Summary
Vala breaks down walls. Jack approves. Set post-Counterstrike, pre-The Quest.
My notes
Love this little slice of Jack’s perspective on Daniel and Vala. This quote is beautifully put, and exactly why I think Vala is so good for Daniel:
It wasn’t that he liked seeing Daniel taken down a notch, though, of course, he did. It was that Daniel had, over the course of the decade Jack had known him, managed to come up with a set of personal defenses that made the platform in Antarctica look like a snow fort. The people like Mitchell who’d met Daniel after–after Sha’re, after Oma–didn’t have a clue how to breach those walls and probably didn’t realize half of them were there. The people who’d come before, Carter and Teal’c and even Hammond, knew they were there, but didn’t try to break past them often because they knew how pointless it usually was.
And then here came Vala, careening into Daniel’s carefully constructed world, knocking into his walls with the delicacy of a sledge hammer. Jack could see the cracks in the armor starting to appear. Vala didn’t even realize what she was doing.
This was, Jack thought, probably the only reason she was getting away with it.