Title: Welcome Home

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the world is not. I claim nothing but the plot.

Rating: PG.

Summary: It felt like friendly faces had been a little thin on the ground lately. 400 words.

Spoilers: Eureka post-3.17 "Have an Ice Day"

Notes: This was the second tag in a row I had trouble finding a story hook.

Jack watched Taggart shiver in the infirmary bed, silvery blanket clutched around his shoulders as he waxed eloquent to Tess about his experience with the 'icy anaconda', and felt a little of the alarm that had gripped him upon finding the cryptozoologist's frozen body next to the ice core fade.

Taggart was eccentric, often a trouble-attractor on par with Fargo, and prone to flights of fanciful exaggeration, but he was brilliant in his field, and one of the few remaining pillars of Jack's life-changing first year in Eureka. When the newly minted sheriff had been struggling to keep up with the challenges and absurdities of dealing with a town full of self-centered scientists whose funding often outstripped their sense, Taggart had been a cheerfully madcap, unpretentious presence, who never treated Jack as though his average intelligence and badge made him inferior or irrelevant.

With Stark and Kim dead, Beverly evil and on the run, Spencer back at grad school, Henry away at NASA on a project, Allison on maternity leave, and so many of the other scientists he'd got to know at Global Dynamics either dead as a result of out-of-control experiments or redacted during Eva's tenure, it felt like friendly faces had been a little thin on the ground lately. It hadn't helped that Zoe had started talking about going off to college, either; maybe that was why Jack had been so relieved to see Taggart again, and so thrown to find him apparently lifeless in the ice core room.

He saw Vince and Jo frequently, of course, Fargo and Zane slightly less often, and Tess had recently become a welcome constant; but the latter two hadn't been there from the beginning. They hadn't known the town the way he'd first seen it, and lately, he'd found himself mourning those early days. This was home to Jack now-- this town and its residents-- as strange as that seemed to him after all the years he'd spent living in the city and roaming the country as a U.S. Marshal. Eureka's people were his to protect-- and no matter where he happened to be located, Taggart was always going to be one of them.

"Maybe it's a malfunction in the cooling unit?" he spoke up, adding his two cents to the conversation.

The sooner they could figure this out, the sooner they could stop it from threatening any of the others.

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