AN: It dawns on me that I standardly tell people I began to ‘ship Dan/Jan after A Hundred Days and usually give no explanation as to why. Until today at work, in fact, I didn’t have one. And would you believe it, when I got my answer, it came as a fic!
Spoilers: A Hundred Days (duh!)
Disclaimer: So not mine. sobs
Summary: Sometimes, those alien customs really do make an awful lot of sense.
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Moving On
Daniel sat in his lab for a very long time that particular evening. He had a lot to think about, after all. Well, more than normal. The geological samples sat right in front of him, but he was strangely reluctant to reach out the intervening half a foot to his desk to pick one up and examine it. He was certainly not inclined to unearth his microscope.
His attention, this particular evening, was on the photograph that sat beside his computer. It was rumpled and there were not a few tearstains on it, but it was one of his favourite possessions. For more than two years it had been a beacon of hope, an item he used to focus his will towards the upward struggle that was his day job every time he stepped through the ‘Gate. Lately, it had been only a memory of something he had lost and would never again regain.
Sha’re was gone. And she was never coming back. There would be no last minute help from the Tok’ra, no daring rescue by rebel Jaffa or the USAF, nothing. He had lost her, and everything she had ever been was buried in the sands of her home planet. Everything, that is, except what he had captured in the photograph.
She hadn’t known he was going to take her picture. She had been weaving at the time, and he was so entranced by her that he didn’t even remember standing up to get the camera. When he took the photo and the flash momentarily lit the room, she had jumped about a foot in the air. He spent the next two hours explaining how a camera worked and lamenting the fact that he would never be able to develop the roll.
Daniel had spent a lot of time thinking these last one hundred days. Sam had been closeted in her lab for at least eighteen hours a day and Teal’c had been going off world with SG-3, so he had felt very much adrift. In fact, Daniel had spent almost all of his time under the mountain in the company of Janet Fraiser. Janet fretted endlessly about Sam and while she never came right out and said anything, Daniel understood that Sam’s obsession was not merely founded on rescuing her superior officer.
As the months rolled past, Daniel found himself spending more time inventing reasons to talk to Janet than dreaming up scenarios in which he had rescued Sha’re. For her part, Janet seemed to appear in his lab at all hours. At first, she would voice her latest concerns about Sam, but eventually, she would just hand him his coffee, sit in a spare chair and do her own paperwork until he broke the silence.
And then Jack came home.
Daniel did not miss the anguish in Sam’s eyes, nor could he quell the immediate feelings of anger that Jack had given up on them so quickly. And yet…..and yet…..
He understood.
It had taken him more than a hundred days, but he understood that at some point The Past must be laid to rest. He understood that he could not continue to accept coffee from the small woman who came uninvited into his lab and poured out her heart to him without offering her his heart in return. Moreover, he understood that he wanted to make that offer. He wanted to move on.
She was still here. He knew that because she had sedated Sam upon their return to Earth and had insisted the Major sleep in the infirmary so that Janet could keep an eye on her. With one last look at the rocks, he reached out to touch the photograph of Sha’re, then turned his back on it, and headed for the commissary. It was dark there, it was almost two o’clock in the morning, after all, but the coffee was still warm.
He carried two cups towards the infirmary, and knocked on the door of Janet’s office. The door was not fully shut, so his knock pushed it open. Janet looked up from the papers in front of her and saw him standing there.
Her smile was like the sun of the first day.
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finis
gravitynotincluded, May 1st, 2005.