While he wasn't ready to meet Deeje yet, he was fascinated with her and little by little, he got closer to stalking her. He got the detective agency to give him Deeje's home address and he drove through the neighborhood a few times. He found out where her office was in Cheyenne Mountain and started making a point of being aware of SG-24's schedule off-world. He created a whole elaborate scenario that gave him a good excuse to be going down that particular corridor. As the program had expanded with involvement from other nations, office space was at a premium and all the more junior staff with offices shared them with at least 2 other office mates. If one of her office mates was on base and she wasn't, he might just find the office open and empty long enough to look around. It was a stupid plan. It seemed to be very unlikely that someone could share an office with her and not know that she hated him. His presence in the office would have to be reported to her if he was caught but he couldn't help himself.
The fourth time he went down the corridor, he hit pay dirt. The door was open, the lights were on, and the office was vacant. The corridor was empty and he decided to regard that as a sign. He took a deep breath and ducked inside. There were three desks and fortunately each had a nameplate resting on top. All belonged to military officers and so there was no room for any messiness but it seemed that, within those parameters, Deeje's was the least tidy. Was it really or was he just hoping for something beyond her academic credentials that resembled him?
There were two posters taped to the side of the desk. One showed the Lady Vols with a woman named Pat Summit Head in front and the other was someone named Peyton Manning tricked out as a football player. There was a Sunday bulletin from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church partially tucked in a manual lying on the desk. Unreasonably, he felt a little rejected to discover that she was apparently a sports fan and a churchgoer, yet another gulf between them.
On top of the desk, there were four framed pictures. As he moved around to look at them, he knocked one over and froze at the small sound he made. Nothing came of it and he relaxed. He picked up the picture of the sweet girl he had known for a few hours in Tennessee. He had thought he had forgotten her face but, when he saw her captured at close to the age she had been when he had kissed her and almost drowned in her big brown eyes, memories he thought he had lost surfaced. He shook himself realizing that he didn't have time to walk down memory lane while standing in an office where he didn't have any good reason to be. He quickly looked at the other pictures. One was a grim looking older man and his equally grim looking wife. The grandparents he guessed. He smiled when he got a good look at the third picture. It was his friend, Malva. Deeje's kindness to the old woman and the proud display of her picture even though she looked as eccentric in the frame as she did in person were the only evidence he had yet seen that there was anything likable about the daughter he didn't know. When he restored the picture he had knocked over to a standing position, he got a real shock. It showed an unfamiliar colonel, a woman in uniform, her hat pulled down so that only her chin was visible, and standing between them, his arm around both, but his gaze fixed intently on the woman was Jack O'Neill.
He heard footsteps in the corridor and quickly moved out of direct line of sight of the door. If it was one of her office mates, there was no help for it but, he hoped, if someone was just passing by, there was no need for them to see him. His mouth was dry and he felt like he was trying to steal jewels or something. It was really more than ridiculous that a man should have to feel like a burglar to visit his own daughter's office, but that was his fault in the final analysis. The footsteps stopped next to the door and he had to deliberately force himself not to squeeze his eyes shut and mutter, "Please no," over and over again. It wouldn't do for her office mates to find him acting like a guilty second grader. He did hold his breath and then let it out in a whoosh as the footsteps resumed and faded off in the distance. He would be a fool if he stayed there one second longer. He immediately eased out the door and walked rapidly away.
He was really bothered by the picture of Jack on Deeje's desk. He told himself that he didn't know the woman in the picture was Deeje. It could have been almost anyone, at least anyone who was female, about 5'10" and not dark skinned. Deeje could have the picture because of a friendship with the other man or with the woman and never have met Jack. That just seemed quite improbable. Why had Jack defended her so vigorously? Daniel kept coming to the conclusion that Jack had had more than some chance encounter with her that he implied. Not with that expression on his face. It made no sense that he had deliberately misled Daniel. Daniel thought about calling Jack but then decided he needed the benefit of body language and any other telltale signs when he confronted him with his discovery. As impatient as he was, it would have to wait until the next time he got together with Jack.
Daniel began to develop a burning desire to know what Deeje really looked like. Malva had said she had his eyes and his mouth. For her sake, he hoped she didn't look like him. It would be to her benefit if she had inherited her looks from her pretty mother whose shy smile was beginning to haunt his dreams. Finally he contrived to be in the command center above the gate when SG-24 returned from a mission. They came through in rough condition. Two soldiers supported a third who had a hasty field bandage around his head, seeping blood. Another soldier, a woman, was limping and it looked like she had a wound in her leg but she was managing unaided. The fifth team member looked battered but unwounded and had his weapon out as did the limping woman. All five were spattered with mud. Was Deeje the limping woman or the woman helping to support her colleague? He caught a look at the sleeve of the lamed soldier and saw that she was a noncommissioned officer. Through process of elimination, his daughter was the tall woman supporting the wounded comrade.
Now that he knew he was looking at his daughter, it was hard to keep his feelings off his face. Fortunately the condition of the team had everyone looking a little upset so his lack of calm was not noticeable. Deeje had on a hat and, like in the picture, it was jammed down on her head. At this angle, if she didn't look up, he would never see the face hidden by the bill of the cap. She never looked up. Her attention stayed focused on the wounded man. Despite the medics who came flooding in with a stretcher, she never left his side. He clung to her hand and the team formed around their wounded as they went to the infirmary.
He went straight to Sam's office. He did not need to be alone. She was deeply involved in some piece of alien apparatus and greeted him rather perfunctorily. "You're busy," he said, disappointed but too proud to demand that she pay attention to him. "I'll talk to you later."
He was almost out the door when he heard her come up rapidly behind him and felt her touch him on the back. "Daniel, I'm sorry," she said and, turning around, he could see that she did look it. "You look pretty rough. Come on back in." She reached behind him, closed the door, and locked it.
"You didn't need to do that," Daniel protested, but he was gratified that it was important to her that they not be interrupted.
"Let's sit down," she said and they moved to the corner with her desk and a visitor's chair. "Okay, spill."
"I saw Deeje from the control room when she came through the gate. I really couldn't tell what she looked like, her cap jammed down the way it was, but I saw her," Daniel had almost the same wonder in his voice that a father does seeing his newborn baby for the first time. He looked down and saw that his hands were trembling. Sam noticed it too and captured them in her own.
"Oh, Daniel, are you sure you're doing the right thing, waiting to meet her, to talk to her?" Sam searched his face as if the answer would be written there somewhere.
"I don't know Sam. It's just, every day she becomes more real to me. Every day it matters more and more to me that somehow I can get her to forgive me and I don't even know the full dimensions yet of what it is that I need to have forgiven. I'm a middle aged man and this is probably the only child I'll ever have. I'm scared to death of meeting her." Daniel wound to a stop and gripped Sam's hands.
They sat there for a long time, Daniel gradually relaxing his grip on Sam's hands. He sighed deeply and realized he didn't want to keep his questions about the picture bottled up any longer either. "There's something else, Sam, really strange. I saw something when I went into her office the other day when no one was around."
"Daniel, that was crazy. Maybe you want to trigger a meeting subconsciously," she said speculatively.
"Oh for God sake, Sam," he exploded, pulling his hands away from her. "Don't practice psychiatry without a license. Although you probably are quite an expert on people not coming to grips with their subconscious desires."
Sam jerked back as if he had slapped her and he had, verbally anyway. "Where the hell is that coming from, Daniel Jackson?" she demanded.
He stood up and threw his hands in the air. "I think it's pretty funny that you lay such an indictment on Jack and me for being clueless about women being interested in us when you've running around for the better part of what, 15 years, carrying a torch for Jack O'Neill and unable to either admit it sufficiently to yourself that you act on it and/or figure out that he's interested in you. And now he's got God knows what going on with my daughter, MY daughter, who's decades younger than he is."
Daniel's words hung in the air and he seemed to listen to them now as if someone else had spoken them and he was hearing them for the first time. Was this what a decade of suppressing your feelings did? You suddenly went postal on your friends? "Oh, Sam," he said, instantly contrite. "Please forgive me. You didn't deserve that. I'm just really upset. Lately I've been dreaming about May every night. I've been looking at my life and I feel like one of those major 'road not taken' points was reached when I let May slip between my fingers. If I'd stayed with her and our daughter, I wouldn't be alone now. Look, I'll just leave."
"Not so fast, buster," Sam said. "You're going to explain a couple of things. First off, where are you coming from with that stuff about me and Jack?"
"Where am I coming from?" Daniel forgot that he was supposed to be apologetic as she pushed his buttons once again. "Maybe you've forgotten laughing at us over the group sex rumor. We both know that you were alluding to the fact that you think Jack has never been able to see your interest in him."
"Do we?" she said, sounding a little dangerous.
"Yes," he said emphatically. "You're just as guilty as he is, Sam, since you could never really see that your interest was returned or act on it. I just wish the two of you would put the rest of us out of our misery, having to stand around and hope that you'll…"
"Finish the sentence, Daniel," she commanded.
"Leave it alone, Sam. I should have left when I said I was going to."
He started to move toward the door but she stood in front of him, physically blocking his progress. "Okay, Daniel, I'll let that part go but I want an explanation of that crack about Jack and your daughter."
Daniel was feeling like a complete jerk for that slip. He had no real idea what the picture meant and the implication that Jack was having some sort of a relationship with his daughter, decades younger and probably in a position vis a vis Jack in the chain of command such that any relationship was against some sort of regulations, had come out of his mouth without ever having been a conscious thought in his head first. "Oh, I was just aggravated with him the other night, the way he kept saying she wasn't my daughter or if she was, she wasn't responsible for the rumor. It gave me some wild hair idea that he somehow knows her or something."
Sam drew herself up and got right in his face. "Look here, Daniel, you've got your troubles right now and I'm trying to make allowances, but you will not attack Jack to me -- ever. You will not make wild accusations about him like that to me -- ever. My feelings about him are much more complicated than the simple scenario that you have worked out in your pointy little head but whatever they are, I WILL NOT TOLERATE ANY MORE OF THIS CRAP."
He was looking into her blue eyes and he had never seen anything like the flames in their depths. That was when he went crazy. She was so angry with him and he had revealed so much more than he intended to, he might already have destroyed their friendship. He might as well go for broke. He reached out, ran a hand into her hair and gripped the back of her head. With his other arm, he pulled her against him and then he brought his mouth down on hers. It started out very hard but he eased up immediately and put everything he had learned about kissing from every woman he had ever known into that kiss. She didn't kiss him back but she didn't stiffen. She just let it happen, even to his tongue plunging into her mouth. When he finally let go of her, she slapped him hard and said, "That wasn't a kiss. That was some sort of a statement, a salvo fired in some battle you're having with Jack. All these years and you're still clueless. Get out."
Daniel got back to his office somehow and sat numbly in his chair, holding his hand to his stinging cheek. He thought then of his daughter's plot to get even with him. Maybe she hadn't done anything for the past week or so because they had now entered the phase where he took over the destruction directly through his reactions to what Deeje had already set in motion.