DISCLAIMER: I do not own any Stargate characters, ideas or themes. They all belong to MGM. I'm just playing with them a little.

Summary: Every possibility, every choice I had ever made, even choices I hadn't, led to an entirely different life until I could no longer tell reality from its alternates.

Rating: T

Spoilers: Every which way from Sunday. The entire Stargate franchise is open season. Can't really warn you cuz that would ruin the surprise, now wouldn't it?

Author's Note: This is it. The final chapter of this fic! And it's a tad long this time around. I hope you enjoy it!

Title: The Many Paths of Daniel Jackson

By: Every Me Every You

Chapter 10: Third Time's the Charm

At first, when my eyes fluttered open, I did not know where I was. I felt like it had just been moments ago when I had collapsed in front of the artifact on P3X-495 but even with my eyes only partially open I could tell this was the SGC Infirmary. I had been there enough times that I could have recognized it if I was blind. Which, at the moment, I partially was.

"Glasses," I rasped, and several figures, all of whom had been standing around me chatting it up with each other, turned to face me.

"Sunshine!" Mitchell cheered. "You're awake!"

The fuzzy blob with the long dark hair that must have been Vala rushed to my side and slid my glasses onto my face, careful to place them properly on the bridge on my nose and tuck the curve of each arm behind my ears. When her face became clear, I could see that she was tired. Just from looking at her I could tell something was wrong. She looked thinner. Her eyes were red-rimmed and sunken in. A little bit of that famous sparkle was missing from her eyes.

"Are you alright?" She asked, reaching behind me and fixing my pillows, straightening my sheets and asking me, "are you cold?" Then she gently pushed my hair out of my eyes. The look in her eyes was beginning to worry me. She was just being a drama queen. I felt fine.

I caught her hand as it slid down the side of my face. "I'm fine! Would you quit worrying over me and tell me what happened?"

The reaction had been a standard reaction for the two of us, but she didn't react with witty banter. She looked startled and she jumped back, removing her hands from me as her eyes dropped to the floor.

Why wasn't she just brushing this off? Why did she seem so upset? Looking up for an explanation I was shocked to find Jack and Sam amongst the group watching over me.

"Daniel, you don't have to be so mean," Jack remarked, his eyebrows knitted together as he shot a glance over to Vala who had slowly made her way to the corner of the room and perched on a stool.

I followed his eyes to Vala and realized I was being a bit harsh. "I'm sorry Vala," I frowned. "I'm just a little…confused."

"It's fine darling," she answered quickly, flashing a brilliant smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Don't worry about it. You have a lot of catching up to do."

"Catching up?" I parroted, looking around the room and taking note of the tension held in the bodies of all of my friends, noticing how exhausted they all looked, like they hadn't slept in weeks. "How long was I out? The last thing I remember I was zapped by an Alteran device."

"It isn't so much how long you were out," Sam frowned. "It's more how much don't you remember." She moved her hand towards a device, a sheepish look on her face, and tapped it with her hand.

I recognized that device and it only took a few moments to process what had happened. "You erased my memory? What? How long?"

"The Ancient device affected you negatively DanielJackson," Teal'c explained calmly. "It became necessary to erase two weeks of your memories for the sake of your own sanity."

Well, leave it to Teal'c to boil things right down to their simplest and most imperative form.

"I was crazy?" I asked.

"Well, that wasn't the new part," Vala answered dryly from her seat, but the joke had an emotionless quality, like she was speaking from a script, like it was her role to insult me, but she really relished no part of it. "The new part was the fact that you were seeing, hearing and experiencing variations of our timeline as though it was your own."

I stared at her blankly, torn between figuring out what was wrong with her and what the hell she had just said about me.

Sam elaborated on the problem. "You were experiencing multitudes of alternate realities. It was like a Quantum Mirror in your head. You were living through many different timelines as though you were in them. We've been operating on little or no sleep since trying to figure out a way to stop it before…"

"Before you ended up like one of those bodies hanging in the temple back there," Mitchell interjected. "You were well on your way to stark raving loony toons and if it hadn't been for Vala's quick thinking you would be one of those bodies. So try not to tear her down too quickly, Jackson."

Apparently Mitchell hadn't approved of my earlier outburst. I was shocked at the spike of jealousy that rushed through me at his protective behavior towards her. I was also shocked by the pride that surged through me with knowing she had been a part of the solution. I would have expressed that shock had I not still been getting over what he had just said.

"I almost killed myself?" I asked, eyes widening.

"It's good to have you back Dannyboy," Jack shook his head warily. "We should probably just leave it at that."

"I don't really want to leave it at that!" I spat, annoyed. "What the hell happened here? I just lost two weeks of my memories and you want to tell me to just leave it at that?"

"If you don't believe what we're telling you, you recorded a video to explain it to yourself," Sam explained. "Just like the one Vala recorded the last time we used this device."

My anger was rising. I wasn't one to like being confused and this whole thing just fed into everything I had already been thinking about life at the SGC. This just needed to stop. I was getting really tired of waking up in an infirmary bed. Really tired.

I jumped to my feet, knowing for certain that I was being a brat, but I couldn't help it. I suddenly wanted out of this place more than I could handle. "No. No, I don't want to see any video. I don't want to see anything."

"Dr. Jackson," Dr. Lam stepped in. "This has been a very disorienting experience for you. Maybe you should just lay back down and take a minute to collect yourself."

"I don't need to lay down!" I yelled, yanking my arm away as she tried to reach for it and backing myself up to the wall beside the infirmary bed. "I don't need to calm down! I just want off of this damn base!"

"What? Daniel, you're being rash," Vala responded as though the statement was the most absurd thing in the world, as if she hadn't been expecting it. As though I hadn't just told her I was leaving…but I hadn't had I? Two weeks had passed by since then. Had I said something to make her believe I had changed my mind?

I rubbed my fingers through my hair roughly. Damn, this was confusing. Although, I imagined what Sam had just described had probably been a bit more confusing.

"I'm not being rash," I argued childishly, not sure what else to say, still trying to collect my thoughts. "I already told you I was leaving."

"It was an impulsive decision when you said it the first time," she countered.

"You say impulsive as if that's a bad thing," I shot back, knowing that I was grabbing on to the first reason to be angry and running with it, but I couldn't help the feelings of confusion and anxiety this situation brought up in me. So, I lashed out. " 'You don't always have to plan everything, Daniel!', 'Daniel, would you just have a little more fun?' Aren't you always trying to get me to act on impulse? Well here's an impulse for you! I do not want to wake up an infirmary one more damn time. I want the hell off of this planet, the hell out of this program and the hell away from you! All of you! I just can't do this anymore!"

As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake. Just me, getting carried away by my bad temper. Sometimes, I could be an unreasonable jerk, I knew it. But it didn't change the feeling. And the exhalation of breath I made as I walked over to my bed and collapsed back down onto it, all my features twisting into a sheepish, embarrassed glance, didn't change the stricken look on the faces staring back at me.

"Look, I'm sorry guys," I finally said after a few moments of deep breaths. "I've been doing this for twelve years. Jack, you've got a desk job now. Sam, at least you've got a change of scenery. Teal'c, you get to go and visit your family off-world. Cam, Vala – you haven't been doing this nearly as long as I have. I have two places I spend my time in. Here and my apartment, and my apartment has a layer of dust building up in it that's about three months thick, because what is the point? Everything I have is tied to this base. I'm not saying I'm leaving you, I just want to do something different. If an end of the world translation comes up, radio me. I'll be here. But Jack – please, make it happen and fast. I want to head up that archaeology dig. And I want it to be soon."

"Ok Daniel," Jack sighed, the wind clearly taken out of him. "Consider it done."

With that, Vala stormed out of the room shouting her obviously untrue hopes of my quick recovery behind her.

Oh God, there was a "Bon Voyage, Daniel" banner hung in the middle of the room. I could kill them.

It had been a surprise. Everyone had been helping me pack. Everyone but Vala and Mitchell. Vala, because for whatever reason, she refused to accept that I was leaving and Mitchell, apparently because he was doing this.

Jack and Teal'c had suggested we eat. Sam had said she needed to take care of something else first but after a quick call to Mitchell, we all agreed to meet up at the rib place by his house, the one we had taken Vala to when she had first joined the team.

Ends up, it had all been a plan. Although clearly not a well thought out one. Sam was nowhere to be found.

It had been a week since I had woken up in that infirmary bed and I still only understood snippets of what had happened to put me there. People were being very dodgy on the topic. What I did know was that I had been driven insane by living a million different lives and had nearly killed myself in the armory, and – as everyone kept pointing out incessantly – Vala had saved my life with a perfect, ingenious plan to erase my memories to make it like it had never happened.

She was certainly right. It had never happened. Not as far as I was concerned. I was my same old, only slightly neurotic and emotionally unstable self. Which was more than I could say for Vala.

She hadn't really spoken to me since that day in the infirmary. I had come by her quarters to apologize, she had very politely accepted my apology and shooed me away. Since then, everyone seemed to have seen her but me.

There was a black hole in my office where she used to be.

Her laughter, smiles, constant chatter were all gone. She didn't even look like a person who would laugh, smile and chatter anymore. She looked beaten down. So tired.

It felt wrong packing up my office without her.

"Guys, you didn't have to do this," I told them, a tiny crooked smile crossing my features as they ushered me off to the table the banner hung over. "Especially since I know you don't want me going anywhere."

"Well, it's a small goodbye team dinner," Mitchell explained, pushing me into the seat at the head of the table. "Nothin' fancy."

They stared at the table, carefully choosing their seats as I looked on, wondering what they were planning. Jack sat to the left of me. Mitchell sat in the booth, didn't slide down towards me, but rather left space. Teal'c settled at the foot of the table.

I got it. They were leaving space for Sam and…

"We missed the surprise!" A pout came from the entrance we had just walked through and it was a voice like beautiful wind chimes to my ears. I couldn't help how damn good it was to hear her voice, nor could I help the fact that the first genuine smile to have crossed my face since I'd decided to leave made it's way to the surface as I turned to watch her walk in.

She looked just as enchanting as always. Her long curly hair cascading over her shoulders in ebony waves, her steel grey eyes alight with the first genuine smile I had seen on her since waking up in that infirmary which actually seemed to be aimed at me. She was dressed comfortably in a black collared shirt with jeans and black boots, and she still looked like a goddess.

My heart raced in my chest, despite every single admonishment I had issued myself about her intentions, about her inability to be serious, and it tripped up a few notches when I realized that Mitchell had been saving the other seat next to me for her.

As she slid into the seat beside me, my eyes searched out Sam's, who had trailed through the door behind Vala modestly, as though she knew that Vala's arrival would be the main event in my mind. When she looked to me, I mouthed my thank you to her for somehow managing to get this stubborn girl to come here and seem happy to do it.

Sam only smiled and shook her head in return. I was well aware that she thought I was crazy and stupid, but I wasn't sure if she felt that way because I felt the way that I had grown to feel for Vala or because I refused to act on it.

Apparently, my feelings for the crazy space pirate were clear to everybody. But nobody would talk about it, just like nobody ever nudged Sam and Jack together. It wasn't anyone's place.

I turned to Vala when she finally settled into her seat and covered her hand with my own, squeezing just slightly. The look on her face when she glanced up at me couldn't be categorized as anything other than pure surprise. "Thank you for coming. I didn't want to leave things on a bad note with you."

Vala smiled, but it was a much more subdued one this time. "I never intended to let you leave that way."

"Good," I nodded and then turned to the rest of the group. "Let's eat! I'm starving."

The next twenty minutes or so was spent ogling the menus with hungry, tired eyes and eventually placing an order. As we waited for food to be brought our way, the gang started in on me, telling every story they could think of that showed anything about me, from my brains, to my guts, and of course, not bothering to omit my brief moments of stupidity.

The stories didn't stop when our food came back and they definitely grew more outlandish when one round of beers became two and three. I didn't drink too much. My tolerance for beer had not grown at all and I didn't need to be drunk when I started my new job in the morning.

A story about the Kor'mak bracelets and my annoyance with Vala during that time had everybody roaring with laughter, even Vala, who had spent much of the time only tentatively chuckling.

"Don't think he's still that annoyed with you Princess," Mitchell laughed. "Never make that mistake. Back then, he couldn't wait for you to go away and then, when you were taken by Athena, that boy couldn't eat, sleep, or think until you came back home."

My eyes dropped to the table. Damn Mitchell and his beer soaked inability to keep his mouth shut.

"Really?" Vala leaned all her weight on my shoulder, gazing up at me with wide innocent eyes. I couldn't help but meet them with my own. "You were that worried about me?" She batted her eyes.

"Oh, shush you!" I bumped her with my shoulder, holding my finger to my lips. She bumped back and flashed a huge smile at me. I couldn't keep eye contact for too long. If I did I thought I might change my mind altogether.

I almost wished I could have done this without them paying too much attention. I wasn't so sure I could do this if I had to look them in the eyes.

Mitchell took off on another, outlandish military tale then, as if he didn't just turn my emotions upside down. I leaned over towards Vala then, Mitchell's earlier words sparking a slight realization in me.

"Speaking of not eating," I whispered, motioning towards her very full plate. "What's up?"

"What?" She feigned ignorance. "I'm just not hungry."

"You are never not hungry. Never mind the fact that you haven't once picked at my food, which is a nearly habitual behavior for you. What's up?" I asked the question firmer this time, pinning her with my eyes.

She reached over into my plate, grabbed a french fry and popped it into her mouth defiantly, never once taking her eyes off of mine. "Better?"

"No," I answered impatiently. "Better would be you telling me why you're not eating."

"I'm fine."

"Yeah, that's what I say all the time, usually when I'm not."

"I'm horribly ill. Still leaving tomorrow?" She lied, petulantly.

I didn't answer, simply glared at her.

"Yes?" Vala asked. "Well, then 'I'm fine' will just have to be enough. Now pay attention to Mitchell's yammering! You're being rude."

I very nearly growled in return before turning my attention back to the rest of the group who were now laughing loudly at some joke I'd missed.

Three hours and a decent amount of beers later, the waitress had been paid and received a very healthy tip. The group had taken turns going around the table and listing all the things they would miss about me. For Jack, he had said he would miss bickering with me and torturing me incessantly. For Sam, it was missing someone to talk to who was just as interesting in the "boring details" as she was. Teal'c said he would miss our occasional kel'no'reem sessions and my ability to be unheard when it was necessary and to refuse to be unheard when that was the best course. Mitchell said he would miss his basketball partner. And Vala, well Vala laughed it off and told me she would miss our constant arguing.

Teal'c, who had never really developed a fondness for drinks of any kind, took driving duty and we all piled into Jack's car. When we returned to the base we split up with the promise that they would meet up tomorrow to see me off. Jack and I had made it back to my office and were packing up the very last of my things in silence when he let out a sudden interested hum.

"Hmmm what?" I asked, looking up only to find him innocently placing something into a box, but I suspected from his quick movement that he was hiding something.

"Oh, nothing."

I didn't believe him and that was with good reason. When the last of the boxes had been packed, the two of us had almost completely sobered up, and I found myself saying a bittersweet goodbye to the room that had been my safe haven for the last eleven years, Jack showed me that he had been lying.

"Oh, sad now are we?" He asked with little sympathy.

"I never said it was an easy choice," I answered, sighing with the weight of all of these goodbyes. "I just said it was the right one."

"You've mentioned that," Jack nodded, condescendingly before roughly shoving a book against my chest. I looked down to find my journal pressed there. "Read the last entry here. Tell me how you feel when you're done."

I took the book from his hands without a word, trying to remember what my last entry had been. Hadn't it been something about the bug people of P5X-429? It certainly hadn't been anything important.

"Good night Daniel," Jack smiled. "See you in the morning."

He turned down the hall and left, leaving me alone with the journal as I stood against the hallway wall beside my office door. I opened it to the page Jack had bookmarked and found a date from a little over a week ago. My interest was immediately piqued. This was from the time I didn't remember.

To SG-1 Past and Present:

I am not confused right now. I am of a clear and lucid state of mind. Given my recent state, I feel it is necessary for me to make that perfectly clear. I am not in a vision. As a matter of fact, I have just had one, embarrassed myself, and demanded that I leave for a little alone time. Yes, Vala, I know you didn't agree. Thank you, Jack, for granting me this one mercy.

I have come to realize how this will end. Though progress is being made toward a conclusion, it doesn't seem to be happening fast enough, and I fear that the solution to the problem will not come until I have to take a definitive action to end it before I hurt others due to my mental deficiency. I won't allow myself to do that.

So I'm using this avenue to say my goodbyes.

It's funny. Before this whole thing started, I was certain I wanted to leave this place as fast as I could. My reasoning was childish. Jack, Sam, Teal'c and even Cam had other places to go to escape this mess. And I was tied to the SGC. The only thing that relieved that even remotely, was the one thing I truly believed I couldn't have. Vala. But we'll get to you later, Val.

It became clear that there was no way I was reading this propped against a wall. I took off down the hallway, headed for my quarters, my eyes never leaving the page.

Now the idea of leaving pains me. You have always been my family while I sat there personally bemoaning my absence of one, as though you all weren't sitting beside me.

It took me getting sick to see it. Watching you all rush to help me, not sleeping, not eating, dealing with the emotional abuse of the visions I was living out, because I know that wasn't easy for any of you, I find that what I used to find an annoying invasion of privacy that could only earn the response 'I'm fine' was a welcome saving grace, a life preserver when I was about to drown.

There are things you all need to know before I go.

Mitchell. Cameron. You are like my kid brother. You screw up sometimes, but it's only because you're so new at this, and though your odd sense of hero worship occasionally disturbs me, it's only because I know you would do absolutely anything for each and everyone of us. You have provided a source of understanding and wonder that is singular to you, and I thank you for always trying to remind me that what we have been doing for years is an amazing pursuit that very few people on this planet will ever get the opportunity to enjoy. Thank you for reminding me that I am one of those lucky few. I know it doesn't seem like I feel very lucky right now. But I do. To have had the opportunity to work with you and all of the rest. If there's anything the visions have taught me, it's that things could have been horrible for all of us, and we have been blessed by the relative lightness of our situation.

Sam. All at once my twin sister and the mother hen. Quick to care for me and quick to commiserate. You have always been the only other person in our team who wanted to know the how and why and not just the what and the how to kill it/stop it. We were siblings in the pursuit of knowledge and it meant so much to me to have another scientist on my team. I hope I always gave you the opportunity to be a little un-military. It meant even more to have a friend, a person who understood my frustrations and always made herself available to me if I needed any help at all, be it to get me a cup of coffee or to shock me into understanding I really was addicted to a sarcophagus. Shit….that really does some up our lives doesn't it? Ha!

I had made it to my room, trying to ignore the way my heart was slamming in my chest, the way my eyes were tearing up while reading these last words of a frantic me, a suicidal self. I mindlessly opened my door with my key card and headed into my quarters, simply wanting to curl up in bed so I didn't, couldn't change my mind. But I couldn't tear my eyes away from the page, so even as I stripped to a t-shirt and boxers, I just kept on reading.

Teal'c. You are like my older brother – always providing wisdom to me even if I can't always see things the way you do. You are fiercely protective and more intelligent than anyone outside of the team has ever given you credit for. I know I've never said it before, but despite the loss I suffered as a result, I want to thank you for your quick thinking in protecting me from Amonet. I know that has always stood between us, at least a little, and I do not want you to think that I still hold this against you. I do not.

Jack. You are like an older brother to me as well and while everyone I've listed are my dearest friends, you and I have always shared a special bond. You are absolutely my best friend. And yes Jack, you, as much as I tease you for behaving like a child, are like an older brother. You use your humor to provide me with a much needed dose of reality, you always protect me when I need it and I honestly don't know where I would be without you. Thank you for always providing me a calming presence when I was falling apart and a laugh when I thought I was incapable.

Vala.

"I'm coming with you," her voice rang out in the silence of the room, effectively causing me to jump right out of my skin.

I looked up at her, shocked by her presence and suddenly quite intensely aware of how few clothes I was wearing. "W-what?" was all I could manage.

"I said I'm coming with you," she elaborated, slinking towards me. I tried not to pay any attention.

"What are you talking about? And what are you doing in here?" Both very good questions.

"Wait, this isn't my room?" She winked.

I glared at her.

"I already told you why I'm here," she changed tacks. "I'm here to inform you that I will be accompanying you on this new adventure of yours. My bags are already packed." She motioned to the corner of my room she had been hiding in, where four huge suitcases were stacked.

"What? Why?" I asked. Didn't she know that she was one of the very big reasons I was leaving? What did she expect to accomplish by trailing along with me. "You say that now, but you know you will just be bored and make it your mission to drive me insane, and that's not exactly what I'm looking for on this trip. I'm sorry, but no. You're not coming with me."

"I'm not?" She asked again.

"You're not," I answered, looking back down at the journal in my hands.

"Would you stop reading that for long enough to actually hear what I am saying to you?"

"I hear what you're saying to me. The answer is, 'you're not'."

"Okay then," she nodded, took a deep breath and then began to walk towards me. "I want you to know that I will not be coming to see you off in the morning. So, I'm just going to give you a quick hug goodbye and be on my way. I'll come and visit you sometime."

The closer she got the clearer the glimmer of tears in her eyes got and the more she spoke, the more her voice shook. I suddenly remembered the conversation we'd had before I had touched that damned device. The one where she had asked me not to go. And I remembered the look in her eyes that I had tried desperately not to acknowledge.

I reached out and laid my hands atop her shoulders, effectively holding her at arms length while simultaneously attempting comfort. I did not want her hugging me right now.

"Vala, what's going on with you?" I asked. "Does this have anything to do with why you weren't eating anything earlier?"

She looked down at the floor and then back up at me, her eyes holding a vulnerable sparkle, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. She nodded.

"Okay," I said softly, steering her to sit on the edge of the bed. I tossed the journal onto my nightstand before kneeling in front of her, looking up at her face attentively. "Tell me. What's wrong?"

She nodded and then took a moment, her hands rubbing away some unnoticed chill from her arms as she began to speak. "I lost somebody I love very much in the time you don't remember."

I examined her face, not entirely sure I had understood her properly. "What? Who? We received an offworld communication? Jacek? T-t-tomin?" Now why did I stutter on that one?

She shook her head, once again looking at me like there was some sort of universal truth in her world that I would never understand. It wasn't a nasty look. It was more the look you give to a child who has no idea what he has just said.

"No, none of those," she shook her head.

"Then who?"

"Daniel, this person was the love of my life. The one person that makes my life whole. And he is gone now and I don't know how to get him back," she explained, without ever really explaining. Her voice cracked as she spoke.

I shrugged to illustrate my confusion at her statement. Was she talking about her fiancé from back in her days before Quetesh?

She pinned me with a look that was nearing venomous the longer I withheld a response. The love of her life? She couldn't possibly mean…

"You can't guess at what I'm talking about? Forget it Daniel, I'm leaving." She jumped up from the edge of the bed and began to march out.

"Fine! I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't want to do anything to hurt you here, but I'm trying to help and you won't talk to me without playing games!" I imagined that my anger may have been fueled by her discussion of some unknown love she'd had. Maybe.

"I'm not playing games!" She growled. "I was never playing games. Maybe someday you will actually get that! I mean really Daniel, how can someone so smart be so damn stupid?"

"You know what? Get out!" I shouted back, frustrated at being treated like I was a fool for not being able to crack her code. "I'm so glad that we get to end this the way it began – with a fight! I mean aren't you capable of a normal conversation? Don't even worry about visiting me. Maybe it's better if we just leave things as they are. It can be a perfectly symmetrical relationship this way."

She stood there for a moment, seething with anger, her hands balled into fists at her sides, her eyes locked in a battle between anger and sadness. "Fine," she finally said, turning and leaving the room just in time for my heart to drop all the way into my stomach.

She was just out the door before she whirled around and marched back in. Oh thank God. That was not the way I wanted to end things. Not really.

"Not fine," she said, plopping back down on the edge of the bed. "You're not chasing me away that easily, Space Ape!"

That was what was so completely wrong and so completely perfect about our relationship. One minute I wanted to kill her, the next I was laughing uncontrollably. It was a shame she didn't know how to be serious. We could be perfect together. We really could.

"You mean Space Monkey," I wheezed, wiping at my eyes. "Not Space Ape. You really need to stop hanging around with Jack." I knelt back down in front of her.

"Well you're acting a lot more like an ape than a monkey," she stated matter of factly.

"So, still angry at me then?" I asked.

"Yes! I know what you think," she answered, her volume rising with almost every word, her words coming more and more desperate. "You think I'm playing with you. You think I'm going to use you and then throw you away and it scares you. You think that if you ever showed me you had feelings for me I would laugh at you. But I know you do. I know you care about me. And do you want to know how I know?"

With every word she spoke, my heart tripped up a little faster, my eyes grew a little wider. Was it just that she knew me so well that she instinctively understood? I was too caught up in my own thoughts to try to answer her question.

"I know because you told me. You told me," she said, her voice still anxious and her words running together at top speed. "You are the person I was talking about. You are the person I lost. And I haven't been able to eat since the breakfast where you made that little announcement before you got sick, because you scared the life out of me with the idea that you were leaving. And I know I wasn't supposed to tell you anything about the two weeks that passed, but I have to because I promised you I wouldn't let you leave." Tears started streaming down her face now, as her argument came to a close. "I promised you I would help us find our way back to each other and then you woke up and you were…mean to me…and I thought I didn't have a chance and maybe it was all the visions that made you love me. But I'm running out of time, so I have to try everything I can which means I have to break the rule and tell you that you loved me in those two weeks. And in those two weeks, you knew that I loved you. You knew it. No question. And I do. Love. You. So like I said, I'm coming with you. Or you can stay here. But either way, I'm not letting you out of my sight unless you can tell me that you don't care about me right now."

For a moment, all I could do was stare and process what she was saying. She loved me. I had told her I loved her. We had been together in the time I couldn't remember. She was crying because of me.

I'm not even sure when I decided to kiss her. It must have been in that moment where I realized that everything I had been running away from was wrong. Unbelievably wrong.

I surged up from where I was kneeling before her, grabbed her face in my hands and kissed her, our lips crashing together with the force of the years that I had been holding back my feelings for her. I pulled her to her feet as I moved to mine, my lips never leaving hers. My hands were in her hair, running over her arms, her hips, her back, until the need for air proved too much and I pulled back, ending the kiss.

Struggling to catch my breath, I pulled her into my arms. My heart racing, my brain still struggling to catch up on everything that now made perfect sense to me, things I had never wanted to accept, like how she only remembered her life after the Athena incident when she saw me, after spending so much time with Mitchell, or how hard she fought my use of the ancient device to learn how to build the Sangraal, how broken she was when I had woken up this time and how broken I had been when I had been a Prior and she hadn't wholeheartedly believed in me.

It was all because we were in love. Beneath the teasing, beneath the ribbing, beneath the arguments and the self-defense. We were in love.

"I love you," I whispered breathlessly against her lips before kissing her again, deeper this time, pulling her against me, only to be pulled onto the bed with a force that made me realize she was always much stronger than she seemed.

Wow.

That was all the thought my brain could form at the moment.

And I had been laying here for a half an hour trying to figure out what I would do now. But 'wow' was all I could come up with.

We had made love. Crazy, passionate, emotional love. We were lying, sated and spent in each other's arms, our legs entwined. Vala was dreamily drawing little circles with her fingers across my chest and I was drawing the Ancient alphabet on her back, absently.

I waited for her breathing to even out and when I was sure she had fallen asleep I reached over to my nightstand and picked up the journal again.

Vala. I hadn't had the opportunity to tell you this at the time, but I wasn't upset when I had found out we had spent our time on the Odyssey together, in a relationship for fifty years. I was relieved. Because it cleared so many things up inside. It forced me to understand that as frightened as it may make me, you love me as much as I love you. I'm so sorry it had to be this way. I'm so sorry I have to hurt you. Any of you, but you Vala, most of all. But I honestly feel like I'm sparing you great pain protecting you from what I feel like I'm becoming. I just want you to know that every single alternate timeline in which we had the opportunity to meet the way we did here, ended the same way. With you and me - together.

In the end, it's all about family. And if Jack, Teal'c and Mitchell are my brothers, and Sam is my sister, then Vala, you would have to be my wife. I'm so sorry I will never have the opportunity to see that through. But take comfort in the idea that there are timelines where that exists. Where we got that chance.

I love you all. I'm sorry for this. Thank you. Thank you for all of your help, all of the time, but most importantly now.

Love always, even in death,

Daniel.

"Does that prove anything to you? Change your mind about anything?" Vala asked from her place lying on my chest.

"You know what this is?" I asked, incredulously.

"I knew it existed. I knew it must," she answered, burying her head into my side. "You don't attempt suicide without a note."

I swallowed hard. I took a deep breath and made my decision. In those two weeks I'd had the opportunity to travel many roads, to live many lives. And of all the paths I had been led on, only one really counted. It had been a theme of our journeys to alternate realities. The only one that could matter was our own. And so, it was irrelevant what happened anywhere else. I finally understood that of all the paths I could have traveled this was the only one I could worry about. This was the only important one. And the truth was, it was the only one I wanted.

"You know," I told Vala, "this is the third time you've kept me from leaving the planet, and the only time I've been grateful."

She pulled me close, burying her face in my neck and I could feel the tears falling from her eyes, even as she tried to hide them. Relieved tears.

I smiled. I would have a lot of unpacking to do in the morning. And I finally understood that I would have at least five grateful people helping me every step of the way.

I can't believe it's done! * sniffle *
Thank you for sticking it out with me and thank you all for your continued support through reviewing me, favoriting me and subscribing to this story. You guys gave a new fanfic writer confidence to continue a complex story she wasn't sure she could handle. Thanks for these last 10 weeks. Much love always - Justine