Home is such an elusive thing. Does it consist of the house your parents brought you home from the hospital to, the house you've spent the most time in, or the house you are currently living in? Does it consist of a house at all? Is it a town, a state, a county, a country? Is it a room, a street, or a school district? Is it a person, or a family, perhaps? Does it change when you move around, or is it always the same place, person, or even attitude?
What, after all, is home?
There is a good deal of our lives that we spend in between where we are and home. Sometimes these times take years. Daniel's home was farther than any Earth human's had been before: He wanted to be home on Abydos with his wife. The SGC was the pathway home.
Oh sure, SG-1 were his friends. He would die for them, and he knew they would for him. But he would be leaving soon. SG-1 was a temporary phase—a hotel room, if you will.
Sure, the SGC and what they were doing was important. He would help with everything he was, he would translate, and mediate, and learn. He would die protecting the freedom of people on planets he didn't even know existed, if it came to that. They were people, after all. They had a right to go home and be happy too.
It was just a means to and end. A noble means, true, and a noble end, most certainly, but still only a momentary bit of his life.
He would be leaving soon.
And in one day, that dream was shattered. He lay there, watching the reason he woke up every day, the reason he learned the military's ways, the reason he had stayed so long, die by the hand of a trusted friend.
He knew it had to be, but still.
As he was packing up his office, SG-1 came by one by one to ask why. He had told them he was not staying, hadn't he? Didn't he make it clear that he was only there to find his beloved?
There's a moment when you have to choose to get off the path and enter home. As you stand in the doorway, you pace the porch. What if home has changed? What then? Is it still home? Are you still the person who called it home?
Sometimes the pathway becomes home.
Daniel had a brief moment of clarity that shaped the rest of his life. And the lives he lived after that.
Daniel was home. And this time, he knew he would never need a pathway again.
They made sure he knew that.