I hate what we’ve done to him.

That moment when he first saw the Gate burst into life is burned into my brain, never to be forgotten. All the astonished awe on the faces around him paled to nothing next to his wonder and fascination.   And as our hard-assed team walked slowly up that ramp, the rest of us grim and tense with what an honest man has to admit was fear, his wide eyes reflected the blue glow of that wall of glistening pseudo-fluid, vivid with eagerness.  The same gentle joy radiated from his entire body as we stared down that dune, witnessing our first alien civilization as the Abydonians slaved, mining a mineral unknown on Earth.  And again as the three of us were folded into their celebration. 

I’ll define the essence of Daniel by those moments for the rest of my life.  He was a revelation to me, though it took me a while to understand just how profoundly he was destined to impact my life.

In those first heady months of the Stargate program, the purity of his motives put a gloss of higher purpose on the spirit of the operation.  Not for him the need to find more and better ways to kill.  For Daniel, it was the exhilaration of discovery—cultures long vanished on Earth living and breathing, pathways long dead carried forward, extrapolating themselves not in theory but in reality. 

And the passion of his vision infused itself into our more grim military objectives.  For a while. 

But the military perspective is a juggernaut.   And with the growing realization of the scope of the opposition, Daniel’s higher vision was swallowed, inch by painful inch, by the harshness of our tunnel vision.

I try hard to convince myself that the changes are the result of the truly awful things that he’s had to survive.   Hathor.  Nem.  Shyla.   Machello…twice.   The agonizing loss of Sha’re… twice.   Staying behind to die alone on Klorel’s ship.   In fact, dying… several times.   Reliving surely the most traumatic event a child can experience… several times. 

Horrible, awful things.  Enough to shatter the spirit of the strongest man.

To my sorrow, dreadful as these things were, they didn’t do the real damage.  We did that.

I can’t believe I didn’t see what was happening, that it took me so long to realize that we were gradually destroying him.   How long has it been since I’ve seen that joyous wonder radiating from his face?  How long since his tongue has been tied by the excesses of excitement, rather than outrage?

The evidence was there.  It was expressed in the increasing rarity of that shy little smile.   And in the escalating desperation of his opposition to our obsessive search for more and meaner technology—particularly weapons technology—and the growing edge of hopelessness that became so evident in his pleas to be allowed to pursue the gentler obsessions that motivated his life.  He craves peaceful exploration; we give him duplicitous exploitation.

See, Daniel?  I can use words, too. 

I will never cease to rage against myself for my personal contributions to this damage.  In retrospect, I see so clearly how focused I was on getting what I wanted.   Jack O’Neill does not lose, and I was absolutely convinced that the only way to win this one was to get better toys than the bad guys, and blow them to smithereens.   Daniel’s constant opposition drove me insane.   Every time he’d plead his case, I’d want to smack him.  A relationship that had been a warm, reassuring friendship became increasingly confrontational.   And in sheer self defense, he pulled back from the hurt that replaced camaraderie.  I drove a wedge between us that has left a possibly unbridgeable gulf.  And he’s all by himself on the cold far side of that chasm.

Daniel has always been such a man alone.   No family that matters, alienated from the professional friends who should have supported him and instead kicked him in the face.  We became his family.   He let himself learn to count on us.   Then we carelessly, ruthlessly pushed him back out on his own. 

I pushed.  I pushed him right out onto that balcony. 

Oh, God… when I walked past that piano and saw him, perched outside the rail, bare toes hanging out over the edge…   I don’t ever want to feel that kind of panic again.  And what he said…

“It all goes away…”

Oh, Daniel.  What a blinding wake-up call.  Did we go away?  Did we leave you to suffer the raging aggression of the universe without us? 

To have a man like you in my life… that’s an overwhelming privilege.  To neglect that stewardship must be one of the great universal sins.

He’s sitting there on the step, hands clasped behind his bowed head, rocking forward and back in exhausted pain.   When I lurched through that Gate, I was sure we’d waited too long.  Convinced that I carried a body finally, irrevocably dead.  My thanks to any real god in the universe that he beat off that foe one more time.

I’m so sorry, Daniel.  So sorry.  We’ve failed you—and thus the finer part of ourselves.

Unfixable?  I hope to hell not.  I need you.   I need the brightness you brought me.   Surely, surely we haven’t completely extinguished that glow.

Realizing what I’ve done is the hardest part of repairing the damage, right?  The rest has to be easier, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t matter.  If it takes the rest of my life, and every scrap of energy and determination I have, I will fix this.  Having experienced his brilliant illumination, I can’t face life back in the darkness. 

I’m coming for you, Danny.  Don’t give up until you feel my hand reaching for you.