By 11:35, he had a rather nice short list with 4 strong candidates and tucked it in his jeans pocket. He typically had great success with defining a problem very precisely and then walking away from it for at least 48 hours. When he came back, it just fell out of his mind, tied up in a neat bow. God knew, he needed something to be neat and well-defined right now.
He stood and looked around the place. He COULD clean it. He briefly entertained the thought of having Bertie over for dinner, to pay her back for her cooking for him, and tried to envision what she would think of the general mess. She would be appalled. Anyone but a fanatical slob would be appalled. Daniel wasn't so far gone into sloppy housekeeping that he didn't at least realize just how abysmal he had allowed his home environment to become. Scratch Bertie over for dinner because he couldn't bring himself to clean a place that in the deepest part of his mind he had already decided to leave forever.
"I can't believe I'm actually thinking about this so seriously," Daniel thought, appalled at how a wild idea had become a plan while his conscious mind wasn't watching. He told himself, "Okay, so the woman you've loved for years isn't even your friend any more, the man you thought was a cross between best friend and older brother has lied to you and may be messing with your daughter, said daughter hates your guts, your career is in a precarious state, and you have one friend left who is never around. Is that any reason to run away?" It didn't sound that bad but it didn't sound that good. The happiest, most useful days of his life had been on Abydos. He could make that happen again. Even as he sold himself on the idea, honesty did force him to make one quick correction to his recitation of his dismal state. He actually had two friends because Bertie, somehow, overnight had found her way into his heart.
The doorbell rang and he must have jumped a foot. Jack may just have gotten in the car and come over to figure out why he was a no show. It would be uncharacteristically hands on care and feeding of his friends for the self-contained man Jack had become over recent years but Daniel hadn't been doing well with probability lately. He decided to assume it was Jack and not someone selling candy for their school band. He grabbed his wallet, cell, and keys but realized that he didn't have a coat. That would require him to go to the front hall. He was being ridiculous. There was no way for the caller to see him doing it. The only telltale window had its drapes drawn. He just needed to avoid being heard. "Thank heavens for the back door," he thought, shrugged his carefully retrieved coat on and he eased out it as the caller hit the doorbell for the third time.
He went silently into the alley and down to the end of the block. He was powerfully tempted to try to determine whether it had been Jack at the door but that would put him out in the open. As Jack drove away, he might well see him skulking about. And what did it matter anyway? If Jack had shown up, it was probably because he was still capable of a certain amount of guilt and shame, not because he gave a damn about Daniel. "Pity party alert," he told himself sternly.
He slipped out the cell phone and called the one person he knew wouldn't tolerate any pity party foolishness from him. "Good morning," he said sweetly as Bertie snarled something incoherent into the phone.
"It is still morning and on a SATURDAY," Bertie pointed out, far more coherent. He could hear her moving about now, and then sounds that seemed to indicate coffee preparation.
"By maybe 15 minutes. Don't you want the worm?" he asked, smiling.
"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asked, sounding very wary.
"For heaven sakes, Bertie, get your mind out of the gutter," Daniel chided. "I was referencing early birds."
"And I was thinking tequila," she retorted. "Have you ever been, in any way, described as wormlike?"
"Let's try to bring this whole thing up to a higher plain," Daniel answered, unable to repress a chuckle. "Look, I have to hide out today and thought you might like to hide out with me."
"What girl wouldn't be tempted by an offer like that?" she said dryly, "but I have to work."
"Can I help?" he asked, surprising both of them.
"You probably could," she said. "I have to go look through a bunch of dusty records. Someone's trying to find out what happened to their grandfather, a milkman, who went out for a pack of Chesterfields after listening to "The Shadow" on the radio and never came back."
"Ouch," Daniel said. "We're talking a reeeely cold trail."
Bertie said, "I tried to dissuade the granddaughter, who's rather antique herself at this point, but it's giving her great pleasure so I'm cutting her a discount." She paused, "As a client you should know this is something I am not going to do for you since you have a fine income despite the fact that you are cuter than a dead baby seal and kiss like a dream."
"Okay," Daniel said, slowly. Bertie's compliments tended to leave him confounded. "I'm afraid to go to the front of my place to get my car. The person who rang my bell five minutes ago could be sitting in their car waiting for me to show up."
"Get over yourself. Who cares enough about you to sit around in their car in this weather waiting for you to show up?" Bertie said bluntly.
"They have heaters," Daniel said weakly.
"Right. Just give it another five minutes and then march your butt around the house, get in your car, and get over here. I'm only waiting 30 minutes." She sounded very stern and then she started her wonderful laugh, cut off by the dial tone.
Daniel's cell started to ring. He almost flipped it open immediately but made himself check caller id first. It was Jack. He wasn't answering that but then he had a bad thought. "Jack is a really high muckety muck now and he's got like the CIA working for him. Maybe they could triangulate on my cell phone. I need medication," he reflected then, trying to take himself in hand. "Jack has too much integrity to use those resources to track down a friend who stood him up for coffee. Doesn't he?" He looked at the cell like it was a tarantula but it was too expensive to toss in the gutter so he jammed back in a pocket, retrieved his car, and went to Bertie's.
On the way, he thought that he might be able to use Teal'c for some misdirection. He dialed the larger of his two remaining friends immediately. "Good day, DanielJackson," said Teal'c courteously. It sounded like he was in a coffee shop.
"Hi, Teal'c," Daniel returned. "Are you going over to Jack's tonight?"
"Is there a reason I should not?" Teal'c asked.
"Huh? Look, Teal'c, I suddenly discovered that I need to … visit a sick friend who lives in Castle Rock. I was going to call Jack but I'm afraid he'd try to change my mind."
"GeneralO'Neill is very concerned about the sick," Teal'c said loyally. "He would not try to interfere."
"Whatever. Just tell him, thanks, but I can't make it. Okay? Because I'll be in Castle Rock. I'm actually leaving now. For Castle Rock." Daniel winced. He was a really bad liar. How was he going to get to another world in order to gate off it to a fresh start without telegraphing his evil intentions through general weirdness. "So, goodbye," he said, adding, before he could stop himself, "because I need to get on the road to Castle Rock."
Daniel had a marvelous afternoon with Bertie. They had only talked about her work for him long enough for him to tell her to call off investigating Jack. He already had the information. She didn't push for more details and he was grateful because he had already thought about it more than he wanted to. They actually did find a lead in the musty volumes and celebrated by buying a huge pizza with a bizarre assortment of toppings and taking it back to Bertie's. She made him laugh more than he had laughed in a long time, not just since the Deeje nightmare.
Eventually it got late and Daniel knew he needed to leave before he did something stupid. He didn't believe in casual sex. Bertie deserved better than some guy making love to her and then literally departing this world almost immediately afterwards. Her camouflage glasses and frumpy clothes told him she was even more vulnerable than the average woman, although he had not yet had an explanation of why she had assumed her protective coloring.
He was trying to force himself to stand up when she said, "Put your head in my lap." He looked at her askance but her only response was to repeat herself. Daniel shrugged and complied. She gently removed his glasses and started to massage his scalp and his neck. "Do you want to tell me from whom you're hiding and why? Or what it is that you periodically went off in a fog thinking about today?"
He caught her hands and kissed her palms. "So you think you can torture it out of me?"
"Not ready to tell me?" she said, a little sadly.
"I can't Bertie, not all of it. There's classified stuff. But I promise you, if I decide to go hide forever, I'll tell you good bye first." He craned his head back to look at her. "Since hiding forever is definitely on the list of possibilities, I can't do what I would very much like to do to you but how about another five minute kissing session. It seems to be good for at least 8 hours of significant mood enhancement." She managed to actually make him feel better well into the next day as well as very uncertain as to whether he might have gotten over Sam at some point when he wasn't looking. Maybe loving Sam had become a habit persisting after the original reason was gone. Maybe when Sam rejected and humiliated him, she had set him free. It was one more think to wonder about chasing itself around in his brain.
He spent Sunday prowling around the mall, getting inspirations for small, easily portable trade goods that could be slipped in his normal kit but give him enough lingua franca to get established in one of the destination worlds he had in mind. He sat in the Food Court and looked at the humanity flowing past him with new eyes. He was quite ready to never see some things again. In fact he started making a list of things that he would be DELIGHTED to never see again such as overweight women in spandex with midriff bearing tops, men with rude and crude slogans on their t-shirts, nine-year old girls dressed like hookers, and little boys ignoring the real world for the artificiality of Gameboys. But there were other things that became achingly beautiful when you thought you would loose them forever, even humble things like onion rings. He'd left it all behind once. Could he, should he, do it again?
Periodically, roughly at one hour intervals, Jack's name showed up on his ringing cell phone. Then about mid-afternoon, it started alternating with Teal'c's. He finally took Teal'c's call about 5:00 as he stood contemplating the choices of movies at the mall's adjoining multiplex. "DanielJackson, are you still in Castle Rock?"
Daniel said, "Castle Rock?" and then realized his mistake, "Oh, that Castle Rock. Um, actually, no," he finished lamely.
"So how is your friend?" Teal'c asked politely. Daniel thought about his not so sick friend from the night before with the sweetly kissable mouth and the delectable body hidden under the baggy clothes. She was something so unexpected that she was almost like a scientific breakthrough or a spectacular archeological find. "DanielJackson, how is your friend?"
"Oh, sorry, I was just thinking about her chest… x-rays," Daniel responded. He quickly changed the subject, saying, "Did you all have a good time last night?"
"It was most interesting, DanielJackson," Teal'c said. "GeneralO'Neill invited that Captain who did the imitation of you in the bar. You told me then, I think, she was sort of talking you down in general."
Daniel nearly dropped the phone. "He did what? He knows her?" He realized that he hadn't told Teal'c about Deeje's suspected more serious acts beyond casting professional doubt on him nor that Deeje was his daughter and so Teal'c didn't realize how insane it was that Jack would stage this sort of surprise.
"Apparently she is the protégée of a ColonelPrior who is an old friend of GeneralO'Neill. ColonelPrior asked GeneralO'Neill to look out for her," Teal'c explained matter-of-factly. "I suspect that after you told GeneralO'Neill the story from the bar, he thought that the two of you should meet and get past whatever the problem is. GeneralO'Neill was very disappointed when I told him you were not coming."
Daniel groped behind him to find the marble planter and a seat. This was not a standing up kind of conversation any more. "How did she and Sam get along?"
"ColonelCarter was polite. She is always very polite."
Daniel reflexively touching his cheek, felt a sort of phantom stinging. He thought, "Not always, Teal'c." Aloud he said, "But?"
"Yes, there is a but," Teal'c agreed. "She was very angry at GeneralO'Neill under the polite words. They were in the kitchen together having a very bad argument in very low, polite voices. CaptainCox and I were left alone together in the living room and it was very awkward. CaptainCox left almost immediately after that. She was also angry with GeneralO'Neill I believe."
"That's all sort of hard to understand," Daniel said. "Okay, well, I should let you go. I've got a movie to see that's about to start. Will you be on base tomorrow?" Teal'c assented and they made plans for lunch.
Daniel put the cell away, feeling numb but hot and cold at the same time. He was convinced that only the lingering dose of Bertie medicine, still buoying him even in the midst of all this craziness, was allowing him to function at all. So Jack was coming out of the closet about knowing Deeje. The timing was interesting to say the least. Jack's audacity in staging this meeting without consulting him first, despite what he had told him about not being ready to meet her, staggered him. He wondered if Jack had revealed to Deeje that Daniel knew he was her father or if Deeje even knew that Jack knew it.
At that moment, the cell rang again. He almost didn't fish it out of his pocket and check the caller id since it was about time for Jack to annoy him again but thought crossed his mind that it might be Bertie and so he looked. The cell phone almost hit the hard tile floor of the theater lobby a second time. It was Sam.
He was too curious to not answer and she couldn't very well slap him through the phone, could she? "Hello, Daniel?" came Sam's voice sounding tentative and on the edge of upset.
"Colonel Carter," Daniel responded, "may I help you?" A woman walking by with her young daughter looked at him curiously. She had overheard his formal greeting and tone but she was looking at body language and an expression that went better with "Please tell me my entire family wasn't wiped out by terrorists."
"Yes you can. I would really like to see you. Do you think you could come over?" Sam said, her words little white flags hoping to be respected under the conventions of war.
"What would be the point?" Daniel asked, not feeling the least bit interested in seeing her. Despite the fact that he knew he had been drifting into rampant paranoia of late, it seemed like an inescapable conclusion that Jack knew Daniel knew something and Jack had roped Sam into contacting Daniel. Daniel wasn't okay with Jack at all. Jack had lied to him about Deeje. This business about his interest in her being on the behalf of his old colleague smelled like a convenient cover story given the intense argument he had witnessed through the window in the rainstorm.
"Please Daniel, it's important to me. There was a time that would have been enough," Sam said, her voice breaking a little.
"To every thing there is a season," Daniel quoted. Then the little girl, now sitting on a bench across from him, gave him a huge smile and suddenly he felt old and mean and used up. He couldn't let whatever his friends had done make him less than the man he wanted to be. "All right," he said, heavily. "I'll drop by after the movie. I guess with travel time and all that'll be about 9:30. Okay"
The movie had been a comedy and he used its better lines and thoughts of Bertie as a sort of armor to get himself prepared to deal with whatever pro-Jack arguments he was going to get from Sam. She greeted him, looking very, very young and vulnerable, even given the advantages the Gate effect gave her. She wore a very soft, pale blue sweater, with a big cowl neck. It hugged her neat curves and set off her blue eyes, shining with something. Tears? She wore soft pink lipstick and she smelled like something faintly floral, more than her normal soap and shampoo smell. She took his hand and pulled him into her living room and down on the sofa next to her. "Daniel, I want to apologize to you."
He looked at her coldly and said, "If I'm supposed to reciprocate and say I want to apologize to you too, it isn't happening."
"You're angry, not just hurt," she said with a hint of surprise in her voice.
"God, you do see me as some sort of toothless, old hound, always ready to come to heel when you call and panting eagerly for any crumb from you, don't you?" He stood up. "Coming here was a bad idea," he finished.
She jumped to her feet. "Daniel," she sighed, "Daniel, I don't see you that way but I've been a real hypocrite. Instead of telling you how I felt, I've been expecting you to read my mind and then being irritated when you didn't. You're not being fair now. I know I don't have a right to expect fairness but you aren't. Please try to be yourself, your fair, dear self. I promise you won't regret it."
He didn't sit back down. "I'm being as fair as I can. What is it you want to say?"
She moved closer to him and said, "I've always heard that actions speak louder than words." She rested one hand against his chest, brushed the other against his check and then she kissed him. Tears started to roll down her face. The salty water washed their joined mouths while her tongue sought entry. It was a deep, hungry kiss that mingled with the tears and it didn't just speak, it shouted.