A/N: In the immortal words of Han Solo, "It's not my fault!" Seriously though, this is a very long chapter and I worked my bum off to have it ready to go yesterday, but there was something wrong with the site. I tried again today at naptime, and it wouldn't work then either. It was actually rather frustrating. Anyway, I do believe this is the saddest chapter of the story- maybe even of anything I've written. Don't worry, it gets better. It wouldn't have made sense if they weren't a little sad to say goodbye. And I promise they'll eventually finish all the conversations that get started here.

Ch 41: Pillow Talk

"Jack?" Sam asked, getting impatient that her revelation had failed to elicit a response of any sort beyond that one incoherent word he'd muffled into his pillow.

Absently wondering if Teal'c could teach her how he always managed to wake up their CO with one quiet word, she plopped down on the edge of the bed and shoved his shoulder just a little bit harder than most people would consider necessary. Biting her lip for a moment, she cleared her throat and did her best impression of Teal'c. "O'Neill."

Nothing. Apparently her Teal'c impression wasn't any better than her airplane noises.

She let out a frustrated sigh and debated the pros and cons of going from shoulder-shoving to shoulder-punching. On the one hand, it would probably wake him up. On the other hand, if she woke him up by punching him, in all likelihood he'd come up swinging himself. Teetering dangerously close to whining, she said, "Come on, wake up, this is really important!"

Sam yelped in surprise as he suddenly rolled away from her, onto his back, trapping her arm and taking her with him. And while Jack had been clinging to sleep fiercely, having his 2IC suddenly land right on top of him was more than enough to wake him up.

He let out an 'oomph' as her knee landed squarely in his solar plexus and got the wind knocked out of him, but even as he shook off sleep's last foggy remnants he sent up a silent 'thank you' that her knee hadn't found a lower, even more painful target. "Carter what the hell?" he demanded as she scrambled off of him.

He'd already had the comforter and everything kicked down around his legs and now it seemed to be attacking her - or at least she must have thought it was, based on how hard she was trying to kick free of it. He turned on his side and watched her, amused.

By the time she won her battle with his comforter, he was laughing into his pillow. She glanced at him and then decided it would be much wiser to stare straight up at his ceiling instead.

"So, um, it's not so much that I object to you jumping into bed with me, but you should really work on your technique a little there," he finally remarked conversationally. When she laughed, he added, "Frankly I expected more of you."

She covered her face with her hands, but he could tell it was to hide the fact that she was giggling rather than from embarrassment. "That is not why I'm here," she said firmly. "And for the record I did not jump into bed with you, I was trying to wake you up. You're the one who pulled me down on top of you."

"Can you blame me?"

"Jack."

"Okay okay. If you're not here for a pajama party, what is it?"

"I figured out how to fix Daniel! At least, I think. The first step anyway. I need to check a few things first, but I'm almost positive I've got it."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Come on, I'll go get him." She sat up and turned to get to her feet.

Jack grabbed her wrist lightly. "You want to go up to the base right now?"

"Of course." She turned back around, looking at him as though he were the crazy one - it was very similar to the look he was giving her.

"Sam," he stated. "It's the middle of the night. You want to go wake up that sweet, sleeping little boy, not to mention everybody at the base?"

"People have been working nonstop on this for days, and I've had…"

"General Hammond's not going to come back up to the base for this until morning anyway, and he's not going to let you do anything with the trunk until he gets a report…"

"All right, I guess you have a point," Sam admitted reluctantly. "I'll go get him."

"And how exactly does that fit into 'you have a point?'"

"I can't leave him alone in the guest room and I've already interrupted your sleep enough so I'll just move him in here and…"

"What?"

"Well, I admit waking Danny up was… overreacting but I can still go get started. You can bring him up in the morning and…"

"No," Jack said flatly.

"What?"

"Look, I'm glad you had one of your genius revelations - in your sleep this time, apparently… but that just means you weren't sleeping right. Which is further proof that you need to sleep now. A few more hours isn't going to do anybody any harm."

"But…"

"I'm surprised you're so eager to get him changed back all of a sudden anyway. I thought you liked him like this."

"Of course I do," Sam said defensively, and Jack realized he'd hit on the best way to convince her to wait until morning, which was good, because his first plan had been to just order her to go back to bed. While that was sort of entertaining in and of itself, he doubted she'd appreciate him pulling rank whenever it was convenient, while simultaneously encouraging the informal atmosphere they'd been developing since Danny had shown up. He wasn't above resorting to such a tactic - at least not at two in the morning when he was pretty damn tired himself and wanted to go back to sleep… but he'd rather avoid it if he could.

"I love Danny, you know that. And if there were no way to get him back to Daniel I'd happily go tell General Hammond I wanted to adopt the little guy. But the fact is we can get him back and we need him. We need him on SG-1, the SGC needs him as part of the program… not to mention the fact that we can't very well decide to keep him like he is just because he's cute, while essentially erasing the person he was and making him grow up as somebody else who just happens to have the same DNA as our old friend and…"

"Whoa, easy," Jack interrupted. "Geez, breathe, Carter. I wasn't suggesting we keep him small forever just because he's cute. I know he's not a stray puppy or something. I just meant I was surprised that all of a sudden the solution to the problem seemed more important to you than letting Danny get a good night's sleep."

"Oh. Well when you put it like that…" she sighed. "I know I got carried away, it's just that I haven't really been contributing to the solution all that much and I kind of… overreacted."

"Yeah, just a little."

"Actually, I don't think there's such a thing as overreacting a little. I mean, by the time you're able to say that someone is 'overreacting,' it pretty much implies that there's nothing little about it…"

Convinced she wasn't going to make another dash towards the guest room for the sleeping boy, Jack finally released her wrist and nudged her leg instead as he spoke. "You've been giving me crap about arguing with Danny, and now you're arguing over my attempt to defend you from your own accusations against yourself?"

She looked down at her hands and got very still and quiet all of a sudden, and Jack realized that the time for gentle teasing was, once again, over. Between the way her brain flashed from one thing to the next and the way he was always subverting serious conversations with attempted comedy, they had always been quite good at switching on a dime from serious to silly, and back again.

After a few moments, he said hesitantly, "So… if you're right about the trunk thing - and you're always right - then… this was really our last night with Danny, wasn't it?"

"Probably," she agreed.

They let that sink in for a few moments before Jack commented, "It was a good one though."

The remark reminded her of something he'd said during dinner that she had wondered about. And, not wanting to start getting emotional about losing Danny now, she tried to steer the conversation in that direction to keep her mind off of dwelling on how much she was going to miss the sweet little boy they'd grown so fond of in such a short time. "It was," she agreed. "But you said you had a bad day today, remember? What happened after Danny and I came back here that was so bad?"

"Oh God… it's a little late to open up that can of worms."

"Oh. Okay." She tried ineffectually to hide her disappointment - she'd been very curious.

He looked at her carefully and sighed. He knew her mind would already be busy thinking about all the things she'd be doing if he'd allowed her to go back to the base. Add on the mystery of what he'd been doing all afternoon that had made him so grumpy when he came home… he knew she'd never be able to go back to sleep. "All right. Get comfortable." He waited as she twisted around until she was facing him, sitting cross-legged on the mattress near his legs. Her toes were cold, so she inched them under his leg discreetly as he started talking. "Well, first of all, everything's fine. So… don't get too mad when you hear this, okay?"

"That's a really terrible way to start a story, you know."

"Hey, hold all criticisms of the storyteller until the end, please."

"Sorry. Please continue."

"That's better. So, you know how your dad's been a little…"

"Bitchy?" Sam supplied.

"I was going to say 'irritable.' But… yes. Anyway, I found out why."

"You asked him?" Sam asked, surprised, knowing her dad would be unlikely to volunteer the information on his own.

"Ah, no. Not exactly. But I sort of figured it out when he had me called into Hammond's office and accused me of having an inappropriate relationship with his daughter."

"What?" Sam exclaimed loudly.

"Shhhh, you'll wake up Danny."

She lowered her voice and continued. "Are you serious?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"It wasn't an official complaint, and we got everything worked out so I didn't want to tell you right away when I got home and you guys had cooked dinner and Danny was all excited about writing our names and…"

Dismissing that issue, she zeroed in on the more important one. "What the hell was he thinking?"

"Well… I'm not sure exactly. But listen, everything turned out okay. See…" He filled her in on everything, and she reacted pretty much as he'd expected her to. She was much more upset about the whole thing than Jack had been, and was especially irritated that her father hadn't tried to talk to her about it personally first before making professional accusations against her CO - no matter how 'informal' they had been.

By the time Jack had finished his narrative, she was all ready to rush back up to the base again, this time so she could have a few choice words with one retired Air Force General. Jack shook his head. "Calm down. It turned out not to be that big a deal anyway. Apparently overreacting runs in the Carter genes."

"But…"

"Nope. Talk to him tomorrow."

"Fine," she agreed grudgingly. "But I still don't really understand the part where you claim everything's okay now. I know my dad, and I know you. You're not exactly the poster boys for 'forgive and forget,' especially…" she trailed off, not wanting to finish the sentence out loud.

"Especially where you're concerned?" Jack guessed. He shrugged and glanced away, then said, "Teal'c had a lot to do with it. On both ends, I'm guessing. But there's not a lot to tell here, Sam. I explained the phone call and everything he'd overheard and misinterpreted, and he believed me."

She narrowed her eyes and said, "Hmm. You're really not going to tell me. Well, I guess I'll have to ask Teal'c tomorrow. I just can't believe he wouldn't say anything to me about it first. I mean, he's done this kind of ridiculous thing before when I was a teenager but I thought… I guess I thought we were closer now." She looked down at her hands sadly, shaking her head.

"You are. You know that."

She nodded. "We are, you're right, I know. Still. I guess some things just don't change."

He left her to her own thoughts for a few moments before offering a quiet, "Hey." His hand landed on her forearm again and he realized she was getting chilly - she actually had goose bumps. He wasn't surprised - he liked to keep his bedroom pretty cold while he slept, and she was always a little bit colder than he was anyway. "Come here."

"I am here," she pointed out, but she stretched back out next to him anyway as she said it and as he reached down for the covers that she'd 'killed' and pulled it back up to cover them both. There was still a good foot of space between them, and he wasn't touching her at all, but they still both couldn't help thinking they really shouldn't be this close together, both under the covers of the same bed, without a toddler or other similar buffer between them, particularly in light of the way Jack had apparently spent the better part of his day defending last night's sleeping arrangements to his CO and her father.

Sam also couldn't help the little flutter as the thought occurred to her and she realized that yes, all that was true, but at the moment, she really couldn't care less. There was respecting rules, and then there was taking them so literally that it was just ridiculous, after all. And while her father may not have appreciated the distinction, General Hammond obviously did. Enough that he'd trusted them both enough to put them in charge of Danny together.

She turned on her side so they were facing each other, and said quietly, "I was just thinking about how right you were."

"That's got to be a first," Jack quipped.

"I mean about Danny. What you said before. I am going to miss him. A lot. And… as much as I love the Daniel Jackson we've always known… there's… it would just be really, really great if there were a way we could have them both."

"Yeah," Jack agreed. "I had forgotten how much fun having a little kid around is. Sam, if he could never be changed back, would you really want to adopt him?"

"Well of course. He loves all of us way too much for us to send him to some anonymous people somewhere and he's Daniel… it just wouldn't be right not to take care of him."

"What about all that stuff you said in the car though?"

"What stuff?"

"On the way back from the dinosaur place. About not being able to do a good enough job at the SGC and being a parent if you tried to do them both at once."

She thought for a moment and said, "All that's true. But it's like when Janet adopted Cassie. Sometimes there's only one right choice to make even if the circumstances aren't what you'd have considered ideal, and you just make it work as best you can, right?"

"Yeah," he said quietly, now lost in his own thought. He knew Sam was talking about being willing to make drastic changes to her career for the sake of a family, but he couldn't help but apply her words to the opposite - and unfortunately more real, for now at least, scenario.

She was speaking hypothetically, and he knew that she'd do what she said in a heartbeat, but the reality was that wasn't the situation they were in. So, for the time being, wouldn't it still be the right choice to just leave everything as it was and get on with their jobs, and lives, as best they could? He really wasn't entirely sure, but as he'd told Jacob, when it came to the whole personal sacrifices for professional duties thing, he just deferred to Sam's judgment and went along with whatever she wanted… even if the circumstances weren't ideal.

"Jack?" she prompted gently, when he'd been staring with unfocused eyes for several moments and started to look about as depressed as she was currently feeling. "Are you… okay?"

"Yeah. Just thinking about what you said."

For some reason, she suddenly got it into her head that maybe he was thinking that in the hypothetical situation she'd just laid out, he would want to adopt Danny, and was upset that she'd just assumed he'd let her have him without a fight. After all, while Danny was obviously extremely fond of her, Jack was the one with actual experience at being a parent… And even though she knew it was a completely moot point, she started crying. She wasn't normally much of a crier, especially when it was for herself, but she was tired, and already starting to feel all sorts of conflicting emotions about saying goodbye to Danny to get their Daniel back…

"What's wrong?" Jack asked, looking baffled and alarmed - if crying in general was an unusual occurrence for her, doing it in front of him was even more rare. Partly because it wasn't really very USAF-Officer-like to cry in front of your CO, but also just because she knew, from what limited experience she'd had in similar situations, that it really, really disturbed him.

"I just… it's… stupid."

"If you're crying about it, it's not stupid," he said simply.

"Most of it's just because I'm thinking about losing Danny like we really will, but I was just thinking about how… how it would be if he stayed like this and… and we both wanted him."

"You mean we both wanted to adopt him?" he asked, surprised.

"Yeah."

Now he looked even more confused. "Why would that be so terrible?"

"Well, because if we both wanted him one of us would have to lose and…"

"Or not."

"What?"

"Aren't you supposed to be the resident genius? You're missing the simplest solution, Major-Doctor."

"What do you mean?"

"Easy. We could both adopt him."

"We… what?"

"Yeah, it's this crazy idea where some children are allowed to have two parents."

"Parents?"

"Parents, caregivers, legal guardians, whatever."

"Oh."

They lapsed into silence, both giving each other contemplative looks. Jack was more than a little bit hurt that she'd immediately assumed Danny would have to go to one or the other of them. Even if she didn't want him to be part of her hypothetical family in any sort of legal definition, she'd taken it a step further by implying that he'd actually get into a fight with her over guardianship of Danny - it made his hypothetical self look pretty selfish and harsh… not to mention stupid and arrogant.

What sort of insane judge would rather give a kid to him than to Sam? Was that how she really thought he'd react to such a situation? He knew she was tired and emotional and not thinking like she normally did but it still stung. A lot.

Then again… if she thought he'd actually stand a chance at putting up any real sort of fight, that had to mean she thought he'd be a decent candidate, right? And maybe it was just another reflection of some lingering insecurities - those things that he still didn't understand how they could possibly exist in her head, yet seemed to be there nevertheless. As far as he was concerned, his 2IC was just about as close to perfect as you could get… which he had always imagined would be really annoying to be around. It so wasn't though… maybe just because she seemed so completely unaware of how unusually gifted she was. Regardless, experiences like they'd had when she'd insisted on taking Danny home from the base alone that first night had shown him that Janet was right: Sam was no stranger to self-doubt and was definitely her own harshest critic, which made those accompanying feelings very real, even if he considered them to be completely unfounded and ridiculous.

Still, if that was how she was thinking now, then maybe he didn't need to be taking all this so personally - it would mean it wasn't about him at all, it was about her. Now he was just confused. Which often happened around her. But when it did, he usually just waited until she explained herself again in a way he could understand. This wasn't something he could very well ask her to demonstrate with fruit or a quick sketch though, so once again, he was back to confused.

Sam, for her part, was also confused. When he'd said they could both adopt Danny, both be his parents, she'd thought he'd finally been about to bring up all the unspoken issues this entire situation had been fostering. The 'could we really do this?' ones she'd tried to think about as little as possible - it was a futile line of thinking that would only, she knew, leave her frustrated with the decisions they had both repeatedly made. Decisions that Jack's account of his conversation with Hammond and her dad had only underlined, no matter how nonspecific and causal he'd tried to be during all of that. On the one hand, she'd been terrified he was finally going to address the situation directly. On the other, she'd been momentarily relieved.

Then he'd added the various legal terms so lightly, even throwing in 'whatever' at the end, that now she just felt stupid. Of course Danny could have two guardians. It didn't mean those two people had to be in a relationship with each other, or even live under the same roof. And of course he wouldn't risk all the problems it would cause to their working relationship and friendship by fighting a custody battle with her for an age-regressed former teammate. Danny would simply continue being their responsibility, it didn't necessarily mean Jack was proposing altering anything else about… anything else.

And none of it mattered anyway - the whole reason they were even talking about this now was because she'd woken him up to tell him she'd figured out how to get Daniel back to normal… which she still hadn't actually gotten around to doing just yet.

Despite the fact that they were both vastly misconstruing the other's intentions, they each came to a silent truce for the time being, each wanting to avoid having to be the one to actually start a real, non-obfuscated conversation about their feelings. Now probably wasn't the time - and it certainly wasn't the place. "So…" Jack finally said. "Now that we've established that we can't keep the little guy, how do we get our Daniel back?"

"Well, that's the thing," Sam said, seizing on the topic gratefully, the initial excitement she'd had when she hurried into his bedroom to wake him returning. "Remember the list of symbols nobody could identify?"

"Vaguely. In that I remember there was a list."

"Well, it's got forty-six symbols on it. But only ten of those appear on the top line of text. The rest are on the bottom. The top ten are all in a row in a seemingly random order. But I don't think it's random at all. I think they're numbers, 0-9. It's a countdown, from 30-0. I should have realized it sooner but they didn't bother to put any sort of space between, so it looked like an inventory number or something… anyway, I think Daniel dialed the box back to zero. It opened up, he crawled inside and he got changed."

"And explain to the slower students in the class how you got to that," Jack requested, pointing to himself just in case she needed help identifying the 'slower students.'

"Okay. Whoever built this trunk is most likely a recent ancestor of the Furlings, who were part of the alliance of the four races: Nox, Furling, Asgard, and Ancient. Now, we know the Nox live for a long time without technological assistance. And Thor once told me that before they developed their cloning procedures, the average lifespan of the Asgard was two and a half times that of humans. And we know the Tok'ra and Goa'uld can live for hundreds of years even without the sarcophagus, in a single host. So it's reasonable to assume that the Furlings could have a longer lifespan as well. I'm guessing three hundred years or so."

"Why 300?"

"The trunk is in base 10 math, the dial starts at thirty. I think it's increments are in decades. The writing on that trunk is microscopic. I bet Daniel was just tracing the line and he accidentally reset it to zero, to the first decade of his own life, from zero years to ten. I'm also guessing that the since the device can work on humans as well as Furlings or whoever, that it compensated for the time when human babies are completely dependent on another person.

What I mean is, if the device was created for the purposes I've already said, the minimal age it would set you back to wouldn't be a newborn. That would be an ineffective use of time and energy. But the younger a brain is the more readily it can absorb information, so they would want to get the person as young as possible before transferring whatever database of knowledge they used, while making sure they retained some minimal level of self-sufficiency: mobility, basic speech, et cetera."

"Okay. So do we just dial it back up?"

"Well, that's a little more complicated," Sam admitted. "But it shouldn't take much longer for me to figure out how to reverse it now that we can guess what actually happened to him. I need to be back in the lab to be sure, but I think the reversal is going to be a little bit trickier."

"Isn't it always," Jack said, because she seemed to be waiting for him to weigh in somehow. He leaned up and peered over her at Danny, who was stumbling into the room sleepily, rubbing his eyes with one fist and holding Toppy with his other hand. "Hey little buddy, what are you doing up?"

"I scawed in dere awone," Danny admitted, stopping at the side of the bed where Sam was. "Sam you weft me."

"I'm sorry, Danny," she said, suddenly full of guilt at the hurt look in the little boy's eyes. "I thought you were sleeping and wouldn't mind if I came in here for a while to talk to Jack."

"Were you scawed too? Dat why you needed Dack?" he guessed.

"Um, no. I just had something important to talk about with him," Sam explained.

"Me?" Danny asked hopefully, pointing to himself.

They both laughed. "Actually, yes, it was about you," Sam said, pulling him up onto the bed with them.

He gave a huge yawn and leaned over Sam, holding out both arms towards Jack, who scooted closer and hugged the little guy. "Dack you saved me and Sam in da baff AND you finded Toppy when he was wost. I not scawed now."

"Good, because it is way past time for everyone in this house to be sound asleep," Jack said in a falsely-stern tone. "How's an old man supposed to keep up with you kids if you won't even let him get a decent night's sleep, huh?"

Danny giggled as Sam said, "Oh please. You're not old."

"He hads gway hair dough I fink he's kinda old, Sam," Danny pointed out.

"Hey!" Jack objected, poking the little boy's tummy playfully. "I've got combat boots older than you, kid, show some respect."

Danny obviously didn't know what 'respect' was, but he took a guess and offered a cheerful, "Sowwy Dack," along with a kiss that proved Danny drooled liberally in his sleep. He wriggled his way back over Sam, who was still laughing quietly, particularly as Jack wiped his cheek on his pillow and grumbled to himself.

"Night-night Sam," Danny added, kissing her as well before snuggling into her side.

"Oh, Danny, we need to go back to our…"

"Nooooo," he whined/yawned, closing his eyes and falling asleep almost immediately.

"That settles that," Jack commented as he peered over her shoulder at the little boy. "I've never seen Daniel resort to falling asleep in the middle of a conversation to get his way before."

"Actually I'm pretty sure he did it once in the infirmary."

"Really? When?"

"When he had his appendix out. Jan came at him with her penlight for about the sixth time in one day."

Jack laughed quietly. "I'll have to give that a try next time then."

Sam nodded absently, but he could tell he didn't have very much of her attention at the moment. She was obviously thinking about the fact that this was probably the last night she'd be sleeping with Danny curled into her side. Jack as well was reluctant to take his eyes off the little guy… or to be more accurate, it was really both of them he was having trouble with. In addition to having a great time with the kid, Danny had also shown him a side of his 2IC that he'd never really thought he'd get to see - one that it had been quite obvious she hadn't even really thought she had.

Sam sighed and pressed another kiss to the top of Danny's head. "Could you give me a hand please, Jack?"

"With what?"

"Moving Danny. He's on my arm, I can't get up to move him myself…"

"No."

"No?"

"He doesn't want to move."

"But…"

"I don't want either of you to move either," he admitted cautiously.

She was silent for a few moments, trying to decide how to respond. She finally decided to follow Danny's example and laid her head back down on the pillow. "Goodnight then. Again."

"Yeah, I figure you guys can't keep traipsing in here and interrupting my beauty sleep if you're already in here," Jack commented lightly to counterbalance his earlier remark. Then, since it was their last night together, most likely, and it had been pretty close to perfect, he leaned over her to kiss Danny's head as well.

Sam smiled at the sight, despite the fact that he was sort of squashing her in the process. She'd caught him kissing and hugging Danny a few times, but he was very discreet about it because it was Daniel, and she knew he was always expecting to be made fun of. It was the first time he ever did it right in front of her. Then he surprised her even more by kissing her cheek next as well. Imitating Danny, he said, "Night-night Sam."

Despite the fact that she had a little boy sleeping peacefully in her arms, and Jack snoring quietly next to her, it was a long time before she finally fell back asleep. She couldn't help thinking that, as happy as she was to have figured out how the trunk worked, she was really, really going to miss not only Danny, but the effect he had had on both of them as well. And, despite the fact that she'd agreed completely with the way Jack had handled the situation with her father and General Hammond, the truth of the matter was that she was going to miss all of this, a lot more than she was supposed to.