To satisfy his need for more information, he actually opened up the Yellow Pages to detective agencies, feeling like someone in a bad black and white movie out of the thirties. His fancy was caught by the Gillford Agency whose ad said "Investigation beyond infidelity." The first appointment he could get was a week from Monday. He was delighted to have it put off in a way that allowed him to tell himself that he was facing up to things but yet gave him some more time to deal with his turbulent emotions. The truth was that he feared the eventual encounter with Deeje more than he had ever feared anything in his entire life.
Daniel was grateful that this time Teal'c wasn't available when they all got together at Jack's. It seemed like a discussion better held with just the affected parties. Sam and Jack were sitting on the couch and he was at a 45 degree angle to them, in an armchair. Their attention was on the DVD for a dark comedy, "The Upside of Anger." Daniel was watching them, wondering if he'd ever have a chance to sit and watch them like this again once they heard the truth. Sam was laughing so hard she fell over against Jack and was pounding his arm. "Sam, it's funny, but is it that funny?" Jack asked, starting to laugh at Sam more than at the DVD.
"Oh … my … God," she gasped. "Did you hear what Kevin Costner just said to her."
"Yeah. But in a slightly less funny universe, I suspect," Jack answered, chortling. Jack looked over at Daniel then and said, "Daniel, you seem to be watching a completely different movie from us, like maybe 'Saving Private Ryan.' Why the long face?"
Daniel shrugged, trying to make light of things. He should at least wait until the movie was over. "I guess I have trouble laughing at this poor woman whose husband took off without even a farewell leaving her with four kids which she copes with by drinking her head off and fooling around with her alcoholic neighbor."
"When you put it that way," Jack said, "I guess Sam's one sick puppy."
Sam punched him lightly. "You laughed your ass off when he asked her if she wanted a drink and she said, 'Do you know me?'"
Jack was still watching Daniel's face closely. For reasons Daniel had never been able to understand, Jack didn't want people to know that he was a very, very bright, astute man. That astuteness was showing now. Jack clicked the DVD off. "What is it Daniel? Really."
Sam was looking
at Jack with some surprise. Despite the fact that she certainly had a
reputation for being smarter and more sensitive than Jack, there were
times she just didn't seem to want to know what he was really feeling.
He had thought for years she didn't want to know what was going on
inside his head because she was afraid of what it might be. Maybe he
hadn't concealed his feelings quite as well as he had hoped.
"All right, Jack, you are right. Something is very wrong but it's
really, really awkward to talk about," Daniel said, not meeting either
of their eyes.
"What? You got someone pregnant?" Jack quipped, thinking he was making a joke and lightening things up.
Daniel looked at him then, his face full of pain, and said, "I don't want to talk about that yet." Sam looked confused, unable to process what she was hearing, but there was instant sympathy in Jack's brown eyes and the sarcasm and wise guy expression fell away. "What we have to talk about first is what's going on now," Daniel continued. "There's a rumor going around the base. At first people didn't take it seriously but they're starting to. They're saying," Daniel said and ground to a halt.
"They're saying…" Jack repeated encouragingly.
Daniel blurted out in a rush, "They're saying you and Sam and I having been having three-way sex for years."
Jack blinked and fell back on, "Ya think?"
Then Sam shocked both of them by starting to laugh. At first it was more like a chuckle but it soon segued into even more hysterical laughter than "The Upside of Anger" had been sparking. "Sam?" Jack said, sounding concerned. "I don't really see the funny side."
Sam gradually got control and said, "Look, I'm not worried about the rumor because there isn't a shred of actual evidence. We didn't have sex three-way," she snorted, "or two-way. It'll die down in the face of that."
Daniel said, definitely puzzled, "That doesn't explain the laughter."
Sam closed her eyes for a moment. "Yeah, right, it doesn't. I was laughing because you two are the most clueless humans, possibly on the face of the planet, at picking up signals that women are interested in you. The three-way thing would be more credible involving Bigfoot, Superman, and a nun."
Jack and Daniel were both stunned by this assessment. Jack picked up the conversational reins first. "Sam, what the hell are you saying?"
Sam just shook her head. "Let's just say that if I ever decide to engage in three-way sex, I won't wait for you guys to call me. I'll call you first."
This atypical remark, not even unaccompanied by the sort of blushing shyness Sam would usually bring to such a conversation, did nothing to move the two men out of their stunned condition. Sam took action then to prod Daniel. "Okay, Daniel, this is actually upsetting to some extent and certainly nothing any of us wanted but it doesn't really explain the 'I don't want to talk about that yet' of a moment ago. What else is there?"
Daniel sighed. "Here we go," he thought. "Okay," he said. "I'm pretty sure I know who's behind the rumor. You guys are being hurt as a side effect of someone going after me."
"Yeah, right, Daniel," Jack snorted, the opportunity for sarcasm being more than he could resist. "You must have returned a library book late or something."
"Sometimes you need to know when to turn off the jokes," Sam said, surprising Daniel by being willing to defend him when it required criticizing Jack.
"When I was working on my second Ph.D. at the University of Chicago," Daniel said, "a professor took several of us to Tennessee for a few days to help environmental activists look fo additional Indian burial sites to block a TVA project and I met a girl, May. We knew each other for less than two days and we were together just once. She was really something special in my life, the first person since my parents died who really listened to me, who didn't think I was some sort of weird, child prodigy geek -- you know 21 and aleady on his second Ph.D.."
Jack said, quietly, "I notice you don't describe it as a one night stand." He wasn't being a smart aleck. He was pointing out the deep feeling they could all hear in Daniel's voice.
"It was supposed to be the beginning of a life together but I lost her address. The first thing I did when I got home was to put my jeans in the wash and seconds after it was too late I realized that was where it was, in the jeans pocket. I spent hours trying to make sense out of what was left but it was hopeless. I didn't have a phone number for her – it's a long story why there wasn't one. But there I was, no way to contact her. She had my number and SHE didn't call me. Of course, I didn't have an answering machine and I basically just slept there. I was at the library or in class. My horrid roommate was on the phone all the time. But she didn't write either. Shortly before I got rid of that loser roommate fully two long years later, I found out that he had more than once grabbed a piece of my mail when he needed something to write a note on or mop up something he spilled. I never even knew about whatever that piece of mail was. At the time, though, I just thought that May wasn't really as interested in me as I had believed. As time went by, it was harder and harder to believe that she would be any different from everyone else."
"About 11 years later I got hauled into court to pay child support for her daughter. May was dead and her grandfather, who was raising the child, was about as ugly to me as anyone has ever been in my entire life. I reacted defensively and insisted on a blood test which just made the man madder. He wanted the money for the girl but he didn't want me to have anything to do with her. The court talked to her and she confirmed that she didn't want to know me or live with me. Her grandfather wouldn't let me see her. So I started paying child support and got a handful of very unsatisfying letters from her dripping with hostility. Looking back on it, I'm appalled that I didn't try harder. I was the adult. I should have been able to deal with rejection better."
Jack said, "Not that this is all about me, but why didn't you ever tell Sam or me about her?"
"I found out about her the first year I was in SG-1. It was pretty personal and I didn't know any of you that well. And by the time I did, I had pretty much opted out of her life and I was ashamed. I didn't think you'd understand. Here you lost Charlie and Teal'c was separated from Rylac while I had a child just a few hundred miles away that I just walked away from."
Jack shrugged but Sam looked hurt. Jack then asked a curiously pragmatic question, "What happened with the child support while you were ascended?"
Daniel welcomed an easy to answer question. "I was afraid that something would happen to me and interrupt the payments so I set up a trust and arranged for the money to be paid out of the trust, no matter what happened to me."
Sam was clearly impatient with this discussion of logistics. "Daniel," Sam said, softly, "you obviously think this is something to be deeply ashamed of. I agree that you could have done better but facing that sort of rejection, it's easy to understand why you backed off."
Daniel looked at her thinking, "If you only knew," but merely said, "I've had enough practice dealing with rejection, you'd think I'd get better at it."
"So," Jack said getting back to the original topic, "you think your daughter is out to get you? How in the world would she be able to start a rumor at the SGC?"
"She's here. That's how," Daniel stated simply.
"Wait a minute. This is a joke? You're putting us on, right?" Sam asked, uncertainly. She too had teen years of being hideously teased and this final detail was just too much.
"Sam, honestly," said Jack, uncharacteristically being the one taking the sensitivity high ground.
Sam blushed and stammered out, "I'm sorry, Daniel. It's just too much to take in. Who is she anyway?"
"Deeje Cox. Captain D.J. Cox of SG-24," Daniel answered.
"Absolutely not," Jack said, vehemently. "No way. You must have your facts wrong."
Sam and Daniel both looked at him in surprise. "You know her?" they chorused.
Jack looked very tired and took a moment to answer. "I know OF her, okay." He hesitated again. " I met her briefly once. Deeje was in black ops. She served under a good friend of mine in a real dicey situation in the Middle East. She was really good at her job and pulled off a near miracle on her last mission with him including saving his life. But she got badly hurt. That got her out of black ops and back here," Jack said, reciting the facts flatly. "She's brilliant – she's your daughter in that sense Daniel -- but I just can't imagine you having a daughter who's," Jack paused, searching for the least hurtful way to put it.
Daniel finished, "A raptor?"
"You've heard her rep, then," Jack observed. "I cannot, WILL not, believe she's your daughter. But suppose for a minute she is, is there more to her hating you than what you've said so far? I mean it doesn't seem like enough for someone to organize their entire life around getting even with you." Sam and Daniel were looking at him with a "What do you mean expression" on their faces. Jack clarified, "I mean getting into the Air Force and getting herself here, although I suppose that could be a happy accident."
"The evidence is pretty hard to refute," Daniel said. "I don't know why you're so vehement about this but accept it, Jack. She's my daughter. As to what else I did, I went to Tennessee and checked into it last week. I thought she was happily living with family. It turns out that after her grandfather died, she was first parked with someone who blew themselves up in their meth lab, then a cousin who tried to molest her, maybe did molest her, and then she ran off and I don't know what happened to her for two years. The cousin in question just kept taking the checks and having his own daughter pose as mine when I called. So she had a dreadful childhood and I was absent the whole time."
"Even though you think your daughter's at Cheyenne Mountain," Jack said, still sounding unconvinced, "how do you know she planted the rumor?"
Daniel proceeded to lay out the entire story, detailing all the things he knew for sure and those he suspected. Sam was very quiet listening to him but it seemed to Daniel that she wanted to comfort him, to make him feel better. She just couldn't figure out how to do that. Jack was more vocal, stubbornly refusing to believe that Deeje Cox was Daniel's daughter or that if she was, she had really done anything to hurt him. He could understand Sam's dilemma but he was baffled by Jack. Both of them seemed to think that he should meet Deeje and talk to her but he refused to change his mind on that. He wasn't ready.
Eventually, a very subdued Sam left, saying one last time, "I'm here for you Daniel. Let me be there okay?"
After the door closed behind her, Daniel rose slowly and prepared to go himself. Jack said, "Before you go, Daniel, I have to ask. I'm curious about where you think Sam was coming from when you brought up the rumors? All that laughing and so on."
Daniel said in mock horror, "A feelings question, Jack? Is it really you?"
Jack said, "I'm not the only one who could stand to turn off the inappropriate humor."
"Get a grip, Jack," Daniel said, a little over Jack after he'd butted heads with him for an hour over Deeje. Then he felt bad about it, considering how much more supportive and accepting his friends had been than he had any right to expect. "Sam's frustrated because she's spent years panting after you and you've never given her any encouragement. That's my humble opinion," Daniel said, unable to avoid sounding a little bitter.
"Damn it, Daniel, I should have talked to you about this a long time ago." Jack said, leaning back and scrubbing his face with his hands for a moment. "You don't think anyone knows how you feel about her and, with the exception of me, you would be right." Daniel was gaping at him. "Close your mouth or something is likely to fly in." He picked up his beer and started picking at the label. "I think she was, hell still is a little bit any way, infatuated with me but one reason I never did anything about it because I was certainly interested in her, was that it always seemed to me that she really cared more about you and your opinion and, in general, sharing things with you. She was definitely more interested in you and your company in every way except the romantic one. I always thought that if I had made a move, say one of us had changed teams, you would always have been in the way, kind of. I'd be sharing her with you and I'm kind of a selfish guy when it comes to being involved with someone. In MY humble opinion, maybe on some level she's in love with you and doesn't understand herself well enough to know it."
"You are a real fool, Jack," Daniel stated with a great deal of affection. "You should have made a move you know. When you retire in a couple of years, if you stick to the plan you gave me, you'll have an opportunity again. For both your sakes, forget about me and make her happy." Daniel was surprised to realize that he meant it. He had never had anything with Sam and he never would. He wasn't giving up anything and at least he could see someone make her happy.
Daniel stood and Jack did the same. Jack put out his hand and said, "I think you're dead wrong. We'll just have to agree to disagree, okay old friend?"
Daniel smiled and pulled Jack into a quick hug. "Always," he said and went out into the night.
A few days later, as Daniel trudged up the single flight of stairs to the offices of the detective agency he was considering hiring, located above a Starbucks, he wished that Harry Copperfield Dresden was real. The fictional wizard/detective seemed more like what he needed, under the circumstances, than someone who was used to catching cheating spouses in motel rooms with the wrong people. Daniel really wanted someone to tell him what was in Deeje's brain, as much as what had happened to her, but he was going to have settle for the latter.
Nothing in the experience meshed with what Humphrey Bogart had led him to expect about detective agencies. The door didn't have a frosted glass pane in it through which to glimpse a seated man in a fedora and suspenders smoking a cigar. Instead it was your typical featureless internal door with a small plate that said "Gillford Agency." The receptionist wasn't wearing pumps, shoulder pads, Joan Crawford hair, and bright red lipstick. In fact, the role was filled by a young man with spiked bleached blonde hair complete with dark roots and piercing in his ears, nose, and an eyebrow. The hair and piercing warred with his selected fashion statement of a pair of Dockers and a polo shirt with a Tommy Hillfinger logo. As the man looked up from the copy of "Childbirth for Dummies," Daniel was left reassured that he had not wandered into cinema noire but unsure as to what he had wandered into instead.
The receptionist asked coolly. "May I assist you?" For unknown reasons, he had affected a British accent that Daniel, as a linguist, could immediately identify as phony.
"You having a baby?" Daniel asked, tempted to think that this was perhaps a portal to another dimension based on this watchdog stationed out front and also a little dismayed that this fellow was potentially contributing to the gene pool. He chided himself for giving in to stereotypes and waited for the response.
"No. I just think it's funny," the receptionist said, forgetting to be aloof and lapsing very briefly into an American accent before he caught himself on the word funny. "Did you have an appointment?" he asked, returning to his assumed London roots.
Daniel nodded and the young man glanced at a screen on his computer and then immediately ushered Daniel back, gesturing into the office with a hand whose nails were decorated with chipped black nail polish. Daniel found himself in front of a desk occupied by a no-nonsense looking woman with short grey hair that was chopped off rather than styled, wearing glasses with ugly, black plastic frames and a shapeless polyester pants suit that cried out "I qualify for the senior discount." As he bemusedly watched the receptionist leave, she said, dismissively, "He's my nephew. He really wants to be Spike, you know the vampire on Buffy, but his mother buys his clothes." She then extended a hand and gave him a brisk, power shake, saying, "I'm Bertie Audubon and you, of course, are Dr. Daniel Jackson." She looked at him a trifle impatiently and said, "You do know what a chair is for don't you?"
"Okay," Daniel thought, "weird receptionist and now this." Still he sat. Where else was he going to go at this point? The woman was as fascinating in her own way as the receptionist. He actually thought he glimpsed a hint of dark roots in her hair and her complexion seemed on the dewy side for the age suggested by the hair and the clothes. "Would someone deliberately die their hair and frump themselves up?" Daniel wondered.
"You obviously have a problem. I'm not here to investigate your sexual partners for you although," she looked at him critically but without rancor, "I'm not at all sure you have any. Do you have any other problems?"
"My God," Daniel thought, "why do I find myself liking this woman?" Aloud, he said, "I have an illegitimate daughter whom I have never met. I paid child support while she was growing up and lately I found out that she ran away from the relatives she was living with but they concealed this from me and continued to cash the checks."
Daniel thought the woman was going to come across the desk at him. "And you want your money back?" Bertie asked him in a very unfriendly tone.
Daniel raised a hand as if to fend off a blow, "I don't give a damn about the money. I want to know what happened to her after she ran away. I want to understand what happened so I can understand her. She hates me and I have to know all of it. I have to understand my own … my own sins."
Bertie's face changed and she looked almost friendly. "I'll do it if you can stand to have me wait two weeks before I start. I've got several other cases and limited resources, in more ways than one." She jerked her head toward the outer office.
Daniel wanted to know the truth but yet he was afraid of it. A two week delay was something of a reprieve and he said, "As long as it won't be any longer than that."
She raised her eyebrow. "If I tell you something, that's what happens." Daniel tried to looked appropriately chastened. "Not to worry. If anyone can find out what happened it'll be me. It won't be cheap." She took a sheet of paper from a drawer and slid it across to Daniel. "Here's my rate schedule. Can you handle it?" When Daniel nodded, she said, "You'll have weekly reports and invoices. You'll hear from us more often if we find anything really significant."
After Daniel gave Bertie all the information he had, they shook hands again and Daniel left the building confident that he would know enough when Bertie Audubon finished to determine whether he even had a right to prevent Deeje from ruining his life.