2006

As soon as alternate Daniel and his family disappeared into the room with the dying Mandy, SG-1 heard Landry's explanation of the problems surrounding the quantum mirror. Landry had just learned that morning that it was missing. There were no clues as to who had taken it or why. It was not likely to be the way to save the couple from temporal distortion.

Carolyn, having overhead them, came closer and said quietly, "If she dies, there may not actually be a problem. Daniel's DNA changed slightly after each time he descended. He may be, in some cosmic sense, different enough that temporal distortion isn't a problem. Dr. Frasier learned what to look for with respect to the temporal distortion phenomena and, when I examined the other Daniel, I didn't see any sign of it."

Sam said, fervently, "We can only hope." Cam was having trouble himself with the situation. He could imagine how hard it would be for Sam to think of those children, in some sense her children, losing their other parent. She continued, "However, we can't be sure, right? If I might ask, General, who's working on the problem?" Landry filled her in and she left quickly to assist with the effort.

Landry said, "There's nothing to be gained by questioning the man any further at this point about how he got here. I think he's told us everything he knows. He's just lost his wife and his children, their mother. Mitchell, he seems to be comfortable with you. Please take charge of getting them settled in guest quarters, under guard of course, food, whatever they need. I putting them under your care until otherwise notified." Daniel seemed to be about to say something and the General said, "I think putting you in charge of yourself might be a strain on both of you." Daniel reluctantly nodded.

The family came closer to stumbling out than walking out. The little girl was sobbing noisily again and little Mitch was trying very hard not to cry himself, but to focus on her. Jake was as stony faced as ever. Mary Clare was buried against her father's shoulder, her visibly shaking shoulders evidence that she was weeping silently. Alternate Daniel was white-faced and drawn, but not crying. "She's gone," he said simply. He turned to the General. "Sir, is there a priest available? I'd like the appropriate rites."

Landry, nodded, not showing his probable surprise at this marked difference from the Daniel of this reality.

Cam said, gently, "Daniel, would you like to get out of here? Go to guest quarters and have an opportunity for some privacy?"

Alternate Daniel nodded. "Thanks. That would help." He smiled slightly and said, "It's Dan by the way. No one calls me Daniel, but my mother. You certainly never did."

They began to walk toward the guest quarters, Cam leading the way and Daniel accompanying them. Daniel spoke then, "Dan, I'm really sorry. When I lost Sha're, it was like falling into a black hole and she and I had just a short time together. You and your wife shared a life for a long time. Whatever I can do…"

Jake zoned in, surprising them, and said, "Sha're? The headman's daughter? I don't get it."

Daniel said, "We were married for three years before she died." His eyes widened. "She's well? She's still alive and okay in your reality?"

Jake said, "Alive, yeah. Okay? Let's just say, the woman is the biggest pain in the ass in the entire village. She's really down on the Tauri and certainly not a big fan of our family, particularly not of me. You really know how to pick 'em, don't you?"

Dan rebuked Jake sharply in the Abydos dialect. Daniel said something conciliatory in the same language which brought the other two up sharp. They were evidently used to using it as a secret language when they were back on Earth and hadn't considered that Daniel would know it.

"So," Dan said, "how did that happen, you and Sha're?" Mitchell thought, if he's like our Daniel, his curiosity works overtime and this is helping him to distract himself.

"When we got to Abydos, we were greeted as personages of great importance. They gave Sha're to me as a wife. Of course, we didn't…" Daniel fumbled for words, "It would have shamed her for me to openly reject her so we let the village think we were truly together, but after awhile we wanted to be."

Dan slanted a sidewise look at him. "I got cross-examined about whether I had a wife, which of course I did. Now, I see where I might have ended up." Jake snorted and Dan gave him a quelling look. "So, you two never had a child?"

"No," he said. Just no, but all of them had seen the intense pain on his face. Cam imagined he had felt again the pain of Sha're's child by Apothis, the bittersweet pleasure of the time when he had Sha're back for himself briefly in her late pregnancy, and then losing her again. Teal'c had told him the sad story to help him understand Daniel better.

When they reached the guest quarters, Daniel said, "I imagine you want to be alone as a family. I'll be by in the morning and, like I said, if there's anything I can do, let me know." Cam took his leave as well.

As he and Daniel walked away, he observed, "This might be the last night of the man's life. It seems so inadequate just walking away."

Daniel stopped and looked at Cam. "I was very struck by what Carolyn said. I think there's a good chance that he'll be okay."

Cam said, "Have you stopped to think about the implications of that? The man has nothing here. No savings, no possessions, no academic credentials. He won't be able to stay Dr. Daniel Jackson because we won't be able to explain two of you, identical in appearance, with the same name. It's a lot like the android Daniel, isn't it? Except this is a flesh and blood person whose rights simply can't be trampled on or ignored. I imagine there'll be strong pressure on him to pick another world. Then there are his kids. They have no identity here either and he has no resources to provide for them. Right now, he's just lost his wife. If he lives, he'll still die for all intents and purposes."

Cam continued to spend time with Dan and his family. It was a little like waiting for a bomb to go off although after the first 24 hours, every hour that passed without any sign of temporal distortion, he relaxed a little bit more. He had always admired Daniel, but he found that he instantly bonded with Dan. It was hard not to respond to Dan's easy friendship and he was fascinated by the stories Dan told him about the boyhood and teen years the two of them had shared in another reality. They were very close to what had actually happened to him. In some cases, the only difference was that Dan had not been present when he had lived it.

Dan asked him, "Cam, I need an orientation here. Tell me about this Daniel and your relationship to him."

Cam said, "That's pretty weird but okay. The guy is brilliant. He's got two Ph.D.s, one in linguistics and one in archeology, and multiple Masters. The last count I heard was that he spoke 23 languages but that was years ago. Who knows how many he's up to now? He figured out how to make the gate work. He's done all sorts of fantastic things and been a major force toward saving the planet more than once. He ascended once and was gone for a year before he chose to descend. The second time, he ascended part way, turned it down and came back." That got him an incredulous look. "Really. He did."

"Is there anything between him and Mandy, I mean, Sam?"

Cam said, "They've always been great friends, but, well, it was always Jack that had Sam's attention and now that he's been promoted and she's not really in his chain of command, they've finally done something about it."

Dan stopped and looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Then he smiled and started walking again. "Okay, you had me going for a moment. That's worth at least a Wookie, but not Chewbacca. Now what's the truth?"

Mitchell gaped at him. When he had been a kid and his friends had been in their intense Star Wars phase, they had actually gone through a period of using their Star Wars figures as measures of value.

"We were really good friends growing up," he said.

"The best," Dan affirmed. "Why do you think my youngest son is named Mitchell? And you and Janet were going to," he clenched his teeth and stopped.

"I'll tell you about Daniel's love life if you'll finish that sentence."

"It's just hard. Janet's not dead. The two of you have been married a little over a year. Janet's seven months pregnant. It's a girl and you've, or rather they've, already decided she will be named Danielle. Now I'll never see the kid."

Cam hated to see what this man was going through. He said more heartily than he felt, trying to get to a lighter vein, "Sam really is with Jack."

"That's preposterous!" Dan exploded. "She doesn't look much like my Mandy, way too uptight and military, but she can't be that different. Like my British friends say, they're chalk and cheese. Jack O'Neill's a great guy and he came through for Abydos on our first mission together, but he's just NOT up to Mandy-ur-Sam's fighting weight intellectually. He'd bore her to death and she'd annoy the hell of him. And that's just the beginning." He chewed on it for a moment. "Nothing with Daniel. So who is he with?"

"There hasn't really been anyone since Sha're. He mainly seems to draw alien babes for whatever reason. There have been quite a few really interested in him, Vala Mal Doran being the latest, but he's still a geek at heart I guess and just seems a little clueless when it comes to female interest on earth." Cam considered, thought about telling Dan that he thought Daniel might care more for Sam than anyone realized, but decided that was only a wild suspicion on his part, devoid of anything but a gut feeling.

Mercifully, the children hadn't heard about temporal distortion and didn't realize that their remaining parent was on a potential death watch. Cam enjoyed the two little ones and within a few days, they had forgotten that he was not the same man they had always known. Jake was less willing to make the substitution, but Cam found that they were able to come to their own accord. The one he couldn't figure out was Mary Clare. She was a winsome girl, quietly vibrant, with the kind of looks that would grow into great beauty by the time she was fully mature. He found her refreshing and regretted the fact that as soon as she knew he was there she got extremely shy. He was shocked when Jake told him quietly, "She has a huge crush on the original Uncle Cam but she was comfortable with him because she had always known him. He just teased her and had a way of making light of the crush without making light of her that kept it all defused. It's a little different with you." The days went by and nothing happened except that Daniel's family began to get cabin fever and Cam became more and more certain that he really needed to introduce Mary Clare to some attractive boys her own age.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Jack came for the weekend but he didn't come to the Mountain. He and Sam sat in front of a roaring fire at her house and it seemed there was nothing to say. He just stared into the flames and responded to her conversational sallies with monosyllables. Finally she said, "Jack I really don't want a relationship with a statue."

He leaned over and pulled her to him and started kissing her but she pushed him away. "What's your problem? I didn't think statues made out," he said.

"My problem is that every time something is going on the answer is not to shut me up with sex. What is it!" She couldn't stop her voice from rising.

"These kids," he asked, turning the beer bottle in his hands and not looking at her, "they look like you or do they look like Daniel?"

"Mary Clare looks a lot like me at that age and little Mitch looks just like Daniel. The other two, though, are sort of a mixture. They have Daniel's light brown hair and their eyes are more his shade of blue than mine, I think they have his mouth too, but still I think they look more like me. Well, except Jake's got Daniel's body proportions I think although he's a lot more muscular than Daniel probably was at that age."

"You certainly have studied Danny's body parts," Jack said sarcastically.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam asked.

"I'm just saying, for all intents and purposes these kids are yours and Daniel's even though there's never been anything physical between you." He looked at her through narrowed eyes. "There hasn't, has there?"

"Jack, have you lost it?" she blew up, losing her cool. "So there's one alternate reality where I'm with Daniel. In all the others I'm with you including this one. You're acting like you just found out that I had Daniel's love child. I feel like the cover of the National Inquirer."

He raised a hand. "Okay, I'm sorry. I just can't help but wonder what goes through your head when you look at those kids."

"Nothing Jack except feeling exceptionally sorry that they have lost everything but their father and they may be about to lose him too. Why do you think I've been working so hard to try to figure out how the gate sent them here and what can be done to reverse it?"

Jack looked at her a moment longer and then shifted to face back to the television set. "I think what we need is a good hockey game. Don't you?"

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

After about two weeks, Dan asked for some work, some translations, something to keep busy. Landry directed that he be given something with no weapons implications, no real classified content other than the fact that it was from off world, something Dan obviously already knew. It turned out that Dan was, like Daniel, a linguist and an archeologist. Daniel sat down with him to orient him and determine the background he brought to the task.

"So where did you study?" Daniel asked.

"I got both doctorates from the University of Chicago like you." Daniel looked a question. "I asked Cam for your curriculum vitae. It's a matter of public record after all," Dan said, just a little defensively. "I don't have any masters in other fields. Mandy and I got married before I finished the second Ph.D. There wasn't time for collecting degrees with Mary Clare and Jake being born 10 months after we got married."

He grimaced ruefully. "I make this sound like a competition, don't I and I have to explain why I'm on the losing team? Too many years of competitive soccer, I guess. Anyway, after the accident in the museum when I was young that killed my father-our father-, Mom was determined that I should have a stable life. She accepted a faculty position at Duke in Chapel Hill, N.C. and tried to see that I had a typical childhood. After she remarried, things got even more relentlessly normal. I was only ahead of myself in school a year up until college. Of course I did a lot of independent study with her and I got through undergraduate in two years, but in grade school and high school, I was really good at faking being one of the guys. Cam was the only one of my friends who really knew all the stuff I had going on. I guess all that blending in was why I only shared my rogue research conclusions about the pyramids with Catherine. Lucky for me, she was the one who got involved with the Stargate and really the only one who needed to know." He laughed. "That was a lot more than you asked. I'm sorry. I do tend to run on."

Daniel laughed in response, "And I don't? Just ask Sam."

Dan looked down for a moment and Daniel apologized. "I shouldn't have mentioned her."

"Hey, she's here, right? I notice she's staying away from me and I appreciate that. I'm not ready to see Mandy sort of," he grimaced, "okay, I'll say this to you. If I can't be honest with almost myself… Thing is you need to understand me but no one else, except maybe Cam, needs to hear this."

Daniel said, "It's really hard for you not to act like Cam's your life long friend, isn't it?"

Dan said, "Yeah. I keep trying to remember, but there he is, looking and sounding exactly the same. I'm glad he seems to have bonded with the little ones because emotionally if their favorite uncle rejected them, I think it would really hurt. That's the thing with your Sam. She looks a lot less like Mandy than Cam does like, well Cam. It's more than the short hair and the uniform. If I had to describe Mandy, after her brilliance, what you noticed was that she was unconventional, hated rules, hated conformity. Her father died in Nam and her mother died when she was about 10. She and her brother went through a series of foster homes, mostly separated. She got very rebellious, kind of wild."

Daniel said, "My curriculum vitae didn't tell you that the accident killed both my parents, Grandfather Nick didn't want me, and I grew up in foster homes."

Dan looked at him stunned. Then he nodded slowly, "So maybe you can understand how different that would make my Mandy. And frankly, watching your Sam walk around all military and cool seems like a perversion of something. I keep finding myself reacting to it as wrongness. It's not at all fair to her or even rational, but it makes me mad that she's alive and Mandy's dead. The little ones I think will have a harder time separating her from their mother and it will only confuse and hurt them when she really can't fill the role. I think we need to go to the Alpha site or I've heard talk about Atlantis."

Daniel said, "Problem is, we haven't developed sites as total colonies with families the way your reality has. There wouldn't be anywhere for you to go where there would be a structure for your kids." They looked at each other glumly and let it drop. Neither of them could see a solution.

At the end of a month, Carolyn was sure that Dan wasn't going to self-destruct and Sam and her team had found no way to return him and his family to their own reality. It was time to face up to the challenge of making a life for himself and his family in a world where he had no home, no savings, and no pension. He and his family had no identification or no record that they existed. All their friends and relatives were gone. The wounds were too deep for the SGC's psychologist, but he tried anyway. Dan turned to the priest who was a chaplain at the Mountain and seemed to get more from those conversations than session with the psychologist.

Landry sat down with Daniel, Cam, and Dan to talk about it. "We've thought about sending you off world and if it weren't for your kids, that would unquestionably be the solution. They will pay a price whether you go to the Alpha site or Atlantis or settle on one of the worlds of our allies. The price they pay if you stay here is that they will have to accept new identities. The little ones will have to stay in the Mountain for quite awhile until we're sure they have completely mastered the new story. We won't be able to give you academic credentials that would really work for the kind of research career for which you are suited. The first time you published anything, it would be immediately apparent you hadn't attended wherever you claimed to have gone. Your only option if you want to continue with the work for which you are trained and stay on this planet, is to work for us."

Dan shrugged. "Nothing you've said is a surprise. Let me think about it. Talk to the older two at any rate."

Before they reconvened, everything changed. Daniel was in his office and looked up to see Dan at the door. His face was drawn and he moved almost like a zombie. "Can I come in?" he asked, his face and his manner devoid of any animation.

"Sure," Daniel said. "Please sit down."

Dan dropped into the indicated chair like a felled steer and sat staring at his hand for awhile. Finally he looked up and said, "I've just spoken with Dr. Lam. She's found signs that temporal distortion is affecting me after all. She projects I have maybe six months."

Daniel felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. Despite the fact that Dan had lost everything worldly, in addition to his wife, Daniel had felt guilty twinges of jealousy several times. Dan had had the childhood he had wanted, a long standing marriage, children, a professional career devoid of criticism, and was relaxed and confidant in a way Daniel would never be. He felt as if he had willed this terrible thing on Dan at some level. "No," he said. "I can't accept that."

"It's still going to happen," Dan said. "I have something huge I have to ask you."

Daniel felt a second, even more powerful wave assail him. "You want me to be a father to your kids."

He didn't pose it as a question. Dan knew Daniel understood just as Dan knew that Daniel would have done the same thing had the positions been reversed. "Will you consider it?"

What could Daniel say? The man was dying because Daniel lived. "I'll consider it. Perhaps I should spend some time with them. Let us all make an informed decision."

Dan said, "That's all I ask."

Daniel sat in his office for a long time after Dan left, thinking about the request. He realized that this would change things between Sam and himself. Things were already strained because of her affair with Jack. He had been surprised at how much that bothered him and he didn't really want to think about why it did. How much more strain would it cause to have children walking around that were living proof of what might have happened between them, but never had?