The least difficult was ending the tender young relationship that had just started to grow between himself and Bertie. He was going to miss her but if he was going to give it a chance with Sam and honestly find out if there was still enough left of his once consuming love for Sam to justify being with her, he couldn't be involved with someone else on the side. Bertie was too fine, in any case, to ever be delegated to that role. He and Bertie had a history of mere weeks. Ending something so new had to be easier than dealing with a daughter who had haunted the back of his mind ever since he had learned of her existence some 16 years before or confronting Jack, the man he had thought was his best friend.
Oh yes, Jack. Was he still his friend or was he, God forbid, a candidate to become his son-in-law? His skin crawled. Or, an even more distasteful thought, Jack could become his grandchild's father. Jack undoubtedly had information he needed to help him understand Deeje. That's what he needed to focus on.
He couldn't hide seeing Bertie from Sam but some instinct told him not to tell Sam yet about the rape. She would expect him to want to be with her for comfort and might see a rejection in his seeking out Bertie. In any case, Deeje's workplace was not the place to be discussing something so personal to her.
He found Sam in her lab with two other scientists. He decided that it would be actually easier to tell her what he had to tell her in whispers than talk to her where she felt free to explode or, once again, slap him. She smiled, trying to simulate the way she had greeted him before they had spent quality time making out. He thought she needed practice. Her smile slipped as she saw the deep dejection in his body language and concern replaced it. "Sam," he whispered, "I just talked to the woman, you know, the one I've been seeing. I'm going to see her tonight to break it off."
"Oh really," she hissed. It was a pretty loud hiss and one of the other scientists looked up puzzled. She moderated her hiss down to a garden variety whisper. "I guess you have to. You're not the kind of man who would do this over the phone." He shook his head. "You don't need to look like it's the end of the world."
So she'd noticed but misinterpreted his unhappiness. "I just hate hurting people," he temporized.
She looked at him a little dubiously but moved to a new topic. "So, you're not going to touch her or kiss her, are you?"
He rolled his eyes. He couldn't help himself. "Sam, I'm not going to make out with her but I probably will kiss her good-bye." She glared at him. "It's not negotiable," he said flatly.
"My, that went well," he thought reflecting back on the encounter as he reentered his office to unexpectedly discover Jack O'Neill. "And this is going to be even more fun," he completed the thought.
Jack didn't initially pay any overt attention to him. He completed his circuit of the room studying every single thing, framed or stuck up with thumbtacks, on the wall, finishing at a photo of the fascinating funeral urn of a couple of months before. "You need to recharge your cell phone or learn to check your voice mail more often."
"Yeah," Daniel, said so dispirited that he just hoped Jack would go away and leave him in peace.
"Why, Daniel, did you not take my calls? Why didn't you show up to talk with me on Saturday and why didn't you show up Saturday night? I don't remember kicking your puppy at any point," Jack said, with a definite edge to his voice.
Jack going on the offense when Daniel felt like the one wronged shook him out of his lethargy. Jack was definitely the year's, hell the decade's, poster boy for sheer audacity. The anger felt good after the last half hour or so of guilt and sorrow and he went with it. "You're offended? You have the balls to be offended? I talked to Sam and Teal'c. I know you more than just met Deeje once. I know you were planning on trapping me into meeting her Saturday."
"I thought we were friends," Jack said and ripped the photo off the wall, rolled it into a tube, and started whacking it viciously against the side of Daniel's desk.
"Why are you attacking my photograph?" Daniel was seriously considering that maybe the explanation for this whole sorry episode as far as Jack was concerned was some sort of insanity. Maybe the ancient knowledge loaded into his head and unloaded more than once had caused some lasting damage that was just now showing up.
"Because it's easier than WHAPPING YOU ON THE HEAD." Daniel's mouth was hanging open now. "Daniel, you never talked to me. You never asked me what was going on." Daniel made a sound that stopped short of actual words. "Okay. I should have been more forthcoming with you at first but doesn't saving your sorry butt over and over again back in the day cut me any slack?"
"Jack, are you doing my daughter?" Daniel found himself saying and the euphemism just lay there between them.
It was Jack's turn for his mouth to hang open. "Let's not be shy, Danny," he finally said. "No, I am not 'doing' your daughter. Not any more than I ever 'did' Sam." He turned away from Daniel and went back to perusing the wall. "Not that I didn't want to with Sam and don't want to with Deeje. They're both off limits under my command and I take my duty seriously. And, like I told you before, you were always in the way with Sam. I never let myself fall all the way with her. And, as for Deeje, I'm an old man. The Gate effect makes me younger looking and more vigorous than most men 10 or 15 years younger but I'm still way too old for her. So there's nothing going on. But she's as stubborn as you are and she keeps coming at me."
"What were you fighting with her about Friday night?" Daniel asked.
"You were spying on me?" Jack said, his voice rising.
"No, Jack. I went over to see you and stumbled on it."
"I didn't know she was your daughter and when I first found that out, I wondered if she had gotten close to me simply to help her get assigned here, to help her in whatever vendetta she had going on against you. She convinced me that it started out that way but things changed. She also managed to convince me that she wasn't responsible for the poem or the rumor about the three of us. I never did think she would be capable of something that low but even if she were, I know she wouldn't do something that could hurt me that badly."
"So you buy everything she tells you?" Daniel said. "And don't forget to explain what you were fighting about."
"Daniel, Deeje is like no one I've ever known. She's at least as smart as Sam but she's much tougher. She's the kind of soldier I wanted with me in black ops, utterly fearless and ruthless when you need ruthlessness. She's got a delightful dry sense of humor. She's like the complete woman. When you care about someone, you have to believe in them." He turned to look at Daniel. "We've been fighting for a month now because I kept telling her she was wrong about you. That you both had been lied to about each other. That people sabotaged your relationship. She didn't want to hear it. Look at her life. She studied the same subjects at the same university as you. She came here and she stalked you for days when she was 17. Long enough to figure out that you worked on something highly secret for the Air Force and had been for years. Why do you think she went into Air Force ROTC? She's been determined to be better than you. To show you up and get even too. I was messing with that whole scaffolding. Friday night, we were fighting again over my insistence that she meet you."
"She slapped you over that? Seems like a mismatched reaction."
"You were the busy little peeping Tom, weren't you? No Daniel she slapped me because of something else altogether which is none of your business. You know when you start fighting with someone all sorts of off topic things get said because you're mad. I said something pretty stupid. I deserved to be slapped. If I hadn't deserved it, I would have slapped her back."
"She's a woman," Daniel said from some inbreed lifelong training about men not hitting women even though he had spent several years surrounded by female soldiers perfectly capable of beating him up.
"She's a soldier, Daniel."
"Whatever. So let's get back to the meet and greet. I believe I had been clear that I wasn't ready to meet her. I guess that didn't matter."
"It was tearing you up Daniel. It was tearing her up. I love both of you. What was I supposed to do?"
"Treat us like grownups," Daniel said, the heat gone from his voice. He wasn't angry with Jack any more. It had bled away in response to the anguish in Jack's voice over Deeje and him. "So, Jack, have you gotten anywhere with the 'Daniel's not really a bad guy?'" he asked without real hope.
"Not really. You're the Great Satan still. I think the only reason she finally agreed to come and meet you was she was trying to do something to dispel any lingering doubts I might have had about her feelings about me," Jack said, clearly discouraged.
Jack crossed the room to Daniel. "I don't do sorry well, Daniel. Are we okay about Saturday, about this whole mess?" He was doing his naughty little boy thing. Daniel was sure he didn't realize he did it but he had seen it work on women. Daniel sighed and then, despite everything, found himself laughing. Jack was such a bull in a china shop but it kept working for him. He'd had a professor once who had said that it was better to be lucky than good. Jack must be lucky or have some sort of very deep inner knowledge that no one else did because he kept charging around, brute forcing life, and yet succeeding.
Daniel put out his hand, "It's okay." He added, "really" as Jack stared at his hand as if he wasn't sure what to do with it. Instead of shaking it as Daniel expected, Jack grabbed hold of his hand and pulled him into a fierce hug.
"Don't ever go away on me like that again, Danny," Jack said.
"I won't. I promise," Daniel said, "but Jack watch the shit you pull, huh?"
That evening, he found himself sitting on the couch across from Bertie, full of an excellent meal and knowing that the time was right. "Bertie, I don't believe in talking with one woman about my relationship with another but I'm going to break that rule because it's the only way I can fully convey the huge impact you've had on me in a short time."
"You don't have to," she said, trying to derail him.
"I do have to. For years I believed myself to be in love with a woman who was in love with my best friend. I never said anything until a short time ago. She shut me down completely and it left me free to discover you. Then just Sunday night, she threw herself at me. She wanted to make love and I couldn't do it because of you. You've had that much impact on me in a matter of weeks. I'm not in love with you Bertie but I do love you. You've been so good for me that it makes me wonder about what I really do feel for her."
Bertie as always read him like a book. "But there's a 'but' right?"
"I have years invested with her. I have to be sure that there really isn't anything left before I walk away."
Bertie looked at him very fondly. "And you're all worried about how this is going to make me feel. Daniel, I don't like being dumped. Who does? But I wasn't in love with you yet. You've helped me more than you know and I am not a loser here actually. I think I'm starting to heal."
Daniel said, "You were raped, weren't you?" She shut down for a moment, her eyes shuttered and her face closed. "God, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you. You would have told me if you wanted me to know."
"Don't apologize. You asked me because you cared, not out of prurient interest. It's a fairly awful story, a lot worse than the standard date rape, and I guess it explains some of why I'm a touch eccentric or maybe I've just used it as the excuse to be as eccentric as I always wanted." She touched his cheek for just a moment, a butterfly touch. "Someday when your lady is secure enough in her relationship for us to be friends or if she dumps you, maybe I'll tell you all about it."
"She can't stop me from being your friend, although, for now, it's a friendship by phone and e-mail."
"Daniel, she won't understand. Just stay away completely for awhile," she said briskly and stood, clearly signaling to him that he needed to leave.
He rose reluctantly. As soon as he was on his feet, she walked to the door and opened it. "Do I get a goodbye kiss?" he asked.
"Do you think we're living in some romance novel or fan fiction story?" she asked. "Of course not. Goodbye for now, Daniel Jackson. Have a good life."
There was nothing left but his final task. He thought about asking Jack to mediate but that wasn't fair to Jack. It didn't seem appropriate to corner Deeje at work. He had a feeling she would want their biological relationship to remain a secret and the confrontation could so easily become a scene. So the logical conclusion was to go to her house but he agonized over whether he should just show up or call her first. He thought about what he would want if he were her and he decided to call her.
He found out that she had gone through the gate and would be off world for a month, joining the original SG team when the planet turned out to have some unexpected risks. He couldn't feel this way for another month. It wasn't that he expected the encounter to make him happy but he did hope it would free him of this constant sense of dread. He WAS the head of the archeology department and there was indeed an unexpected major find on the world to which her team had gone. If the initial reconnaissance had indicated it, he would never have assigned the hapless Carl to the mission. What could be more logical than that he went through the gate to check up on the archeological work in progress?
As he walked up the ramp to the gate, he almost wished it would malfunction and kill him. He was meeting his daughter face to face for the first time and facing the reality of himself as a failed father. If she couldn't forgive him, he wouldn't be able to forgive himself. Hell, maybe he wouldn't even then.