Like Father, Like Son (1/1)
Like Father, Like Son
All Ages
Genre: Gen, Challenge, Character Study
Episodes: Pre-series, Post-series
Synopsis: Genetics and possessions aren't the only thing passed down from generation to generation.
Notes: Written for my " A-to-Z Stargate" challenge; archersangel requested a Daniel-centric story with the prompt "bibliophile"
Like Father, Like Son
When Melburn Jackson was a child, his father read to him every night. Clifford Jackson was not a wealthy man, but there were two things he had in abundance: love for his son, and books. His wife, Danielle, had passed away during the flu pandemic of '43, leaving him a widower with five year-old Victoria and a two year-old Melburn. A year later, Victoria died from polio, and a grieving Cliff vowed to spend as much time with his boy as he could.
Cliff didn't own many books for children, but he had a sizeable collection of contemporary and classic novels. Each night, Mel went to sleep to the sound of his father's voice, reading Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and more. Any book he could buy or borrow, Cliff shared with Mel.
As he got older, the younger Jackson ventured further afield in his literary interests, and after taking French in high school, he began to make his way through the works of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, and Voltaire. In college, he raised a number of eyebrows by reading the works of Tolstoy, Chekov, and Pushkin in their original Russian. Though he originally pursued a degree in literature, he soon found himself enamored with the idea of studying other cultures, and turned toward anthropology and archaeology.
Cliff lived long enough to see his son become Doctor Melburn Jackson, but lost his battle with lung cancer not long afterward. Grieving, Mel threw himself at his work, taking an assistant professorship supervising over-eager graduate students at remote digs. It was on one of those digs that he first met Claire Ballard, and though he managed to keep their relationship strictly professional while she was still his student, he finally asked her out for coffee the day she became Doctor Ballard.
Claire was not the most beautiful woman Mel had ever known, but she had clear blue eyes that were full of passion. When she spoke, her whole face lit up, and when she smiled, Mel felt his heart flutter. From the stories his father had told him about meeting his mother, Mel knew he was in love, but he waited almost an entire year before finally asking her to marry him.
A week after their first anniversary, Claire announced she was pregnant. Initially, they planned to name the baby after Mel's father, if a boy, or Claire's mother, if a girl, but when Mel first held his son in his arms, everything changed. Cliff had been a large man, dark of hair and eye and coarsened by age and hard work, and though he wanted to honor his father's memory, Mel decided his child was too tiny and pink to be named for the grandfather he would never know. Instead, he was named Daniel, for Mel's mother, and the doting new dad vowed to spend as much time with his son as his own father had with him.
Mel read to his son from day one, working his way through the same books Cliff read him, plus novels from his own collection. Occasionally, while he and Claire were out in the field, he would read from archaeology journals and texts. Daniel didn't seem to mind what was being read to him-or what language it was in-as long as it was his father's voice.
Daniel began reading on his own before he was four years old, but he still enjoyed having his father read to him, especially at night. No matter how busy the Jacksons were with their life's work, Mel always made time to share his love of books with his son, just as Cliff had done for him. Years later, after his parents were long-gone, Daniel would think of lying in bed, listening to his father read to him, and remember it as some of the best years of his life.
"Read?"
Daniel smiled at his son's hopeful expression. "Well, we finished Peter Pan last night, so I thought we'd go for another classic." Settling into the chair beside the little boy's bed, he began to read, "'Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife...'"
Author's Notes: The identity of the mother of Daniel's son is entirely up to the reader. As a D/V fan, I know who I had in mind, but he could just as easily be someone else's, or even a down-sized Jack to whom Daniel is reintroducing The Wizard of Oz!
...or he could be Daniel's child via some kind of mpreg sort of thing... *whistles*