Headaches

Title: Headaches

Author: BadgerGater

Email: [email protected]

Category: Drama, Sequel to Legacy, from Janet's POV

Rating: PG, language, after all, Jack's involved

Season: Three.

Summary: A little sequel to Legacy

Pairing: None

Warnings: None

Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, Gekko Productions; all the powers that be, not me; This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement intended. The story is the property of the author and may not be posted without the author's consent.

Authors Notes: For Carol, who's going to make a medical expert out of me yet.

Shortly after "Legacy"

I always knew that moment would come back to haunt me, I knew it by the look he had thrown at me that day, the probing 'I don't have time to deal with this now but I never forget a thing' look that warned me, sooner or later, it would be tossed back into my face.

And now it had.

Lord, talk about your headaches. There were plenty in this job, as the Chief Medical Officer of the Stargate program, and most days I swear a certain gray haired, brown eyed, hardheaded Irish Colonel was chief among them.

Hardheaded. Hmmmph. Good thing, actually.

Colonel Jack O'Neill was sitting, well mostly sitting, really rather sort of half sitting, half reclining, on a bed in my infirmary, with a really, really pissed off look on his face. Directed at me.

"I do have another headache," he said, stating the obvious. It was what I would expect, what with the way he'd staggered through the gate and wobbled into my infirmary, a gash in his head and blood running down the side of his face, Daniel half carrying him.

"So which report is this going to show up in?" he said, not just sarcastically, but with an edge of genuine anger. Add to that a little hostility and a large dose of accusation too. A lot of emotion, for ten little words.

He could be such a bastard, I thought. I wonder how his wife put up with him? Oooh, Janet, that was unfair. No matter how mad at him I am, I have no business injecting his personal messes into this professional one.

Keep your cool, Janet.

Taking a deep breath, and counting to ten, very very slowly as I pulled on gloves, I went to work. "What happened, Colonel?" I asked, quickly assessing his condition. His pupils were equal and reactive, good; he seemed alert; and certainly his mouth was working just fine.

"What happened? What happened? I'd sure as hell like to know what happened myself." He shot one of his patented extremely pissed-off Colonel glares at SG-1's archaeologist who stood quietly leaning against the exam room wall. "One of Daniel's friends hit me over the head with some big hammer-thingy. For no reason at all."

"Hammer-thingy?" I asked.

"Yeah, like a tomahawk or something," he glared at Daniel.

"He wasn't one of my 'friends,' Jack, not really." Jackson said in his own defense.

"Oh, right, you just invited him over to our campfire to hit me over the head." O'Neill was waving his right hand in the air, finger pointing at Daniel. "What *did* you say to him? Huh."

Its hard to take a blood pressure reading when the arm you're trying to put the bp cuff around keeps waving in the air. "Colonel, please," I requested, making another grab at his arm.

He turned the glare on me, then relented, his gaze fixed once again on his team's archaeologist/linguist.

"I told him you were the leader of our group. I didn't *know* he was going to hit you."

"Well, he did." O'Neill was nearly sitting upright now, eyes focused on Daniel. "And it's your job to figure out what these people are going to do."

"Jack, I didn't know that the word I used didn't mean *exactly* commanding officer in that context."

"What did it mean?" O'Neill was not relenting.

BP 130/80. Pretty high for him. All that glaring and yelling was probably indicating he was a tad agitated which just might make his pressure a bit high, ya think, Janet?

Daniel again spoke softly. "Well, uh, actually, I guess it meant more like owner. He, uh, apparently thought he was doing me a favor, freeing me from your slavery," and I heard Daniel mutter under his breath. "Sometimes that's the way it feels, the way you boss me around."

O'Neill nearly leaped off the table. "What was that crack?"

His heartrate seemed a bit on the rapid side, too. Of course, that might be expected, due to all the jumping around he was doing.

"Oh, just, sometimes I really feel for you, the way you get knocked around." Daniel's always a quick thinker, thank God.

"Sir, I need you to sit still for a moment so I can take a look at this wound, see what we have here."

The Colonel turned the full power of the glare at me. "What we have here is my head, with a rather large gash on it and blood running out of it at a nice, steady pace. Nothing you haven't seen before," he snapped.

"Are you hurt anywhere else?"

"What, this isn't enough?"

Maddening SOB, when he wants to be. I sighed. Some of the most difficult moments in my life are in dealing with children, and I'm *not* talking about my daughter. "Colonel, I need to clean this, get an x-ray and this will require several stitches, none of which I can do while you're moving around like a squirming three year old." I turned to Daniel and the rest of SG-1, standing just inside the doorway. "Out, all of you, now. He'll be just fine." If I don't kill him first, I barely restrained myself from saying out loud.

They left, and I turned back to my patient. "Colonel, just sit still for a moment while I clean this." He grumbled, but sat still, flinching as I used warm water to rinse the blood from his face and scalp. Nasty cut, with plenty of swelling around it my probing fingers revealed as I used a gauze and the pink Hibiclens to clean the wound.

"Ouch!" He turned the glare on me. "Geez, Doc, think you could just hit me again and get it over with?"

"Sorry, Sir."

"I'll bet," he stared down at his hands, pointedly avoiding meeting my eyes.

"I'll have this clean in a moment, Colonel," I explained, and he silently tolerated the treatment. Finished, I sent him for x-rays, which came back negative, and then it was my turn to stitch him up.

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So, I thought as I gathered up the supplies and equipment I needed, how had things gotten to this ugly state? It was just a couple of weeks ago, in the midst of the mental health crisis with Daniel, that I had been forced to reveal, in a meeting with SG-1, Dr. MacKenzie and Gen. Hammond, that the Colonel's medical records weren't quite as entirely private as he thought they were. I hadn't been able to meet his eyes when I'd tried to explain how MacKenzie knew about his headaches.

Colonel O'Neill was military. He should understand, I had orders to follow, too. Orders that included noting medical matters that might be related to gate travel, and might impact the program, not just the individual.

He should understand that. He didn't. Or at least he didn't want to.

I had had a vague hope that, what with the whole thing with Daniel, and then Machello's nasty little devices infecting the both of us, that maybe he would forget. Maybe, once he'd thought about it, he'd see my side of things and let it slide. I should have known better. He'd been distant and cold toward me ever since. Angry. Disappointed. Disapproving. Much, much more guarded. He told anyone so little as it was, and this had just made it worse.

There had to be a way to restore the ease between us, regain the trust, or at least, call a truce, if we were to continue working together. I had to know he would tell me and my staff anything, and everything. It had been such a hard won battle to start with, to gain the confidence of this private, almost reclusive man.

And now, it seemed, it was all gone, all the hard work undone.

I started by injecting the inside and around the wound with 2% xylocaine with epinephrine. Yes, it hurts and it makes the wound bleed, a lot. He didn't complain. He was staring at me, a little bleary eyed as the drugs began to take hold.

I didn't look at him for the uncomfortably silent minute or two while I waited for the area around the wound to go completely numb. Using 4-0 chromic dissolvable sutures, I began the routine but always delicate job of closing under the skin, then added 5-0 silk sutures to close the outside.

"So which report is this going to show up in?"

The words stung.

The look he was directing at me reminded me very much of the one I'd seen him give Colonel Frank Cromwell, that long-ago day in a dark SGC hallway. I knew a little of their history from O'Neill's medical records, and had surmised enough of the rest to know the Colonel had nursed that little grudge for gee, only eight or nine years.

O'Neill mad at you was not a thing you wanted to be a part of, not if you were a junior officer, not if you were his doctor, not if you'd once thought of yourself as a member of that tiny circle of people he called his friends.

Unforgiving? Yes, that was the Colonel. Holding a grudge? Oh, you bet. Working around a pissed off O'Neill was like juggling nitroglycerin. Un-nerving. Volatile. Explosive. Deadly. I'd just never had the full fury of that look directed at me before, and I didn't much like it.

I sighed. "Colonel, you know the military loves records. All kinds of records." Hell, O'Neill's medical records alone filled half a file cabinet. "And because this operation is so unique, I have to keep even more detailed records on everyone who goes through the Stargate or works around the Stargate or even looks at the Stargate." I paused in my work, to look him in the eye, peering into those very intense, still angry brown eyes. "Sir, I have a job to do, and I do it as I see best, for my patients, and for the program. There was a pattern forming, one I could see. And when McKenzie, my superior officer by the way, reviewed the records, he couldn't miss the pattern either."

"I see," he said coldly, and I knew he didn't.

Angrily, I retorted, "Well maybe someday, if I ever reach the exalted rank of Colonel, I'll be so self-righteous as to judge other people's motives against my own needs, rather than the good of everyone else."

I stopped. Oh my God, what had I just said? And to the second in command of the SGC.

I snuck a quick look at his face. He wasn't looking at me, he was staring at the far wall.

Well, the words were out. They couldn't be taken back. I blundered on. "Colonel, my job here is to keep everyone as healthy as possible, and that's no easy thing, dealing with the unknown every day. I have to try to balance your needs, as my patient, and the needs of the Air Force, my employer, and then remember that this is all experimental. There's no way to know what is or isn't significant in the long run. There's many a night I go home and don't sleep, because I wonder if I've done the right thing or missed some little thing that could prove to be important. I've got the lives of every person here in my hands, the safety of hundreds, not to mention the threat of disaster to the whole planet, if I make a blunder.

"Quite frankly, Colonel O'Neill, I've cut you slack as often as I could. I've left things out of your medical records that I probably shouldn't have, because I knew they were personal. I've given you time to work things out in your own way, when I could see you needed to," I told him, not needing to mention Hathor and the Goa'uld larvae, and his struggle to find his equilibrium, after. "There's probably already enough holes in your medical records that could get me court martialed twice over. And booted out of the AMA."

"It's a judgment call, each time I talk to you, as to what's a doctor-patient conversation, what's a friend to friend conversation. Just like, for you, there's the Colonel-Captain conversations and the friend to friend conversations. Or at least I used to think so."

When I stopped to catch my breath, I noticed he was silent, watching me intently, studying me and thinking.

I tied the final suture, knowing I'd said quite enough, more than enough, actually. Either he would understand and things would go back to normal with us, or they wouldn't. He stayed quiet as I added steri-strips, gauze and tape to cover the wound.

"Are you done yet, Doc?" he asked quietly.

"Yes. Finished," I answered softly.

"Good. Thanks," he looked up, and I knew there was more to that question and answer than just referring to the six neat little stitches I'd just added to his rather large collection.

He sighed. "I don't suppose you're going to let me go home..."

"No. Sorry, Colonel, you know the drill. You have to stay here tonight for observation. That's routine with a head injury. If nothing else comes up, you can go home tomorrow."

"Sounds fair," he said quietly, looking up, meeting my eyes. "Look, Doc, I, uh, appreciate it," O'Neill said waving his hand, indicating he didn't mean just the stitches or the promise to let him go home.

"You're welcome, Colonel. Anytime," I answered with a sigh of relief. I understood. That was as much apology as I was ever going to get out of him. It was just a little thing, but it was a start.

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FINIS