“More,” the creature that was once Jack O’Neill croaked, extending his arm toward her as if asking for an injection.

Janet Fraiser hesitated, knowing she had already given the Colonel more than the maximum safe dosage of sedative. When she tried to explain to him why she couldn’t give “more”, the creature’s voice rose. “GIVE! ... Give.”

She paused, torn, but the pain in those brown eyes - eyes that, to some degree, still belonged to Jack O’Neill - decided her.

Gesturing toward the orderly, she knelt beside Colonel O’Neill and rolled up his shirt sleeve, leaning close to make the injection. O’Neill’s body slumped forward, and she stepped back, sympathy showing in her eyes. “Must have been in a lot of pain,” she whispered, turning toward the door.

Behind her, there was a soft moan. “Doc ... ”

She turned, disbelieving. “Colonel O’Neill?”

His lips formed the word ‘yes’.

Janet knelt beside him, smiling sadly. “So you are still in there somewhere.”

The Colonel nodded again. He reached out one shaking hand to touch her cheek. The other hand joined it. Caught off guard by the strangely gentle gesture, she stared into his eyes. She recognized the flash of wildness an instant too late.

For a primitive creature, he presented an impressive hoax, was her last strangely analytical thought before the hands dropped to her neck and she heard the last sound ever to reach her ears: the snap of her own spine.

O’Neill was dead almost instantly, his body riddled with bullet holes, lying in a pool of its own blood. He died for nothing, because Janet Fraiser was gone before the first bullet was fired.

The men, their minds hopelessly controlled by Hathor’s pheromones, were firing at her. The men of the SGC were shooting at her, Janet Fraiser!

Sick to her stomach at the thought of violating the very standard upon which she’d based her life - “first, do no harm” - but knowing what she had to do, she fired off a few rounds at them. She missed. They didn’t.

The first bullet struck her arm, only a flesh wound, nothing serious. Ironic that it should kill her by throwing her into the path of the second bullet.

The instant the second bullet struck her chest, she knew her life was over. While her medical mind catalogued the massive damage done by that one small projectile, she wistfully wished that the sarcophagus still worked. It didn’t. The sarcophagus was ruined, and she was dead.

She couldn’t speak, which meant she would have no last words. That wasn’t fair. She wanted to make an impressive dying speech. Couldn’t there at least be some sad background music?

But there were only the groans of a ravaged SGC, and the horrified faces of her friends hovering over her, slowly fading to gray.

The little girl collapsed in the gate room, her small body going limp as a rag doll. Janet shoved her way through the onlookers to kneel by the child’s side. Cassandra was pathetically pale, her red hair like copper against milk-white skin.

“Sam.” Janet’s eyes met blue ones, pleading helplessly. “Sam, we can’t ... ”

“Janet,” Carter said, trying hard to sound stern even though her own voice was shaking. “We have to. You know we do. Because we can’t save her, and if we keep her here, we will all die.”

With every instinct telling her to snatch up Cassandra and never let go, Janet bowed her head and slowly backed away. Sam took the child in her arms and looked up toward the control room.

“Chevron seven locked.”

After the event horizon stabilized, Sam walked up the ramp, carrying Cassandra. She turned to look back for just an instant, and Janet saw the tears glistening on her cheeks. Squaring her shoulders, the Captain stepped through the wormhole.

An instant later, the world exploded.

They told her to stay on Chulak. They told her that, if they failed, they wanted her to carry on in some small way. That they wanted one person in the universe to remember them as something other than crazed terrorists.

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stay, because it had been her plan too, and if they died it would be partly her fault.

So she told Teal’c she was coming with him, and he must have been able to see that he wasn’t going to change her mind, because he didn’t argue much. He just bowed his head slightly, and she could tell that, though he might not agree with her, he did understand.

If they died, she would die with them.

So she walked through the wormhole with Teal’c and his Jaffa friend. She wasn’t sure how she could feel vulnerable while standing between two hulking Jaffa carrying staff weapons, but she looked up at the automated defense system and felt fear.

After Teal’c’s friend went down, she grabbed his staff weapon, even though she didn’t really know how to use it, because she had to do something. She fired twice at the defense system, missing the first time. One of the round glass domes exploded on her second shot. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jack swoop in just as the first daggers of pain stabbed her chest.

She never knew whether they got the note through.

Daniel’s hands were shaking so much that the video was going to be all jumpy. Truth be known, Janet couldn’t blame him. It was bad enough to be in the middle of a battle. Having a mangled, bleeding, dying man stammering out his last goodbyes to a wife he loved and a child he would never meet made the situation infinitely worse.

“Listen to me!” She leaned over the soldier, who screamed in agony, his arms flailing as he sought to escape the pain. “You are not going to die! I need you to calm down, all right? I need you to - ”

At first, she didn’t realize what had happened. There had been a whistling sound, and a touch, like fingers brushing by, on the front of her uniform. Daniel’s face had blanched, and she forced herself to look down. She saw smoking fabric, and for an instant, her heart stopped.

She had come literally inches from death.

There had been times in Janet Fraiser’s life when she had been on the edge of eternity. Probably there had been times when she never knew just how close she had come to dying. This time felt different, because there was tangible evidence, proof that she was incredibly lucky.

She reached down and touched the charred cloth, then said a silent prayer of thanks that she would have many more years to take care of her people - people like this sobbing soldier, who, thanks to her, would live to meet his child.