-Can we keep her?-
Puppy dog eyes.
"No," he tells her.
Bigger puppy eyes.
"Vala, you can't just take a kid out of an orphanage."
"But she doesn't have parents, that's why she's in an orphanage, and we want a kid. We waited nine months for a kid."
"She's not Adria," Daniel says clenching his teeth.
"No, you're right. She's here on Earth, and she actually needs and wants us. So she's nothing like Adria."
"Vala, it just doesn't work that way. You just don't walk into an orphanage, and see a kid, and take it home."
"Ok, so how does it work?" Vala asks.
"I'm not sure, but I bet there is a lot of paperwork involved."
"Well, we both work for the government. We're not afraid of paperwork," she says.
"Vala, you want to have a baby. She is not a baby. She is not flesh and blood. You just have to be patient. We're going to have a baby."
"Of course we are! Just because we adopt a child doesn't mean we won't have a baby of our own in a few weeks. Daniel, you spent all those years waiting for a family, and you never got one. We can be her family."
He bites his lip, "This will probably take months."
Vala squeals, and jumps up and down.
"It might not happen," he tells her.
Vala looks somber, "Why not?"
"A lot of people have to say that you're a good parent before you'll be allowed to adopt. Maybe one of these people won't agree with us, or maybe she's got some family member that won't let go of her, but also doesn't want her."
"Like your grandpa?" Vala asks.
Daniel nods his head.
"Well, I'm going to try my best to convince them that I would be a good mother," Vala promises.
"Anyone who knows you ought to know that you will be an amazing mother," he says, planting a kiss on her forehead.
-Home Visit-
"Maybe we shouldn't have decorated the room already. Maybe it looks like we're too sure that she's coming home to us," Vala says, fidgeting with her dress. She looks very much like a 1950s housewife.
She stands up, and rushes toward the oven to turn it down, "What if she's late? I timed it so that the whole place would smell like apple pie when she came, but what if she was late? It will just smell like something burnt."
He stands up, and pulls her into a hug, "Vala, everything is fine. You've been cleaning the house for a solid week."
"What if I'm not got enough?" she asks, with terror in her voice, from her husband's chest.
"You are definitely good enough, but if they fail to see that, then that little girl will at least know that someone loved her, and that someone wanted her. We'll have a baby ourselves. It won't be perfect, but it will be ok."
The doorbell rings, and Vala gives her dress one last smooth before the door opens to admit a social worker inside.
"We want to show you her room first," Vala blurts, without any more pre-amble.
"Ok," the woman says, following her.
Vala leads her through the kitchen to the room which was a few short weeks ago covered in boxes. When they had started the process of getting the room set up, she suggested they get a storage unit for all of Daniel's stuff. However, he said, "I want to make room for a family in my life, not just our place."
So he'd donated a lot of it to museums, and what he wasn't ready to get rid of was moved the SGC or the study.
The social worker doesn't seem to have much of a poker face, because she is obviously impressed. The walls of the room are the color of desert sand, and the ceiling is sky blue. Between them there is lighter line covered with rows and rows of hieroglyphics. The far wall contains pyramids. One is so large, that the top of it is not far from the ceiling, it is a loft, like a bunk bed, but the bed is not on the top of the pyramid. The bed on the floor looks like a sarcophagus. A box is made the size or a twin bed. A box spring and mattress are sitting in the box, but the walls of the box extend above them, making the sort of fort that Daniel longed for when he was in foster care after losing his parents.
"But it's like a playground," Vala says with her eyes shining. She is barely able to contain herself from grabbing the social worker's arms and dragging her.
One side of the pyramid is a climbing wall which goes to a platform near the ceiling. It contains a desk, pointing out toward the room. The other side of the pyramid is a steep slide.
"That is very unique," the woman says, trying a bit harder now to hold back her enthusiasm.
There are two more pyramids, which Vala quickly displays. The medium one is full of books with drawers for all the parts that are too odd shaped for books. The smallest is a toy box that is already full of a variety of dolls, legos, and other toys. The dresser and closet are covered with hieroglyphics, and a large camel sits in the middle of the room.
"She likes camels!" Vala announces finishing off her tour.
"Well, she's actually very interested in the Ancient Egypt as a whole, and that is where the theme of the room came from," Daniel says, pushing up his glasses.
"Right, and you are an Egyptologist, correct?" the woman asks.
"By training, yes, but right now I work for the United States Airforce, as an interpreter," Daniel says.
"You also work for them?" the woman asks Vala.
"Yes," she says.
"Is there a chance that you would be deployed?" the woman asks.
"No, we both work for the military, but we're not military. We'd never have to take orders per say, and we're not going to be sent overseas. I won't deny that out work is a little big dangerous, but we have back up plans for every contingency. We included those in the file…" he says, staring at the file in her hand, and hoping that she has it.
"Neither one of you have any family around though, do you?" she asks.
"No, I grew up in foster care. Vala's father is still around, but he did not immigrate to this country with her."
"But the people that they work with… they're like family," Vala blurts.
He takes her hand giving it a quick squeeze to comfort her nerves. The social worker sees it, and gives a quick smile. If he's perceptive and empathetic enough to comfort an adult, surely he'll be able to help an eight year old that has been through something similar to what he went through himself when he was a child.
"I'll show you the bathroom. It connects to our room through there," Daniel says after a pause of a few seconds which is far more silence than he can endure with his current nerves.
"You realize that Danielle has some special needs correct?" the woman asks them, as she looks around the bathroom, and makes some check marks on a form.
"Yes, she has some effects from the accident," Vala says.
"She has extensive damage from the accident. She has burn scars over 1/5 of her body. She has a traumatic brain injury which requires special education, and she has seizures."
"Seizures?" Vala asks nervously.
"Is that a problem?" the woman asks.
"Ma'am, no matter what problems that child had, we'd want her just as much," Vala says.
Daniel opens up the door to their room. "So this is where we sleep."
"You gave her the bigger room?" the social worker says, surprised.
"Well, this is large enough for us," Daniel says not sure if this was in their favor or not.
"This is our study," Vala says, "When Daniel lived here alone he had a huge desk. But when I moved in we got rid of it, and got two little ones. Then when we met Dani we added a desk on. They're all facing each other, so we could all sit in here and work, and she could do school work, and still be together."
"Do you often take work home?" the social worker asks.
"Oh no! I didn't mean to imply that!" Vala says quickly.
"I do quite a bit," Daniel confesses. "I have a tendency to become completely absorbed in my work. But I am going to work on it."
"He's always there when you need him though, and my attention span is such that I am totally ready to do something else when I leave work at the end of the day," Vala says.
The woman smiles, and Daniel leads them out into the living room. "Can I ask why you decided to go down the path of adoption?"
Daniel lets a little chuckle fly, "To be honest, we didn't seriously talk about it until we met her accidently."
"But we wanted kids," Vala adds.
"Vala was pregnant, it didn't end well," Daniel says deciding to be honest without being very complete. He figures that the social worker probably isn't going to ask a whole lot of follow up questions to that, "We're still going to have a biological child."
Vala gives him a smile of encouragement, "Frankly, we both know what it's like to grow up ignored. We don't want that to happen to his little girl."
The woman nods, "Can I get another glance at the kitchen?"
"Yes, and then pie!" Vala says, with a bit too much enthusiasm.
