Disclaimer: 'Stargate' and 'Harry Potter' both belong to their respective creators, so I don't own them; I'm just borrowing them for the immediate moment in time and space

Feedback: I'd like it, believe me

AN: This isn't the best chapter I've ever written, but I felt it was necessary to explore how Jack reacts to the idea that his best friend is a wizard; we return to a more action-orientated storyline next chapter

Truth and Revelations

As soon as Jack had entered the office and closed the door, Daniel swallowed slightly, the better to prepare himself for what he was about to discuss, and then turned around to look at Jack.

"Thanks for the help," he said at last; when you have no idea what to start talking about, he'd found long ago that the best way to deal with the situation was to start with something general and work their way up from there.

"Eh, I was in the neighbourhood; thought you could use another face in your corner," Jack replied, a slight smile on his face as he looked at the man he'd once thought was merely a wizard with languages. "So… you're an actual wizard, huh? How'd that happen?"

"My parents were a witch and a wizard; it generally runs in the family," Daniel replied with a brief shrug. "There are some rare occasions where wizards and witches have non-magical children, but they're so rare it doesn't happen often enough to be an issue."

"Ah," Jack said simply, evidently deciding that there was no point in asking further questions on that topic before he assumed a more curious expression and looked inquiringly at his friend. "Know any cool spells?"

"I could turn this desk into a horse with a little time to refresh my memory," Daniel replied, once again shrugging in a nonchalant manner at his statement; it was kind of unexpected, but after spending so long keeping the truth about himself quiet, it was really rather refreshing being able to be honest about his abilities again. "You have to remember, I haven't actually done any of this in a while; combat spells are fairly simply once you remember the incantation and know where to aim, but actual transfiguration- turning one thing into something else- or something like that is a bit more difficult, and requires more in-depth thought on my part about what I'm trying to accomplish."

"Fair enough," Jack replied, shrugging slightly again before he looked at Daniel pointedly. "So, the reason you never mentioned this whole 'I'm a wizard' thing to us before your school enemies showed up to try and conquer the galaxy is…?"

Daniel sighed.

"Because not only did I think that everyone who might want to kill me from that time was either dead or lacked the organisation to track me down, but I was trying to put that part of my life behind me, Jack," he said, the 'You of all people should understand that' implication evident in his voice even if he didn't actually voice it. Even after almost a decade, Charlie's death prior to the original mission to Abydos was still something that nobody wanted to be responsible for bringing up again, with the sole exception being that brief period when Daniel had been recovering his memories after his Ascension (Now that had been a headache and a half; when he'd started remembering both his real and 'programmed' childhoods he'd wondered if he'd suffered from delusions until he'd recalled the moment when he actually had the 'extra' memories programmed into him in the first place) and hadn't known they didn't talk about it. "I'd always promised myself that I'd use my magic only as a last resort if all other possibilities had been exhausted; whenever I was in a dangerous situation, no matter how bad it became, I was always at least fairly certain that there was either another way out of it or that using magic might only make the situation worse."

"Worse?" Jack repeated. "We were up against millennia-old aliens with serious god complexes; how could you whipping up a spell or two in a fight make things worse?"

"Well… take Honduras, for example," Daniel said. "When I'd been captured by Rafael and the others after Doctor Lee and I found the Telchak device, I could have tried to escape by apparating- essentially teleporting myself from one location to another with my magic, if you want to know- but I hadn't practiced it for ages- if you're not concentrating when you do it you run the risk of leaving part of yourself behind-, I didn't even know where I might go, and I'd even never officially received my apparation licence anyway-"

"You need a licence to teleport?" Jack repeated, looking almost amused at the idea. "Maybe we should consider issuing something like that…"

"Jack," Daniel said, looking at his friend pointedly before he continued. "Anyway, apart from that example- along with a few other cases where the fact that I hadn't practised the spells could have meant that trying them could have caused more problems than it solved-, there were also those occasions where we were in a fight on other planets. Even without my wand, I might have been able to use some wandless magic in a fight- I never actually got to that part of the school curriculum, but I've preformed it enough on an instinctive basis to at least understand the essential details; I might have been able to shove somebody back as they tried to attack me or something like that-, there would be no guarantee that it would be enough to make a difference. Besides, if somebody had seen me and managed to escape with that information, then the Goa'uld would have known that there was something different about me and become even more interested in gaining access to Earth and the possible hosts that were available there."

"Ah," Jack said, nodding slightly in understanding. "So, in a nutshell, you didn't want to use your powers because you didn't want to do anything that might make Earth a more attractive prize for the bad guys, huh?"

"As well as not wanting to remind myself of that period of my life unless I had to, of course," Daniel added; as much as he might have wanted to conceal the truth about his past, now that it was out he wasn't going to lie about his motives and let anyone create false ideas of why he'd done what he did. "My ability to use magic may have provided me with the first place where I'd ever really felt like I'd belonged- before I came here, of course-, but it had also…"

He sighed, staring up at the office ceiling for a few moments, lost in thought, before he continued. "It… it cost me so much that I didn't really want to be reminded of that time unless I had to."

"I can get that; I mean, half your friends end up dead because some loony wizard hears a prophecy that you're going to beat him before you were even born, and then your fiancé snuffs it barely a couple of hours after you made the step from dating to engaged?" Jack said, looking sympathetically at his old teammate, recalling the information in the reports that General Landry had submitted. "After everything else you'd had to go up against back then, that really had to suck."

"To say the least," Daniel replied simply.

After another moment's silence, Jack looked curiously at his friend.

"What was she like?" he asked.

There was no need to ask what 'she' Jack was referring to; Daniel knew exactly who he meant.

Ginny…

For a moment, he thought about not replying- after all, it wouldn't exactly accomplish anything for him but to stir up old wounds of the memories of those few blissful months when neither of them had known what was coming for them, before the harsh reality of the situation set in again-, but, on the other hand…

Well, it had been so long since he'd even allowed himself to think about Ginny since that dark day all those years ago; maybe it would help if he actually did talk to someone about it.

Plus, of course, there was the fact that Jack was asking him to look at what Ginny had been like when she was alive rather than how he'd coped after her death; maybe being able to reflect on the good times they'd had before everything went south would help him put things in better perspective.

"Ginny was… she was my ideal, really," he said after a moment's reflection, sitting down on the edge of Landry's desk with a saddened expression on his face. "When we first met, she was just my best friend Ron's little sister who'd had a bit of a celebrity crush on me based on the old tales she'd heard about my defeat of Voldemort when I was only a baby, and could barely even be in the same room as me without…"

He chuckled slightly at the memory; after he and Ginny had started dating, both of them had spent a fair among of time looking back at their past interaction and how ridiculous they'd both been not to realise what was right in front of them. "Well, she alternated between blushing profusely or sticking her elbow in the butter dish, among other things, and could barely say much more to me than the occasional squeak."

"And that started it?" Jack said, looking curiously at Daniel. "I mean, I get that you've changed a lot since then, but that still doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would get you noticing a girl…"

"No, the relationship only really started when I was sixteen and she was fifteen; before that we were barely even friends, although I did still save her life when she was possessed by a fragment of Voldemort's soul and used to release a massive serpent on the school in her first year," Daniel answered allowing himself a slight smile as remembered those few glorious months they'd had together before everything had fallen apart. "A couple of years after that- she was fourteen and I was fifteen at the time-, she'd been encouraged by my friend Hermione- the current Minister of Magic, you know- to try and attract my attention by dating other guys and acting more like her own person and less like a giddy fangirl around me. We spent a bit more time together over the next year or so- she helped me deal with some Voldemort-related issues I had when it seemed like the guy might have been possessing me, as well as both just spending more social time together than we had before- and then one day Ron and I walked in on her making out with her current boyfriend, and I realised… well…"

"You saw her in a whole new light and wanted to pound on the guy for touching her, huh?" Jack said, smiling slightly at his friend. "Tell me about it; same kind of thing happened to me with Sara. She started out as just being the roommate of my previous girlfriend, then we ended up spending a bit more time after the roommate moved away, and…"

He shrugged. "What can I say? One thing led to another, the other thing led to the bedroom, and BAM! There we were."

"Well, it wasn't quite like that with Ginny," Daniel replied with a slight smile; in some ways, it was actually rather encouraging to hear Jack being able to make jokes about his long-failed relationship with his ex-wife. "After she and Dean- the boyfriend Ron and I caught her making out with- had broken up- he was always trying to help her through the door to the common room, things like that; Ginny was a very independent girl-, I'd just come back from a detention while my team were playing a quidditch game- broomstick-based sport, just to let you know-, she and the others came in with the news that they'd won the cup that year despite my absence, she ran at me to give me a hug, and before I knew it, I was kissing her right in the middle of the house common room in full view of her brother and practically everyone else I knew."

"Hold on; your first kiss with her was in front of your entire school house?" Jack said, smiling broadly as he reached over to punch Daniel lightly on the shoulder. "Daniel, you stud, you!"

"Jack…" Daniel sighed, shaking his head slightly as he looked at his old friend with a slightly amused smile, "it's not that big a deal…"

"After how embarrassed you were when Sha're laid that whopper on you back on Abydos?" Jack countered, smiling slightly at the archaeologist's embarrassment; he was just grateful that enough time had passed since Sha're's death for him to feel comfortable joking about stuff like that. "I think I'm entitled to enjoy the chance to point out that you weren't always that shy with the ladies!"

"It took me the better part of a year to get the nerve to even do that, and the previous two years were spent with a stupid crush on a girl who barely even knew I was there the first year and spent the second year sobbing over the death of her boyfriend at the conclusion of the previous year," Daniel countered, prompting a startled look from Jack; he'd never have expected Daniel to show that much frustration with someone who'd suffered that kind of loss.

"Look," he said, raising a hand to reassure his friend that he wasn't being heartless, "it's not that I didn't respect her right to grieve, but half the time we spent any time together it seemed like she just wanted to talk to me about her boyfriend's death; would you want to talk about seeing somebody being murdered right in front of you just because they got captured along with you by accident, especially when you were only fourteen?"

Jack blinked.

"Uh… given that I've never been there myself, I can't really say… but I do get the 'uncomfortable about talking about somebody being killed in front of you' thing," he said, looking at Daniel with an uncertain respect. He'd always thought that Daniel seeing his parents die when he was eight had been hard, but at least, no matter how horrific that would have been, he'd always known that it was an accident; seeing somebody murdered right in front of you, apparently just because they were where they shouldn't be?

Jack didn't care if Daniel had been older when that happened than he'd been when he'd allegedly seen his parents die (The fact that the incident apparently hadn't happened didn't change the fact that, as far as he'd been able to gather from the files, Daniel still had the memory of seeing his parents get crushed in front of him); seeing someone being murdered was a lot more disturbing than seeing somebody die by accident, particularly if you were a kid at the time.

"So…" he said awkwardly, smiling uncertainly at his friend, "putting aside the issue of why you had trouble with your previous crush, I take it that things turned out better with Ginny after you laid that one on her?"

Allowing himself to briefly recall the good times that the two of them had shared in their relationship prior to her death at Wormtail's hands, Daniel allowed himself a small smile.

"Well, I did try and cut it short at one point after our headmaster was killed- I thought that she'd be safer if Voldemort didn't know that I felt that way about her-, but she… persuaded me that she'd still be in danger for being who she was on her own even if she wasn't my girlfriend, so we decided to continue the relationship as much as we could," he replied, the smile still on his face as he recalled just how much Ginny had 'reassured' him; the bed in Ginny's room in the Burrow had never been quite the same after what it had endured that particular night…

"After that…" the archaeologist continued, the smile fading slightly from his face as his memories, like they always did, turned back to how the relationship had ended, "well… we had our tough moments- things weren't exactly comfortable between us after her brother died helping me destroy one of Voldemort's horcruxes-, but we always managed to get past them, up until…"

"Until she died," Jack said simply; even if it had been over twenty years since the events Daniel was talking about, he knew that sometimes you were never comfortable talking about some things.

"Yeah…" Daniel confirmed, pain once again briefly taking over his expression as he tightened his fists, his eyes glaring at something only he could see. "All because that bastard of a rat couldn't get over his old issues…"

Jack blinked.

"You're blaming him for being afraid?" he said, looking in surprise at Daniel. "I mean, you're the guy who understood why that Lotan guy was willing to destroy a planet-"

"Lotan's ship only went to that planet because it was uninhabited at the time it was scanned; it was hardly his fault that we chose it as a home for refugees after his scan was taken," Daniel pointed out. "Wormtail knew what he was doing was wrong when he told Voldemort where my parents were hiding, he knew that he'd just given away their location to somebody who would happily kill them… and he did it all for no other reason than to save himself, and then went on to try and rape the woman I love because he wanted a 'substitute' for my mum; I think I'm entitled to be a bit angry at him."

Jack wasn't sure what to say to that; he was so used to Daniel being the one who stayed in control whenever they faced more human adversaries, always being able to see both sides and attempting to negotiate a compromise that would satisfy both sides of the conflict, that to hear him actually being angry at a human was…

He wasn't sure how he felt about it, to be honest; for the moment, he'd just go with 'strange' and leave it at that.

After a moment's awkward silence, Jack spoke again.

"So," he said, smiling slightly at his old friend, "in a nutshell, you didn't want to use magic in the past because you didn't want to remind yourself of that time and because you could never be sure that you wouldn't end up making things worse if you showed people what you could do?"

"Essentially, yes," Daniel replied, nodding in confirmation at his friend.

"Fair enough," Jack said, still smiling as he glanced at his watch, only for the smile to fade slightly as he looked at the watch. "Well, I better get going; Homeworld Security might not be the most enjoyable job I've ever had, but it's not going to run itself, you know."

Daniel's eyes narrowed, a slight smile crossing his own face at this evidence of an earlier theory of his. "Wait a minute… you weren't just 'in the neighbourhood', were you?"

"Well… if you count 'taking two planes and a jeep to get to the neighbourhood' as 'being in the neighbourhood', than yeah," Jack replied, nodding in confirmation at his friend. "Hey, we both know what those guys can be like; I figured you'd need some kind of official back-up to make sure you made your point."

Before Daniel could say anything more, Jack had turned around and walked out of the office, leaving the archaeologist staring silently after him for a moment, lost in thought.

He had to admit, it had been good to think about how things had been between him and Ginny before Wormtail ruined any hope they'd had for a happy life together. Those few brief moments when they'd been able to spend time together without worrying about the need to find a horcrux… the mock quidditch matches they'd played together with her brothers when they could return to the Burrow… their rare dates when they were able to just go to the cinema or out for a meal…

Pushing such thoughts to the side once again- it might have been a nice change to remember what they'd been through, but he had more immediate matters to attend to-, Daniel walked out of the office and headed back to his lab; with SG-1 still officially on stand-down for the next day or so until Mitchell had been given a bit more time to recover, he'd decided to take advantage of the opportunity to attend to a few of the translations that he'd fallen behind on following his return to the wizarding world.