One Month Later
"Sam told me you told your team about Nick," Janet says softly to her husband as she catches his arm before going into the briefing room.
"Yeah, that's what this meeting is all about," Daniel says.
"Are you sure that you're ok with this? With them knowing? It seemed pretty secretive when you told me."
"Janet, Nick might have been right. He might not even be crazy. And he's been in that mental hospital… for so long. It was horrible for me, and it was less than a week. I don't know what I would have done."
She touches his arm comfortingly, "Are you going to be alright talking about him in there?"
"I have to do this," he says.
"No, you don't. If you don't want to talk about personal family issues in front of your colleges you don't have to. Give me your notes, and I'll give you the reader's digest version."
"I love that you're offering to do that for me, but I am fine," he says smiling a flirt in her direction.
Daniel walk confidently into the briefing and turns on his power point. His wife sits down at the table, and turn the chair pulling it even closer to him.
Jack and Teal'c walk in and sit down. Jack's telling a story about Hannah trying to blow bubbles. Apparently she inhaled enough soap she burped a bubble.
The rest of the people in the meeting come in, and Daniel starts his PowerPoint slides, saying, "I could name at least a dozen different crystal skulls from various parts of the world, but the skull that Nick discovered in Belize was unique."
"Nick?" Jack asks pointedly.
Janet turns, and gives him a glare. Her husband can call his estranged grandfather whatever he wants to.
"Uh, yeah, the, uh… the great explorer, the not-so-great grandfather Nicholas Ballard. He preferred being called Nick even when I was a kid. It was, uh…" He can tell that his overprotective wife is about to save him, so he switches quickly to another a topic, "Anyway, the point is that no-one can explain how the skull that Nick discovered was carved from a single piece of crystal, against the grain, given the technology of the day. He claimed that it possessed a certain… power."
General Hammond asks, "What kind of power?"
"That if one were to look into the eyes of the skull, one would be teleported to see… aliens," Daniel says, looking down and refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
"Your grandfather saw these aliens?" Teal'c asks with his eyebrow raised.
"So he insisted to the entire academic community," Daniel says, sighing.
"I take it it wasn't well received," Tela'c says.
"As you might imagine, no. Um, he tried for years under controlled conditions to make the skull teleport him again to where the aliens lived, but he… never could."
"Doesn't mean he wasn't right," Jack says.
"I know, I should have known as soon as I started working at the Stargate there is some truth to what he is saying."
-0-0-0-
Janet is working in the infirmary when most of SG-1 comes back into the room. "Did you lose my husband?" she jokes.
All of SG-1, even the previously unemotional Teal'c, look stricken.
"What happened to him?"
"He disappeared," Jack says.
"What are you doing here? Go look for him!" she shouts.
"I don't mean that I don't know where he is Janet, I mean that I was looking right at him, and he disappeared."
"People don't disappear," Janet says.
"And the pyramids aren't landing pads for alien space crafts, because that would be ridiculous," Jack retorts.
Tears spring to Janet's eyes, and she isn't sure if it's because she's seven months pregnant, or if she would have been crying anyway.
"We're going to get him back," Jack says moving closer.
"Yes we are, what was he doing when he went missing?" It's not the time for crying, it's the time for saving her husband.
-0-0-0-
Janet took a lot of biology during her education. She also took a fair amount of chemistry. She didn't take a whole lot of physics. Now this means that she can't do much to help her husband come back from his missing status.
She hands Sam a glass of water. At least she can help the person who is getting her husband back not collapse from dehydration. This is something she's qualified to do.
"Thank you," Sam says, taking a sip.
Suddenly Janet feels an incredible chill goes through her body. "Did anyone else feel that?" she asks the room.
"What?" Sam asks.
"I just got a chill." Janet mentally runs through all the medical reasons for a chill. Probably a virus, of course, nothing to worry about.
Then she has the undeniable feeling of arms wrapped around her body. She knows that there is no-one there, it isn't real enough to be mistaken for reality. But it is much too real to be mistaken for nothing at all.
She thinks she knows what it is, but she really hopes she's wrong. Because if she's not wrong… then her husband must be dead. You can't be a ghost until you are dead.
-0-0-0-
"I can't believe I'm gonna suggest this, but what about Daniel's grandfather?" Sam asks Janet as the two sit in their office after a failed run with the UTV.
"I don't think that is an option," Janet says hoping that her friend will drop the idea.
"Well, he claimed that the skull teleported him somewhere. He may be the only person who actually knows where Daniel is," Sam defends her idea.
"I'm not so sure, Major. Daniel didn't exactly share with you guys where his Grandfather lives right now. He's in a mental hospital. Apparently his failure to prove the crystal skull was more than just a curiosity caused a severe mental breakdown from which he's never been able to fully recover. Nick checked himself in."
"Why wouldn't Daniel have told us that?" Sam asks.
"He didn't even tell me until the thing with Marchello's worms last year. There was a time when Daniel actually believed that he himself had a mental illness. Daniel used to visit him all the time. But they had a big fight when he wrote the paper about the pyramids and writing being older than everyone else thought it was. Daniel doesn't really want to talk about him, but when this all started to happen I called up Nick's psychiatric hospital. Apparently, Nick still talks about him all the time. The doctor I spoke to says any friends of Dr Jackson's are welcome."
"We don't have much else to go on. Will you be ok if I ask General Hammond for permission to head out there?"
Janet gives her a nod.
-0-0-0-
Janet stands in the waiting room of the mental hospital where her husband's only family resides. She remembers mental hospitals from her psychiatric residency. She hated it. Hated the way it was so still and silent and so hopeless.
A nurse finally comes out and says, "Sorry for the wait. Is there anything I can do for you?"
"You may take us to Nicholas Ballard immediately," Teal'c says quickly. The time that he spent with Shelby had softened him out a great deal, but he was still direct to the point of crassness.
The nurses is obviously offended, and Jack smoothes it over by saying, "He's just a little anxious to see old Nick."
"Oh, are you close?" the nurse asks. Janet knows that the nurse really doesn't expect them to be close to him. If she's worked there long she must know that they haven't visited him before. And it's not like many people come to visit people in mental hospitals. Prisons, yes; hospitals, yes; the nut house? Not so much. Insanity is just about the loneliest thing you can have.
Jack answers her question in the affirmative at the same time that Teal'c answers it in the negative. Janet doesn't say anything at all. She should be close to this man, but she doesn't know him at all.
With a glare, Teal'c bows to the lie.
"Well, I'll just check and see if he's ready for you," the nurse says leaving the room.
A few minutes later they are led into a room. The man doesn't look much like Daniel, but then again, Sam's father looks nothing like her.
"Hi, I'm Daniel's wife," she says.
Nick nods his head, "Janet, with twelve-year-old Cassie and a boy who will be born at any moment."
"He's got a couple of months yet, actually," she says with a smile.
"I'm pleased to meet you. Daniel followed my footsteps," Nick says.
"You must be very proud," Jack says. But Janet shakes her head, she understood exactly what Nick was getting at.
"He made a fool of himself. He staked his entire academic career on this belief that the great pyramids of Egypt were made by aliens."
"He didn't actually say that aliens did it," Janet protests.
"He was more insane than I was. I told him so. I told him to forget all that nonsense. He lost his apartment, his research grant, he hasn't published a paper in two years. Now where is he? Where is he now?"
"In a way, that's what this is all about. We wanted to hear exactly what happened to you back in '71 when you first found the skull."
"Nothing happened. There were no aliens," Nick says. He's been there long enough to know how to play the game. He knows that there is no benefit in telling the truth. That just gets you locked up. "No one believed me," he muttered.
"Daniel believed you," Jack says.
Nick smiles. So this man doesn't know his grandson as well as he thinks he does, "He didn't. He wanted to. He did listen. In the end he did not believe in my theories of the skull just as I did not believe his theories of the pyramids and the aliens."
"Nick, can you tell us what happened when you found that skull?" Jack prompts.
"Why?" Nick asks, looking as if he is starting to lose interest.
"Because we've found another skull, identical to the one you found in Belize," Jack confesses.
"Show me," Nick says. This seems like a reasonable request to him. Archeologists are used to touching things, looking at them, getting to know things with all of your senses. But to the soldiers it is something absurd. You don't show classified things to civilians in a mental hospital.
"It's in a high security facility at the moment. But if you tell us about your experiences, we…" Sam says.
"Then take me there," Nick says, hoping that this will not only give him a chance to exercise his mind with real work, but also get out of the mental hospital for a short period of time.
"We can't do that. It's classified," Jack says.
"If you don't, then I won't tell you anything," Nick says, standing up and looking out the windows, "It is up to you."
Two Days Later
"Jack told me that you can see Daniel," Janet says after Nick had been brought to the SGC.
"Yes, he wanted me to tell you he loves you, and he's going to be alright."
"Where is he exactly?" Janet asks.
Nick points to her right, and Janet is having a little bit of a flash back to when her sister was a little girl, and had an imaginary friend. She look at her husband and says. "I love you too, and you'd better be alright. I don't want to have to explain to your son that his father is invisible."
She fills a chill covering her stomach.
"Right now Daniel is…" Nick begins.
"Touching my stomach, I know, I can feel him," she says with a smile.
"He wants to know how Cassie is doing," Nick says.
"She's doing great. She had a history test, and she hated that you weren't there to study with her. She said she'd never be able to pass an Earth history test without you. But she got a B, and some confidence."
"He's a good father, isn't he?" Nick asks.
"Yeah, he is," Janet says, smiling at the empty air that is hiding her husband.
"I was never very good at being a father, and of course I was much worse at being a grandfather."
"I think all he would have needed was you to be there for him," Janet says.
Nick turns toward the place where Daniel stands. "He agrees, and I should have taken him. But I was a bad father. And I don't have any job skills besides field work, so what was I supposed to do."
There is a pause, and then Nick frowns at the space which contains Daniel. He says "I couldn't have taken you with me to South America. It was dangerous, and you were just a little boy."
"You could have," Janet and Daniel say at the same time.
-0-0-0-
Janet wakes up to the sound of a sob in the middle of the night. For a second, she thinks her traumatized daughter might have come into her bed with them. Then she realizes it is her traumatized husband.
"I'm sorry he left you again," she says, rolling over to put a hand on her shoulder.
"He didn't want me," Daniel sobs.
"He's an idiot. We want you… your family, your friends, the SGC."
"I wasn't good enough for him."
"Daniel, you're amazing."
"Back then, he didn't take me, because he didn't think I was good enough to go to South America."
"No, he didn't want you to be damaged. He didn't think that he could take good enough care of you," Janet can't believe she's justifying the actions of this horrible man.
Daniel doubles over, "I wasn't good enough."
"God, Daniel, you're good enough. You're more than good enough. You're one of the most amazing people in the world. And now I know where your self-esteem issues came from. If Nick was here right now, I would punch him in the face."
"Janet, who is going to take our kids if we die?"
"Daniel, we're not going to die," Janet says.
"My parents assumed there would be someone for me. We can't assume. I need to know my kids are never going to be rejected, never deal with foster care."
"Do you think we should go with my sister or my mom?" she asks.
"Either one would do a good job of taking care of our kids," he says.
"I'll call my sister in the morning, ok?"
He nods, and is still looking at crying. "Honey, I'm here. I'm not leaving," she says softly.
He turns to her offer of a hug.