The child is fragile, with light brown hair and caramel-colored skin. Her tiny shoulders are stooped beneath the weight of too much pain. She can’t be more than four.

She walks unsteadily through the devastated no man’s land where flowers might once have grown. Jack is the only one who sees her. She is carrying a bomb.

He lifts his gun, sights the tiny chest, all the while thinking No, please no.

“Go back!” He shouts at her.

Her steps falter but she’s terrified of the men who sent her, so she keeps coming. She looks frightened.

She’ll die anyway, Jack tells himself. His finger is light on the trigger. She’s getting dangerously close, and now she’s crying, her small frame wracked with sobs. Can she possibly understand what’s going to happen to her?

She’ll die anyway, she’ll die anyway, O’Neill repeats like a mantra. Then he looks into her eyes, the eyes of a doomed child.

She has Charlie’s eyes. Eyes that have haunted him for a thousand sleepless nights. Eyes that speak of pain and tragedy and lost innocence.

Jack puts down the gun. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

He closes his eyes. An instant later, the world explodes.

Faraway sounds reach his ears, pulling him toward the surface. When he forces his eyes open, he sees blurs of green and gray. He is being carried. Blinding pain steals his breath, but he can’t tell where it’s coming from.

“Jack?” Daniel’s face swims into view. “God, Jack. We have to get the bleeding stopped!” He shouts at someone else, probably Carter.

“I know!” She returns, equally desperate. “Teal’c, try to make a pressure bandage.”

Jack feels something pressed against his skull. A moment later, something else is pressed against his chest. The pain increases, and he writhes uncontrollably within Teal’c’s powerful grip.

“Kid?” He chokes, a froth of pink blood escaping his lips along with the single word. Punctured lung. Won’t be the first time for him.

A hand touches his face, gently, a woman’s touch. “She’s alive; I’ve got her,” Carter’s voice says softly.

It can’t be possible. “Bomb?” He whispers.

“It didn’t go off. We don’t know why.”

“How ... ”

“You were shot, sir. You’re gonna be okay.”

Daniel dials home. O’Neill hears the familiar whoosh as the wormhole connects. It will be the last time he goes through a Stargate.

No more. Not after this.

It’s close, for a while. He has a fractured skull, again, and a shattered leg, again. When he finally regains consciousness, his team is waiting there, trying to hide their relieved smiles.

Three different faces, three different personalities, three good people who have become the second family he doesn’t deserve.

After they’ve left, Doc breaks the news that he’ll never be able to return to field duty. He’ll walk again, but he won’t run much, certainly not well enough to be on the SGC’s flagship team.

She’s surprised by how well he takes it.

“Wasn’t planning on going back anyway,” is all he says.

SG-1 becomes a 3-man team. Samantha Carter finally gets her much-deserved promotion to Lt. Colonel, and Jack O’Neill plans to retire to a lake with no pesky fish in it.

And then one day General Hammond drops by for a chat and casually happens to mention that he’s being promoted to Chief of Homeworld Security, and would Jack like to become Brigadier General Jack O’Neill, Commander of the SGC?

He doesn’t go through the gate any more, but he still gets to work with his family, and in the end he gains something even more important.

The girl has Charlie’s eyes. Her name is Anael, and she likes ice cream and swings and sunshine. Her parents died when she was very small; she doesn’t like to talk about them. Jack doesn’t make her.

She fills a space in his heart that has been empty since Charlie died. She won’t replace his son; no child could ever do that. But his life gets a little brighter every time she smiles, and he loves telling people, “This is my daughter.”

Carter comes over one day, and they watch Anael run around the yard with the puppy Jack got for her. She named the adorable chocolate lab Daniel, innocently oblivious to the fact that it’s a female.

“Don’t you ever miss going through the gate, sir?” Carter asks suddenly.

He smiles a little, watching his daughter twirl, arms out flung. “Sometimes,” he says. “But it was over for me from the moment I saw her carrying that bomb. I could never make that choice again. Never.”

Anael chooses that moment to laugh, her voice light and carefree, her eyes no longer shadowed by haunting memories of the horrors she has lived.

Jack calls her Annie.

She calls him Daddy.