His obsessive circling around and around the same few questions had now expanded to include not just his daughter but his two best friends. Sam absolutely was not talking to him. He tried to call her and she hung up on him. He sent her e-mails, turning on return receipt after having the first couple ignored, to have it confirmed that they were deleted without being read. He thought about going to her office but the memory of that slap made him skirt any potentially explosive in-person confrontation. The overwhelming emotion he had taken away from the encounter was humiliation. She had hurt him so many ways without intending to over the years but she had never humiliated him before and he didn't want to give her another opportunity. After a couple of days of the silent treatment, he was angry and he clung to that. It was easier to deal with than the sick feeling of humiliation that brought back young Danny Jackson from some hidden corner of his mind.
Jack was a huge problem he couldn't solve. He felt betrayed but, at the same time, he also felt disloyal. He kept telling himself that Jack would have an explanation and then that he was a gullible fool because there was no conceivable acceptable explanation. Finally, he called Jack in DC.
"Daniel," Jack said, sounding a little less than thrilled to hear from him or so it seemed to Daniel, "this is a surprise. Is everything all right? Everybody okay?"
"Why wouldn't we be?" Daniel asked, suspiciously.
"For God's sake, Daniel," Jack said, sounding exasperated now. "You never call me in Washington. It's a logical assumption." He spoke briefly to someone in the background.
"If you're busy.." Daniel said, now wanting just to end the conversation and sorry that he had given in to his anxieties and called.
"No. Someone was just in my office but we had finished up. So what's on your mind?"
"I was wondering when you'd be in Colorado next and if we could set aside some time to talk, just the two of us," Daniel requested.
"I guess Sam didn't tell you that we talked yesterday and discussed everybody getting together this Saturday," Jack said.
"Sam isn't talking to me so I have no idea what she discussed with you. In any case, I really need an opportunity for the two of us to talk, alone," Daniel explained, testily. Jack really wasn't listening to him.
"Why isn't Sam talking to you?" Jack asked but he didn't sound that curious. Daniel was immediately convinced that Sam had already told him her side of it but Jack was playing dumb.
"Believe whatever you want to, Jack. And, in case you think that's what I want to talk about, it isn't. Unless you have a problem, I'll be by your place Saturday morning around 10:00." Daniel was through with this conversation.
"Fine, Daniel, fine," Jack acquiesced and they exchanged curt goodbyes and hung up.
Daniel stood looking at the phone for a few minutes after he hung up. He desperately needed someone to talk to but his last friend, Teal'c, was off-world. He also felt it was unfair to put Teal'c in the middle. Not only unfair but stupid. That was what had precipitated the blow up with Sam. "There are your real friends," he thought, "and then there are the people who have to pretend they are your friends because you're paying them money" and he went to see Bertie Audubon.
That day, Bertie's nephew and receptionist was channeling Spike AFTER Spike got a soul and greeted him much more warmly. He showed Daniel back to Bertie's office immediately. This was the third time Daniel had been to see her and there was an actual hint of friendliness in her brisk tone. He collapsed in a chair facing her across her cluttered desk and buried his head in his hands. A silence stretched out but it wasn't uncomfortable.
After a while, he heard Bertie get up, circle her desk, and come around to sit next to him. She went to lean over him just as he decided he was acting like an idiot and straightened up. His head collided with her jaw. Her glasses were knocked off and she yelped. They then both stood up and when Daniel went to take a step back from her, he realized he was about to step on her glasses. In seeking to avoid them, he got tangled up in his chair, and lost his balance, tottering against her. She wound up sitting in her chair with Daniel sprawled across her.
Bertie looked very startled and then she started to laugh. It was a wonderful laugh. Not musical or tinkling but a full out raucous belly laugh, complete with gasping and snorting, that was absolutely infectious. Daniel began to laugh in response and then laughed even harder when he realized what a ridiculous picture they must make. He unfolded himself from her lap and picked up her glasses. He looked quickly down through them and thought they didn't appear to make any difference in what he saw. It appeared that Bertie was wearing bogus glasses along with her bogus grey hair which now had at least an inch of dark brown roots. Not only that but he had gained some knowledge of the body under Bertie's frumpy clothes, sprawled across it as he had been. She did not have a frumpy body.
"I'm sorry for knocking your glasses off and sitting on you," Daniel said, grinning. He wasn't really very sorry at all. It had been quite a revealing experience. It was also the first time he had laughed in a couple of weeks.
"Don't be. You looked like a dead seal I once saw washed up on the beach at Malibu," she said. "It was really cute if you could ignore the fact that it was dead."
Daniel didn't think that was a compliment but he couldn't be sure. "I'm just incredibly discouraged, Bertie, and needed someone to talk to. To be honest with you, this business with Deeje has now cost me one, if not two of my three best friends." He spared a brief thought pitying thought for himself that he had had such a pitifully small number of friends to begin with. "I'm a little afraid to talk to the third one for fear I'll end up with no friends at all." He then served her up the sort of bluntness she typically used on him. "I figured you're not really my friend, just some one who listens to me because I pay her money. Unless I quit paying you, we're in good shape."
"You really are a mess aren't you?" she observed. "I bet all you've ingested in the last two days are pieces of cold pizza left over from a pie you ordered the night before last and a lot of coffee. You looked reasonably buff when you came here the first time but you've started loosing it. Too discouraged even to keep up your exercise routine." She shook her head and waggled a finger at him. "World's full of ugly men. The halfway decent looking ones have to preserve themselves. Sort as if they were national landmarks." She scooped up a manila envelope off her desk and said, "It's the end of the day. I've got your first report here. I don't have any more appointments and you don't have a life so clearly you're not busy. You're coming upstairs to my apartment with me. We'll go over your report and I'm going to put some food in you." She headed for the door, saying, "I'm not carrying you up there so get a move on it." Daniel followed her, noticing for the first time that her baggy pants couldn't completely conceal the fact that she had a rather lovely backside. What in the world was going on with this woman?
Her apartment was almost like home. There were books everywhere and all sorts of interesting artifacts stuck anywhere there was a surface without a competing stack of books. She handed him the report, saying, "Have a seat and scan that while I start something cooking and then we can go over any questions you might have."
He dropped on a comfortable Victorian sofa that had aged gracefully and pulled out several typed pages and a glossy photo. The photo showed a girl in her early teens with long light brown hair and his eyes standing next to a nun and a man in a suit. He studied her photo hungrily, trying to age her 11 years to imagine how she would look now. Her face was cynical and world weary at 15. From that respect she already looked even older than her chronological age today.
The report provided a lot of detail about Deeje's time at Covenant House in Chicago. Covenant House was a national Catholic charity that got kids off the street. Deeje had been the kind of success story of which any charity could be proud. They had taken her in and within five months she had passed her GED and taken the SATs and ACTs, earning perfect scores in each. The only credit Covenant House took for this was getting her to take the tests. She had a genius IQ and, even while on the street had maintained an intense self-study program of her own that had equipped her with the required knowledge. Covenant House had been instrumental in getting the man in the suit, a Chicago entrepreneur who had been a street kid himself, to award her a scholarship that funded her undergraduate study at the University of Chicago. Covenant House had also gone to court with her to help her get declared an emancipated minor.
There was considerably less to report about what she had been doing prior to Covenant House. Several of the nuns and lay workers had been there 11 years before and they all definitely remembered Deeje. They all also refused to divulge anything they knew about her past. The agency had started tracking down other Covenant House alumni from the period in hopes that one of them would talk.
Bertie reappeared from the kitchen and handed him a beer and then a glass. "No need to let civilization go completely down the drain," was her comment to accompany the glass.
"Bertie, I know you don't investigate cheating spouses or significant others but have to ask you to do something close to that with respect to Deeje." She looked like she was about to protest. "Hear me out. I've got a very close friend who's even older than I am. He denies knowing my daughter but I've seen a picture of him with her that suggests otherwise. I'm floored that he would lie to me about it. I'm going to confront him Saturday morning but I'm not confidant I'll get the truth. When we've talked earlier, you promised me that this was all confidential. Can I count on that?"
"A court of law wouldn't ordinarily see it that way," Bertie said, "but I happen to have a law degree stuck in a drawer. We'll add a dollar to your invoice as my retainer."
"Okay then. His name is Jack O'Neill and here's his address," Daniel said extending a piece of paper to her.
"Not THE Jack O'Neill? The head of.." she said, widening her eyes.
Daniel cut her off. "Yeah him." He looked at her speculatively and then leaned over and removed her glasses. "These are just plain glass and your hair isn't naturally gray."
She snatched the glasses back and jammed them on her face. "I dyed it for a particular job." Then she realized she had answered him as if he had a right to ask, "And that would be your business because?"
"Because you really intrigue me and I can't figure out why you want to make yourself look older and less attractive than you really are," Daniel said, moving closer to her and taking the glasses off again. "It isn't working by the way," he added, dropping the glasses on the table and cupping the soft skin of her cheek in his hand.
A brief look of panic flashed across her face and she said, "I'm immune to being romanced. I saw way too many cheating men in the days before I started refusing those cases." She pulled his hand down and tried to reach for her glasses.
He captured it and said, "Bertie, I'm not cheating on anyone. There isn't a soul who cares what I do. I've moped around thinking I was in love with someone for about 12 years but I'm beginning to think I didn't know her at all. She certainly doesn't care what I do. I'm not trying to get you in bed and I'm not trying to start a serious relationship but I feel very, very alone and right now I can't think of anything I'd rather do more than kiss you for a few minutes. What do you think?" It was a fine line between needy and being appealing "little boy lost." If Daniel had ever tried to deliberately work it, he probably would have failed but it was completely unconscious and almost impossible for most women to resist. Bertie was not the first to look in those wonderful blue eyes and drown.
"Hell, there isn't anything on television except WW Smackdown," she said and regained a sense of control by being the one to initiate the first kiss. Her mouth was generous with full lips like his own and she tasted really good. The first kiss was exploratory with the only contact being their mouths. Then he moaned and pulled her very nice body with its lovely, full bosom against him and he plundered her mouth in serious. It would have been like making out in high school, if Daniel not been way young and lacking in the self-confidence to actually take anybody out, much less make out with them at the time.
He kept his promise and stopped after about five minutes. She rose as if they had spent the last five minutes playing Parcheesi. They had a delicious dinner together and he found that she was well read and had interesting things to say as well as an ability to listen. It was as if the scene on the couch had never happened except that when he got ready to go, he turned at the door, embraced her and pulled her around so that she was pressed between him and the wall next to the door. He gave her a very thorough kiss with their bodies full length against each other, his quickly demonstrating to her just how much he appreciated her. "Thanks for everything," he said huskily and left.
Friday, Daniel went on-line and looked at the flights in from DC. He thought he remembered the time Jack had once remarked he typically left and it looked like Jack should be at his house no later than 10:30 that night, provided things were reasonably on schedule. He had arranged to talk with Jack the next morning but he was out of patience and didn't want to spend another night having trouble sleeping wondering about Jack. Of course there would still be Deeje and Sam chasing each other in his head but maybe he could get a modicum more rest.
He tried calling but the phone was busy so, in the end, he just got in the car and drove there. It was raining which matched his mood perfectly. By the time he arrived, it was slashing down in torrents. He sat in the car for a moment, considered whether it was worth getting bone chilling wet in near freezing weather to go into a man's house and possibly put paid to a very long friendship. He fixated briefly on the fact that he was so poorly organized that there probably wasn't even an umbrella in the damn car. He rooted around making sure and extricated a sorry specimen from under the seat at last. It had two broken spokes and there was a big chunk out of the plastic in the handle. When he pushed the car door open and deployed the umbrella, something powdery fell on his face. With the way the rain was pouring down, he quickly decided that despite its flaws, this little umbrella was his friend.
He started to go to the front door but there was a huge puddle at the beginning of the sidewalk to the front which would have required squishing through a lot of wet grass to circumvent. The backdoor wasn't that much further and he didn't see a puddle so he headed that way, noticing as he went that all the blinds on the front of the house were uncharacteristically drawn. As he passed the kitchen window at the side of the house, he heard raised voices. He didn't really want to charge in while Jack was in the middle of something. He noticed that the curtains had probably been hurried pulled together and one had caught on something. A small triangle of visibility remained. Feeling like a peeping Tom, Daniel leaned over and peered in the window.
Jack and a woman with her back to him were squared off against each other. He couldn't understand what either was saying over the noise of the storm. Jack yelled something at her and she turned her back on him and hugged herself while he kept yelling. Daniel knew that face. It was his daughter. The cynicism of 15 was gone, replaced by hurt and loss and tears rolling down her cheeks. When Jack finished, she straightened and dashed the tears from her face. She wheeled and slapped him hard across the face. They stared at each other for a moment and then she ran from the room.
The back door crashed open. Daniel froze. Was he going meet his daughter for the first time when she encountered him peering at her like voyeur? The woman that came dashing out the door didn't run back around the house. She went straight across the backyard and cut through to the street beyond. Daniel realized she had parked where her visit to Jack wouldn't be noticed.
Daniel was now completely soaked. There was no way he could go to Jack's door in this condition. Jack would be a fool if he didn't at least entertain the possibility that Daniel had been lurking outside. Daniel went back to his car and drove home, the cold water dripping down his neck and shivers racking his body, despite blasts of hot air blowing out the vents. He took a hot shower and went to bed.
The next morning, he got dressed but when it came time to go to Jack's, he stayed right where he was. What was the point? He knew for sure that Jack had been lying. He might just have a close, fatherly relationship with Deeje, it might be a military mentor/protégée thing, or he might be her lover. It didn't matter a lot to Daniel at that point. He didn't want to listen to it any more. About 10 after 10 the phone rang and he ignored it. It could be Jack and it could be someone soliciting for the FOP. It didn't much matter. He didn't have anything left to give anyone.
He stayed right where he was, drinking his coffee and making a list of worlds he could gate to and not come back from. The problem was you couldn't just waltz into the gateroom and dial out. What he needed to do was go on a legitimate mission, sneak away, get back to the gate, and go somewhere. It was a pleasant fantasy but the more he thought about it, the more he realized he was seriously considering it.
He poured a fresh cup of coffee and raised it in the approximate direction of his daughter's neighborhood in a salute to her victory. In his head, the lines of the song "Eve of Destruction" started looping.