities, but Jack decided that Carter filled the 'youngest child' role in their team. She was smart and funny and knew how -and was allowed- to get away with things.
That uncomfortably made Jack think of their age difference. He was what -sixteen? Seventeen years older than her?
He decided he didn't want to think about that either.
"Chevron five encoded."
"So. Danny. You think this planet is going to pan out with anything interesting or be a dud?"
The 'dud' planets were boring. Peaceful was boring.
"I think it could be interesting. I'd have to-"
"Ah!"
Jack theatrically raised a hand.
"Chevron six encoded."
Daniel was adjusting his hat and glasses, nearly bouncing on his toes. Jack looked up towards Hammond, giving the general a mock 'this is what I have to deal with' look.
Hammond just stared back. Oh well. He'd get a smile out of him sooner or later.
"Chevron seven, locked."
Jack turned to watch the wormhole burst out and suck back in, forming the rippling blue of the Stargate. Hammond leaned towards the microphone.
"SG-1, you have a go."
Jack gave Hammond a two fingered salute and fell in alongside Carter as they headed up the ramp, hoping that the planet on the other side of the gate would be interesting.
The memory hurt. It had been interesting. In the worst way possible.
He ran a hand over his face, sighing heavily. He had to keep going back there. He needed to stop it. He looked at his watch. He needed to go. Thank God.
Jack somehow managed to kill time before he headed to the hospital. He turned the radio up on the drive, trying to focus on what he was doing and the music, but he couldn't get his mind to turn away from all the images that were inside of it right now.
He parked. He had been here before. He felt that most Air Force personnel that had been stationed in Colorado Springs had been here at one time or another. If not because they needed it, because they were visiting a friend. Jack had been here often enough lately that he had a usual parking spot.
He spotted Daniel's car. He had no idea if Fraiser was here. Doctors parked elsewhere. He went through the familiar routine of walking through the parking lot and into the hospital. Into the front lobby, where he was pretty sure he was familiar with everyone who worked here now.
Jack signed himself in, clipped on his badge, and went looking for Daniel and Teal'c. They didn't wait for each other anymore. It was just awkward and a little depressing if one or two of them waited for the others and then they all walked to Carter's room together.
He took the elevator, which was empty. When it came to the correct floor, he walked down the hall. It was quiet in this part of the hospital. This was where long term patients were. Carter was the only coma patient, but there was a finality to this part of the hospital that Jack didn't like.
He passed a nurse that he knew well. She paused to talk to him, which was the last thing Jack wanted.
"Colonel O'Neill!" she greeted with a plastic smile that she must have been taught in nursing school. "Back again?"
"Yep."
Nurse Andrews -she insisted that he call her Alison, but Jack had always refused- gave him a look that was almost pitying.
"I know that you care about her, but maybe it isn't a good thing for you to be here so often. Talking to a person who can't hear you..."
That made Jack want to hit her in the face, something that he didn't often feel. It disturbed him, but he was getting sick of the fake smiles and the 'helpful' advice.
"You don't know that she can't hear us."
"I just meant-"
"Excuse me." Jack said curtly, continuing to walk down the hallway.
He stopped when he came to the doorway of the room. He had no idea why. A part of him didn't want to walk through that door. But he had to. In large part because he knew that she would do the same for him.
Taking a deep breath, Jack stepped through the doorway.
Author's Note: I've seen plenty of stories like this with O'Neill or Daniel being the victim, but none like this. Posting will be slow (probably ever week and a half to two weeks, because of my other stories, but I usually get them out faster than I thought, so who knows) but it will be finished.
Please let me know what you think!