This is just before The Curse, season 4.

(0)

"You're very quiet tonight," Jillian remarked.

She was seated on her couch with her laptop on the coffee table in front of her, helping Daniel organize his notes on the Unas society of P3X-888.

Daniel looked over at her from the matching chair. She had all her long hair carelessly caught in a ribbon. Small wisps rioted over her forehead and the pale, ivory column of her neck. In her eyes Daniel saw curiosity and the same hunger for knowledge that had stalked him all his life. Was that the reason, he wondered, that she fired all this longing in his soul?

"I've been thinking," Daniel answered.

His tone was deliberately gentle, but Jillian alerted to the subtle difference immediately. He saw her stiffen ever so slightly.

"About?" She asked in a hushed voice.

"Something I want to talk to you about and I'm not sure how to start," he admitted.

Daniel watched as she drew her legs up onto the couch, unconsciously curling up in a protective ball. He moved over onto the couch beside her. God, when it came to hearts hers was made of the same fragile dandelion fluff as his.

"It's okay," he said, "It's not about us. Well, not like what I think you're thinking anyway."

Some of the tension ran out of her and she smiled tentatively.

"Jill, in the last few months, since we've been together, I've barely managed to escape from Sokar, vanished out of phase and might never have been found. I was captured by an Unas. Jack got trapped on Eudora. He and Teal'c almost died in deep space. I've been shot at, chased…..Even before we got together, I've been presumed dead," He paused when he ran out of breath.

"That's why we get hazard pay isn't it?" she asked, trying to sound light and casual about it.

Jillian was still looking hesitant. Her eyes were shadowed like the forest. Her eyebrows knitted together in a way that furrowed her forehead.

"Jill," he waited until she looked at him, and then spoke in one long rush, as if he wanted to get it out before he could change his mind. "Listen. I know when we first got together you told me you had birth control covered and I do believe you. But there isn't anything that's one hundred percent effective and the last thing I want to do is leave you with tough decisions and a fatherless child, so Ican participate if you want me to. It's not like I would mind. The alternative is…."

"Daniel, stop," she begged. "Stop. Please."

He broke off immediately at the pain-filled edge in her voice.

"What's wrong?"

To his horror, Jillian paused and wiped tears from her eyes with her fingertips.

"Daniel, I…. God, you're so sweet…I should have told you sooner. I…. can't have children."

A profound stillness settled over Daniel. Jillian was more wounded than he had ever imagined.

"Jill. Sweetheart. Are you sure?" He had gone instantly from being concerned about creating a problem for her, to simple concern for her, "I mean, doctors are wrong about this stuff all the time…"

"No, I'm sure," she paused and took a deep breath, "Ovarian cancer runs in my family. It took my grandmother, two of my aunts, three of my cousins and … it took my mother."

"Oh god," Daniel murmured, "Jill, we don't have to talk about this is you don't want to…"

"No, I want to," she said, hurriedly, "You're the first person I've ever talk to about it that might understand."

"Okay." He shifted closer to her in a slow, controlled movement, as if he was approaching a wounded deer.

"Have you ever watched someone die of cancer, Daniel?" Her profile was pure stone as she stared straight ahead, not seeing what lay before her but what she had once witnessed long ago.

He shook his head, filled with sorrow at his helplessness to change her past, or to save her from having to remember it now.

"My parents… died in an accident. They were killed instantly." Misery lurked in his eyes at the forced memory.

Jillian looked equally as haunted. "If you had to lose them, consider that a kindness. My mother died by inches, a little at time, before our eyes and there was nothing we could do to stop it; and after she was gone, I lost my father a little time too," she paused and rubbed the palms of her hand on her jeans. "When she died my grandmother told me she had become an angel and could still look down on me from heaven. I remember my father said my mother had already been an angel and I had never heard him sound so angry. We never talked about her again. Sometimes I think it would have been much better if they had died together. He was never the same after. My father was one more person I lost to that damned disease."

Daniel considered that for a moment. He had never thought about his parent's relationship. In truth, he still thought of them as mother and father, not as husband and wife. But even before he had been born, they had worked together as a team. In the days when women were fighting for equal rights, his mother had already been a respected archaeologist in her own right and his father's equal partner in life. He wondered now what one would have done without the other.

He realized his hands were shaking and clasped them firmly together, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward to look into Jillian's storm-tossed eyes.

"When I was twenty my cousin was diagnosed with it, in its advanced stages. Two years later she was gone. She was only eight years older than me," she paused and took a long shaking breath, "and that was when I made the decision to have a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. There were side effects at first and there are things in the future I will need to be aware of, but I'm fine now. I just….can 't have children; at least not my own."

He wasn't sure exactly what the long technical name of her surgery meant but he was sure that if she had wanted to give him details, she would have. Daniel was beginning to feel wretched for bringing any of this up, for making her relive it.

Jillian looked up at him with desolation in her eyes. She shivered and hugged herself.

"I should have told you sooner," she repeated, "I don't know if having children is important to you or not, but you deserved to know. When I made the decision to have the surgery, I knew that if I ever wanted a child the world has no shortage of them. I honestly wasn't thinking about being in a relationship with someone else or how it would affect him. All I knew, and all I still know, is that I could never make a child go through what I did when my mother was dying, or be forced to grow up without a mother at all."

Daniel's gaze became unfocused for a moment.

"I never thought about it, whether I want children," he murmured, finally, "I just know I agree with you. That's what started this whole conversation, not wanting a child to grow up without a father."

"So you aren't upset?" she asked, hopefully.

"No," he said, quickly and now he reached for her. She seemed much less brittle, much less likely to shatter in his arms or resist his embrace all together. "Come here."

Her arms slipped around his waist, her hands moving up to rest on his shoulders. She was shaking so he stroked her hair gently.

"You're all right," he whispered.

"You're not mad?"

"No, of course not! Why would I be mad?" he paused, "To be honest, and I'm going to hate how this sounds, but it's the truth, I'm relieved. Do you understand why?"

Jillian had her face resting on his chest at this point, seeking comfort.

"I do, even I feel that. I don't have to worry about going through a wormhole and wondering what it might be doing to someone else, someone helpless."

"Yeah," he nodded and kissed the top of her head, "For right now, given what we do, it's better if it's just the two of us."

Jillian looked up then, eyelashes still damp.

"And in the future?" she asked.

Gentle kisses, short and sweet, fell on her forehead, her eyelids and cheeks, ending finally at the corner of her mouth.

"We'll worry about the future when it gets here, okay?" He said, in between kisses, "We'll figure it out then."

Jillian turned towards him, curling up in a ball in Daniel's arms. They clung together like that in silence for a moment, two souls who had weathered the same storm.

"Let me take you out to dinner," Daniel suggested, gently.

"Out?"

"Yeah, somewhere nice, with china plates and silverware, something that didn't come in paper or cardboard or off a cafeteria tray." His fingers were making comforting swirls between her shoulder blades.

She smiled a little. "Are there such places?"

"There's one I know of," he admitted, "It has dinner and dancing."

"And dancing? Where did you learn to dance?"

Jillian sat up to look into his eyes.

"When I was 12 or 13, I was moved to a foster home closer to the private school I was attending. My foster mother taught ballroom dancing. There were two other boys in the house at the time and she made sure we all learned how to dance. I think she thought we'd probably all ask someone to the prom eventually, or something like that."

"Did you?" Jillian asked. This was a much more pleasant memory and she let herself bask in his willingness to share it. She knew what Daniel was doing, what he was best at – talking to change a situation to his liking. He was distracting her, altering the mood. He was driving the demons of painful memories and harsher realities back into the dungeon from whence they had been summoned, with nothing more at his command than the soft cadence of his voice and his innate ability to read emotional responses.

Jillian loved him for it.

"Learn to dance?" he asked.

"Ask someone to the prom."

"Oh! No. No," his smile melted her, "I had graduated high school before then and moved to another foster home closer to the UCLA."

"So you have all these mad dancing skills that never get used?"

"Well, I wouldn't say that, but I won't embarrass you on a dance floor, if you want to risk it."

"I think my curiosity is piqued enough that now I have to see," she was smiling a little. The shadows in her eyes were lifting.

"I'm only doing this to get you back in that little black dress you wore the last time we went out," his dulcet voice hummed with something sultry.

"Well in that case," she said, giving him sultry right back, "Your black suit with that frosted blue shirt?"

Daniel lifted an eyebrow. "Yeah?"

"Please?"

He kissed her forehead again, barely brushing his lips against her skin. "Whatever you want."

He had just raked her soul over the coals of a painful memory. Right at the moment, he'd wear a clown costume if she asked him.

"So what else have you learned that you've never shared with me?" she asked.

"Well, let's see. I played baseball and basketball, and at one point ice hockey….."

"You played ice hockey?"

Daniel rolled his eyes and laughed, sky blue eyes dancing.

"Is it that hard to believe?"

"No!" she laughed with him, "I just can't see you taking that much time away from studying. I thought you were like me, too school for cool."

"I didn't say I played it well!" He protested," but that's what that family did on the weekends so I got dragged along. For a while I sat in the stands with some books and was cold; so I started skating to warm up and then …..Well, there was some harassment from the other kids, so I started playing. Mostly I got knocked down a lot."

Jillian nodded. That sounded like Daniel. He didn't back down from most challenges, if he noticed them in the first place. She wondered if that was where he developed his incredible skill at getting back up again.

He went on, in the same soothing matter of fact tone that was setting the world right again.

"Most of the families I wound up with were heavily into sports so I was a huge disappointment to them," he gave a self effacing little laugh.

"I know what you mean. Imagine the frustration of my private school teachers who were charged with turning me into a suitable upper middle class wife. Women's liberation hadn't quite caught on there," she smiled wryly, "It probably still hasn't."

Jillian took a long deep breath and let it out slowly. She felt infinitely better, and actually relieved, as if a dark cloud had been hovering over her relationship with Daniel and now it was gone.

Another storm weathered.

"Why don't you go get ready," Daniel began, "And I'll run home and change…."

"No," she cut him off quickly."No, I don't want you to leave. It's just a dress, some make up and heels. It won't take me long."

"I thought women were supposed to take forever to get ready."

"Five years in the SGC will pretty much cure you of that," she said, standing with the casual grace he had come to know. "Give me twenty minutes."

"Take all the time you need," he said, "I'm here."

Jillian's expression was so tender he almost couldn't look into her eyes. Her fingertips touched his cheek with the same reverence they both reserved for things over a thousand years old.

"I know you are," she said, and then vanished behind the bedroom door.

(0)