AN: For those of you who have been angsting over how this is going, some fences are mended this chapter.
"So, how has he been today so far?"
Sam looked up from the stack of reports she was diligently working through with a grin. "Hey, Janet." The petite doctor had a stack of files cradled in her arm that looked suspiciously familiar. "They have you doing personnel evaluations, too, huh? Jack and I both have them, but Daniel doesn't and he was jealous."
"Well, if he wants mine he can have them," Janet said, hefting them onto a clear space on the work table. "I thought we might as well keep each other company as we work through these."
"Good idea." Sam adjusted her piles somewhat so Janet would have more room. "Or are you just jealous that my table is bigger than your desk?"
"Well, you know, Sam, sometimes size does matter." Janet managed to say it with a straight face, only to snicker when Sam began giggling.
"Is that a subtle way to ask about Jack?" Sam asked after a few seconds.
"No, I don't need to ask. Remember all those lovely full-body examinations my nurses and I get to do before and after each mission? I know what all your teammates are packin', dear."
"And?"
Janet raised an eyebrow. "Doctor/Patient confidentiality, Captain," she said loftily, which sent them into giggles again.
Sam hadn't had this much girl-talk in, well, since she could remember. She'd been a geek in high school and a bit of a late bloomer, and she'd fast learned that the only way to get ahead in the military was to be one of the guys. She'd never missed it, but now that she knew how fun gossiping and giggling with another woman was, she'd never give it up.
"But seriously, Sam, how was the colonel today?"
Sam sighed and turned the page on the file she'd been reading before answering. "He was fine, to me. Kind of neutral. He was a bit rude to Daniel, though."
"Really?" Janet followed her lead and opened the top folder in her stack. "I hear he's been spending less time in Doctor Jackson's office and more time in the rec rooms with Mr. Teal'c."
"Yeah, he has. Daniel's a bit bewildered by it. He's trying to be a friend, and Jack is freezing him out."
"Too bad," Janet said. "I'd gotten the impression they were really close."
Jack strolled into Daniel's office, hands in his pockets, to find the archaeologist buried beneath a familiar stack of file folders, larger than the one Jack had been given. "I told you they'd get around to you, Daniel. Complaining was tempting fate. What, did you get twice the number of folders to make up for it?"
Daniel looked up and blinked owlishly. "Oh, hi, Jack." He glanced around. "No, uh, actually not. Someone apparently did a lot of planning last year back when we first got the gate running, about what kind of operations they'd be running through it. They'd already made a short list of military people they wanted here. Same with scientists. So you and Sam have fewer dossiers to go through, and since there are other officers and scientists already in the project the files you do have can be split up with other officers. But since no one really considered that archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists might be useful to the SGC, they don't have a short list—I'm having to slog through everything. And there really isn't one to share the burden. This is on top of the fact that as the only person trained in linguistics and anthropology, I've got to work through everything any of the teams find until I can actually wade through this stuff, find good candidates, get them hired, and get them trained. It's actually … a bit overwhelming. I had no idea the military had this much paperwork." He looked rather forlorn as he surveyed the sea of manilla.
Jack smirked. "Anybody tells you the Air Force flies on jet fuel is lying to you, Danny. Paperwork. Pure paperwork." He seated himself on a stool and glanced around. Last time Danny had had some doodad or other on the table he could play with, but everything was buried at the moment. "Wait, train people? I thought you were looking at people who were ... already trained." Teal'c was right, he had been giving Daniel the cold shoulder and it wasn't fair to him; Jack wanted to make it up to the guy, but he couldn't bring himself to actually open up. At least not right away.
Daniel pushed his glasses up. "Well, yes, trained in linguistics and such. But I don't think they teach Goa'uld at any colleges or universities that I know of, at least not on Earth. The people I pick will have the right background, but there are some specifics about what we're dealing with that they'll have to learn before they're of much use to me. I'm sure Sam's going to run into the same thing; there's got to be a lot they've learned about physics and astrophysics that hasn't gotten into any scientific journal yet." He frowned. "Which reminds me. The people we want will be a lot easier to get if they're allowed to publish at least some of what we find. I'll have to ask Hammond if there's any way around the security issue."
"Daniel," Jack said with a wince, "I don't think that'll be possible. The paranoid security types would probably restrict so much of the information that whatever you want to print will come out gibberish."
"Oh." Daniel's face fell slightly. "I figured. They really are paranoid, aren't they?"
Jack glanced furtively around. "Shhh," he whispered theatrically, "they might be listening."
Daniel laughed. "Right. I guess it's endemic to top-secret military bases, right?"
"Yup, pretty much." Dammit, there wasn't even a pencil lying around anywhere. What the hell was he supposed to do with his hands?
"So, how's Sam doing?"
Jack's head shot up. "Fine. Why do you ask?" It came out a touch too defensively, and he cursed himself for it.
"No reason," Daniel said carefully. "Do you know she's fine because you've talked to her, or are you just assuming because she hasn't told you something's wrong?"
Busted. He fidgeted a little. Now Daniel sounded like Sara did when she was trying to get him to admit he was wrong.
Daniel apparently drew the right conclusion about his silence. "You do need to talk to her, Jack."
"I know." And Sam wasn't the only 'her' he needed to talk to.
"And not just about the Simpsons and fishing, either. She's under a lot of stress right now, and a lot of that is because she doesn't know much about you or about how you're going to handle this thing."
"I told her I'd be there for her, whatever she needed," Jack said defensively.
"You haven't been, so far," Daniel pointed out.
It took the wind out of his sails. Metaphorically speaking, that was. And why was he using naval metaphors? The closest he ever got to the water was the lake at his cabin in Minnesota, and there were no boats involved.
"I don't want to pressure you or anything," Daniel said, coming around to his side of the table. "And if you need any advice on how to talk to her, I've gotten to know her over the past couple of weeks while you've been ignoring her. And I'm … married," he said with a glance at the picture of Sha're that had pride of place in his work area. He glanced down and bit his lip before continuing, "so I have some relationship experience—"
"I used to be married, too, y'know," Jack said in some annoyance.
Daniel nodded. "That's true," he said mildly, staring at Jack.
Okay, so the fact that he was divorced probably didn't qualify him for husband of the year.
"I know you can handle this," Daniel continued after a pause, "but if you'd like any help talking with her, I'd be glad to do whatever I can."
The slender man pushed his glasses up and watched Jack some more. What was it, the next Olympic event? Teal'c would take the gold, but Daniel was working himself up to a strong contender for the silver.
"Jack is something else bothering you?" he asked at last.
Jack debated telling him. After that wonderful spill-your-guts moment when he'd first found out, he'd been a little leery of talking about it. Well, more so than usual, anyway. Sam had been right to be mad, and his only excuse was that he'd been in a state of shock at the time and had no defenses against the persistence of his teammates, especially the geek. And it wasn't even a one-time-only event. Daniel'd managed to get practically his life's story out of Jack in the caves on Abydos.
Hell, he was probably going to find out anyway. If nothing else, he'd simply wear him down over the next few weeks; Jack couldn't remember what Daniel's middle name was from the personnel file he'd glanced at the year before, but he'd lay money on 'Persistence.' "I haven't told Sara, yet," he admitted. "I don't think she'll take it well, not this soon after … Charlie. But I owe it to her to tell her personally, not just let her find out through the grapevine."
"Do you want me or Teal'c to come along when you tell her, for moral support? Or Sam?"
Jack's eyes widened in horror. "Hell, no. It'll be bad enough by myself. I just … have to get off my butt and go talk to her."
"Then do it," Daniel said. "It won't get any easier."