Adjustments: Children

[brainofck]

This is for spyderqueen and whisper99, who wanted to know what happened after Adjustments B.

A word of warning. The idea came to me, so a wrote it as a story, but this is the original draft, written in about 90 minutes, with no re-read and no edit. RL these days doesn't allow for the kind of care I'd prefer to put into every piece, but I figure some fic is better than no fic, so, here's fic!

Title: Adjustments: Children
Author: muck_a_luck, posting in brainofck
Pairing: Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill
Rating: G
Summary: Life is full of surprises.
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only. muck_a_luck and brainofck
The Matrix: The Matrix is located here. This one is Children.

Previously, on Adjustments... Don't forget, boys and girls, that in this story, Daniel has been changed into a woman!

---

"You're mad at me," Claire said quietly.

Jack had fallen asleep on Daniel's shoulder while watching some hockey game or other. Daniel refused to pay attention, so that Jack couldn't try to have hockey conversations with him. This was because Daniel had secretly loved the Hurricanes for years, ever since they won the 2006 Stanley Cup and Daniel had won the pool, much to Jack's complete disgust, and he was afraid Jack might actually divorce him if he ever found out.

"No. I'm more than a little annoyed with Sam Carter and that damned clone, though," Daniel said, then instantly regretted it at Claire's reproving look. Daniel sighed. The kids loved Jon. Daniel couldn't help it that he found him so unsettling. "I'm sorry. But they shouldn't have let you loose in the declassified mission files without warning me first."

Josh looked up from where he was reading on the couch.

"What? Sammy and Jon let Claire see the files and didn't mention it to me?" Claire stuck her tongue out at him and he threw a highlighter at her.

"You've been doing research forever with Thor. When were you going to go down to the Cheyenne Mountain archives to read?"

"They were just trying to recruit you, you know," Jack muttered drowsily from Daniel's shoulder. "The files were a bribe."

Daniel snorted.

"Claire's not going to join the Planetary Defense Force."

Josh cleared his throat and dove back into his reading a little too quickly.

Jack sat up, looking guilty.

"Um," he said, eyes shifting from his wife to his daughter and back.

"OK. Now I might be about to get mad," Daniel said warningly.

"What were you 'not mad' about before," Mel asked as she came back into the room with her ice cream. "Oh! Score!"

"What?" Jack said, turning and peering at the screen. "Damn. Stupid Hurricanes. What the hell is a hockey team doing in North Carolina anyway?!"

"Oh, give it a rest, Jack, they've been there for decades," said Daniel tersely, drawing a sidelong look from his husband. Josh slid even lower behind his tome, highlighting like crazy. Josh was the only one of the household who knew Daniel's dark secret.

"So? What's Claire been up to now, besides applying to the PDF Academy behind you back?" Mel persisted, flopping on the couch next to her father and grinning at her sister wickedly. The highlighter flew across the room again, beaning Mel right in the middle of her forehead and dropping into her ice cream sundae.

"Good shot," said Jack approvingly, absently picking the pen out of the bowl and sucking the chocolate sauce off as he watched the game with renewed interest.

"Nothing," Daniel said shortly. He turned to his youngest daughter. "Have you accepted yet?" he asked.

Claire lifted her chin stubbornly. She had her father's intelligent, dark eyes. And more than any of their children, she also had Jack's wary caution, his tendency to evaluate and threat-assess almost instinctively. Daniel wondered what it said about them as parents that it was this one child they had both tried the most to influence, somehow creating a tangled hybrid creature that had so much in common with both of them. Daniel couldn't believe he would be sending her off as a cadet in a few months. He stood suddenly and left the room.

He went through the kitchen to the patio. They had a flower garden now, where the old dig site had been. He could still see Mel and Josh walking through the site, swinging their shrieking little sister between them. It couldn't have been more than a few months ago, but now Claire was seventeen and Mel was defending her second PhD in a couple of weeks and Josh's research on Asgard space engineering was going to be the basis of his first.

Claire came out and stood beside him.

"I always thought you would be our social scientist," Daniel said to her, breaking the strained silence between them. "I figured I'd start handing projects off to you as soon as you got through your academic work."

Claire poked him in the arm. It annoyed him that she was tall like her father. It was just wrong for his daughter to be nearly a foot taller than he was.

"Coursework would be an exercise in redundancy – we both know I could teach the undergraduate classes as easily as you could. And I've published original PhD level research in three different fields. What's the point?"

"Linguistics Today took the Unas paper?" Daniel asked, smiling despite himself.

"Yeah," Claire said.

They lapsed into silence again. Daniel wanted to tell her that she couldn't go to the Academy. Thanks to her father and her 'Sammy,' she already had more hours in an X-302 than she needed to qualify to fly it. She had brains. She had the Ancient gene. She could write her own ticket as a civilian consultant, as a member of the new Earth Diplomatic Corps, go to Atlantis, anything. She didn't need to follow in her military father's footsteps. The thought of his little girl reconnoitering hostile alien landscapes made Daniel's heart constrict painfully in his chest.

But it was her road to choose, not his. So he stood there beside her and tried not to hear her lisping little girl voice somewhere out in the garden.

"When were you going to tell us?" Claire asked, changing the subject.

Caught up in the revelation that his child was enlisting, he had forgotten Claire's little excursion into the Cheyenne Museum's deepest, darkest, dustiest file rooms.

"Never?" Daniel replied wryly.

"I always wondered why Daddy and Sammy and Uncle Teal'c always called you Daniel. I figured it was some old SG-1 joke."

Daniel shrugged.

"It wasn't funny at the time," he said.

"You were handsome," Claire said, almost accusingly. "Josh looks like you. There were pictures in some of the files. And one report mentioned that you lived on Abydos for a year and had a wife there."

"Shau're," Daniel said, feeling a surprising spike of grief speaking a name he rarely thought about anymore. The memory of Abydos stung as well. Anubis, Apophis, Replicators, Ori...

"No wonder your goa'uld is so fluent," Claire said, with a tinge of envy.

"Well, your Unas is much better than mine will ever be," Daniel replied softly, offering a salve to his daughter's professional jealousy, trying to dismiss the ghosts of years of galactic warfare, raising Jack's family and waiting for the mission when he finally didn't come home. The Antarctica year...

"You're taking this very matter-of-factly," he said, forcibly turning his thoughts away.

She leaned against him, a sturdy, comforting warmth in the evening cool.

"I have one word to say to that: Jon. When your Daddy has a clone that remembers changing your diapers and hearing your first words, there's not a lot that is going to freak you out anymore."

"You have a point there," Daniel agreed.

"If you could, would you go back?" Claire asked.

Daniel turned to look at her.

He thought about the question she was asking him. He realized that no one else had ever asked him that. Not Sam. Not Janet. Not Jack. He had hardly ever asked it of himself, even. At the beginning, of course the answer would have been yes, and later, the answer just stopped mattering, until one day, he had watched his young tribe of O'Neills traipsing through the dig site that was their backyard and he couldn't tell anymore what his answer would be.

"I don't know," he finally answered honestly. "I can say that now, after all this time, I wouldn't change what happened. My life has been full of surprises, since I met Catherine and went through the Stargate. I've done things I never expected to do. I've walked on a hundred different planets. I've met alien races and found my own history among the stars. I've fallen in love and given birth and nursed my own children."

He trailed off and looked out into the night again. Jack was behind them now. In the kitchen doorway, just inside the screen door. It was funny, after all these years, he could still sneak up on the children, but Daniel had developed a kind of sixth sense – a knowing of Jack's presence. Jack was standing behind them, listening.

"But if someone came to you and said, 'Dani Jackson O'Neill, would you like to be Daniel Jackson again?' What would you do?" To Daniel's surprise, her voice cracked a little as she rephrased the question. He turned to her and hugged her tightly, until she hugged him back, then he let her go to reach up and take her precious face between his hands.

"I don't think it's something you have to worry about, Bug," he said, smiling at her. "Two Daddies are plenty. You don't need three."

She scowled at him and huffed, obviously feeling patronized.

"Fine. Just be sure you call me the day you wake up and are suddenly a man again," she said querulously. She let her mother go and turned away to head down the veranda to the door to her room.

"Claire," he called to her quietly.

"Hmmm?" she replied over her shoulder.

"You'll make us proud," he said and she pirouetted on her heel to beam at him, before sauntering off around the corner of the house to her room.

Jack stepped out through the kitchen door, scooping his wife up into his arms.

"I'd like to say, before you kill me with that blunt knife on the kitchen counter, that I didn't know anything about this til yesterday, and she promised me she would tell you this weekend."

Daniel grunted and settled into Jack's arms.

"They'll put her on first contact teams, you realize, as well as tech retrieval. It's a nightmare."

"Hmmmm," Jack said, rubbing soothing circles on his back. "Don't think too far ahead. There's four years of Academy before we have to worry about that."

They stood there so long that Daniel was lulled into thinking the other shoe wasn't going to drop. Until it did.

"What would you do?" Jack asked. Daniel sighed.

"If somebody gave me an option? I don't really know. I used to be so afraid when I was pregnant, that I would suddenly wake up and be back the way I was. What would happen to the baby?"

Jack tipped his chin up.

"Really? If I could go to the Asgard right now? Or that weird new place, PX7-984, with all that genetic engineering stuff that had Carter so wound up? Would you do it?"

His eyes searched Daniel's.

"The other thing I used to think..." said Daniel slowly. "The other thing that used to frighten me to death... was what I would do if you didn't want me anymore." The last came out as a whisper. He blamed his emotional reaction on Claire's news and thinking about topics that he had thought closed years ago.

And Jack crushed him against his chest, pressing kisses to the top of his head. He had clearly taken Daniel's reply as a 'no,' and Daniel thought it was best to leave it at that.






If you're interested, all my stories, in order, from one page. Also, my fiction recommendations.



For my loyal rugbytacklers, I have done a Stargate crash course located here.