Abyss

Invisible Touch
by elfin

Disclaimer: characters are beloved creations of and copyright Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich and Jonathan Glassner, they're the only ones I trust with them.
Phrase “butter-soft” copyright Biblio!
With thanks to Tomy for her ever-lasting encouragement and inspiration




Going through the Stargate didn’t feel like the great adventure it had once been.  

It had claimed a life.  

In fact it had claimed many, and General George Hammond of the SGC could name each and every one.

But this one, particular life had been more precious to them than their own.  

Especially to Colonel Jack O’Neill.  It felt as if his heart had been torn out.

And Daniel wasn’t even dead.

Jack looked around them with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.  They’d gated into what looked like a laboratory facility.

Strip lights hummed in the high ceiling above them.  There was an observation window about twenty feet up the wall on their right.  The lights were all off, and Jack assumed that whatever experiments they’d done on the giant metal ring, they’d long given up.

He signalled to Sam.  They stepped off the crude metal ramp and headed for the wide corridor in front of the gate.  Teal’c and Quinn brought up the rear, Teal’c with his staff weapon ready to fire, Quinn carrying the Zat gun they’d given him with an unnatural confidence.

They moved cautiously and in silence.  No one had very much to say anyway.

Five months had passed since their fatal gate onto Kalona.  Five months since Daniel had sacrificed himself to save Quinn’s world.  

It had taken fifty-two hours for Daniel to die.  Slowly, painfully.  In front of Jack’s eyes.  If he’d ever hated anyone in his life – anyone who hadn’t been a Goa’uld or himself - it was Jonas Quinn.

For two months Jack had taken leave of the SGC, unable to bare being near the Stargate.  And then Sam and Teal’c had come to see him, and persuaded him to return to active duty.  SG1 was reactivated.  With a new member.  

Hammond had called it therapy.  Jack had barely spoken one word to Quinn in the first month save for giving him orders that were followed to the letter.  After the first successful mission, Jack had managed to at least answer direct questions and engage in conversation with the man.

But each and every day, Jack’s thoughts turned more and more towards retirement.


An inhuman shriek stopped them in their thoughts and tracks.  It seemed to echo around the walls, stilling the members of SG1.

Jack listened intently, trying to pinpoint the origin of the sound.  After a couple of seconds, he signalled to his team, and they followed to the end of the corridor.  Teal’c moved across, carefully checking the left and right turnings.

To their right, the passage faded into darkness.

To their left, they could see lights on in glass-walled labs all along one side of the corridor.  Jack caught Teal’c’s eyes and with a single glance, they agreed to move to the left.

P-90 primed, Jack took point.

Edging their way along the passage, Sam balanced up on tip-toe to peer over into one of the high windows.  It was a lab, empty, but definitely in use.  It reminded her of something from an old Hammer horror movie.  Test tubes full of coloured liquids bubbling away over Bunsen burners.  Clear chemicals decanting over tall flames.

As they reached the third lab along, a second shriek permeated the air, sending shivers through them as though the sound itself was strumming along their nerves.

This time it was obvious where the noise had originated.  The windows of the lab next to them still vibrated with the memory of the scream.

They dropped against the wall, squatting beneath the glass.  Jack slowly rose, taking a long look inside the lab before dropping back down.  Turning to his team, he indicated a door a couple of meters ahead, and led the way as they moved crab-like towards it.

Jack crossed the closed door, facing the others.  Without a word he indicated that there was one person inside, near the back of the room.  Sam and Teal’c nodded their understanding.  

Quinn stared at him in confusion.  He was learning, but still most of what the colonel did bemused him.  For now, his only hope from mission to mission was to make it back alive.  He wouldn’t ever give O’Neill the satisfaction of his defeat.

With a sudden, swift kick, Jack opened the door and had his weapon aimed on its target in a heartbeat.

The surprised alien stared at them from where it stood.  Before it, a large incubator, at least a metre long and a three-quarter metre wide, housed a white mass of pulsing energy and light.  Using thick rubber gloves attached to the inside of the unit through hand-holes, the scientist (Jack assumed that’s what it was because simply because of its white ‘coat’) was doing… something to whatever was inside.

Next to the unit were three jars.  Two were sealed, and contained smaller white masses like the bigger one.  The third was open.  

As they got nearer, they could see that the alien had a hold of some of the mass, pulling it from the centre of whatever it was, and meaning to cut it away.

“Excuse me, what the hell do you think you’re…?”  Before Jack could finish, Teal’c activated his Zat gun and fired once.  

The alien fell away from the incubator, hands – or more accurately, fingers attached directly to wrists - slipping from the gloves, releasing its hold on the creature inside.  Weakly, the being within started to fight, stretching and pushing at its confines.

Stepping forward, Jack kicked the alien further away, putting one hand on the transparent incubator, wanting to help the creature but not understanding why or how.  

But the white mass settled, whether because of Jack’s action of because it just ran out of steam, Jack wasn’t sure.  But when he glanced at Teal’c, the Jaffa was looking at him with the strangest of expressions.

“Okay.  We get this back to earth.  Carter, you and Quinn take the incubator and the jars.  See if it can be… glued back together or something.”  He shrugged.  “See if Fraiser can do something for it.  It doesn’t look… well.  Teal’c, you and I’ll make sure there aren’t any more of these things around here.”

Jack let his fingers linger on the warm glass of the incubator for a few moments before he followed Teal’c out.


The two explored the rest of the facility in silence.  There didn’t seem to be any other living beings around, although there were Bunsen flames lit in other labs and half-finished experiments abandoned.  There was no move evidence of any more creatures, ones made of energy or otherwise.

They circled what they assumed was the ground floor, before they came across some metal stairs heading downwards, just behind the gate.

Jack glanced back at Teal’c before descending.  They walked into the darkness.

“The creature we found… is the same species as those who took DanielJackson, is it not?” Teal’c asked, a disembodied voice in the black.

There was a pause before Jack answered.  “Yeah, it is.”

Neither of them voiced the idea, the thought that had made Teal’c fire the Zat without direct provocation, that had made Jack give the order to take the creature back to earth.

*

Hammond met them at the base of the ramp when they arrived back at the SGC.  

“Colonel, did you find anything else?”

“No, Sir.  It looked as if there should have been a full team of scientists working in that place, but we couldn’t find anyone or anything else.”

“Right.  Fraiser has the… creature that Captain Carter and Mr Quinn brought back in quarantine.”

Jack nodded, and headed out of the gateroom.  Behind him, Hammond called, “Debriefing in one hour, Colonel.”

Teal’c only stared when the general cast his frustrated glare in his direction.


“Hey.”  Janet looked up and smiled as Jack stepped into the quarantine room.  He waved one hand at the unlocked door.  “I’m guessing it’s okay….”

Janet nodded.  “The only quarantined area is the incubator unit you brought back.”

Jack walked around it where they’d placed it on a metal workbench in the centre of the room.  “How is… it?” he asked quietly.

“Very weak, Colonel.  We’ve taken a couple of samples from the… pieces in the jars and from the creature itself.  I’m awaiting the results, but it’s going to take some time.”  There were a couple of cylinders hooked up to two small holes at the base of the unit.  Jack pointed at them, silently querying.  “Oxygen.  This creature is of the same species you found at Kheb.  We’re trying to recreate the oxygen-rich atmosphere on that planet, try to help it survive.”

Jack touched fingertips to the side of the unit.  “If it’s made of energy, why doesn’t it just… go home?”

“I don’t know.  If the results show that it hasn’t been infected with anything I’m going to suggest that you take it home, Colonel.  But if the aliens… mutated it in any way….  I need the test results before I make a decision.”

Jack nodded, watching as she strode to the back of the room.  Pulling up a stool, he sat close to the unit, watching the mass of white light shift now and again.  The longer he watched, the more he thought he could make out a form.

A short tentacle of light/energy was tucked under what, to Jack, looked like the ‘head’ of the thing.  He imagined it was lying on its side, curled up almost foetally, the way Daniel had used to sleep when left to his own devices in the infirmary or on Jack’s couch.

Jack shook himself.  He tried not to think about Daniel.  The pain was too raw when he did, the nightmare too close.

“Colonel?”  His head snapped up.  “Coming?”

He realised that he’d missed whatever Janet had said to him.  But he shook his head.  “I’ll stay, just for a little while.”

Janet tilted her head to one side, regarding him with interest and a small smile.  It was a moment or two before she realised why he was staying.

“Colonel, it’s not Daniel.”

Jack looked at her, eyebrows rising.  “I know it isn’t, Doc.  But it’s alone, hurt and scared.”

She nodded, not entirely convinced of his motives.  “I’ll be back later.”

For a time, he just sat, eyes roaming the quarantine lab, the dark, empty observation room one storey up, the corridor outside the thick glass windows.

The creature shifted again, seeming to Jack to turn over on to its other side, curling the tentacle around until it once again became a cushion.

Smiling to himself, Jack reached out, touching the sides of the incubator.

“You’re okay, little fella,” he murmured softly.  “We aren’t gonna hurt ya.”

Sliding his hand along the unit, he touched the edges of the nearest safety glove.  Reaching his hand into the heavy-duty rubber, he stroked the tips of his gloved fingers over the creature as gently as he could, where he imagined its shoulder might be.

“It’s okay to rest,” he whispered.  “Tomorrow, I’ll take you home.”  

He stayed an hour before loping off to find an empty bunkroom to get some sleep.  He didn’t think he could face his cold, empty house tonight.

*

Janet woke to a furious banging on the door of her quarters.  There were times when she hated being on call.  The thought sparked another directly after it.  She wasn’t on call tonight.

Rubbing her eyes, she crawled off the bunk and answered the door in a T-shirt and sleeping shorts.

Jo, her lab assistant, was standing in the corridor, no signs of apology on her face.  She was holding a medical file.

“Jo… what is it?”

“You have to see these results from the tests.”  She was alternately frowning, and biting her lip.  

“Why?”  Janet reached out and took the file, opening the front cover and drawing out the paper as she walked back inside her quarters.  Jo followed her, flicking on the light at Janet’s instruction.

Janet read for a minute.  Then she threw it back at Jo and got dressed as fast as she could.


Ten minutes later, she’d rousted Jack, Hammond, and Teal’c out of bed too.  Sam had gone home, but she’d had her paged.  No one had ever thought about waking Quinn.

Jack and the general really did look like they’d been dragged out of bed.  They were both nursing mugs of coffee, Jack sitting up on one of the lab’s work surfaces, Hammond and Teal’c standing close by.  Janet was standing in front of two computer monitors and one microscope.  

“Want to explain why we’ve been woken up at this ungodly hour, Doctor?” the general asked dryly.

Jack grunted.

“We have the results of the tests on the creature SG1 brought back today.”  Janet started, keeping herself calm.  “The first set reveal that the fragments of the creature that had been cut from it and placed in those jars are definitely dead.  There’s no energy coming from them, and the cells are starting to break down.”

Hammond frowned.  “What does that tell us?”

“That the mass is the living being as a whole.  But if you take a part away, like cutting off a human finger, it’ll die.  It needs the whole to survive.”

Jack raised his eyebrows.  “Fascinating.”

Janet looked at him for a moment, before continuing, talking a little faster now.  “The second set of tests were on the samples we took from the creature back here at the SGC, one just after we got the creature into quarantine and the other a couple of hours later.  The energy in the cells is starting to change, to mutate.”

The three military faces regarding her were blank.  But she wasn’t deterred.

“Along with the energy patterns, we looked at the genetic code… and we found a match.”

Teal’c raised a single eyebrow, something Jack had never really mastered.  “A match?”

Janet nodded.  “Sirs… that creature… it’s Daniel.”

The silence was broken by Jack’s coffee mug smashing against the hard floor tiles.  They all turned to look at him, mouths opening, but he was out of the room already, and running.  

It wasn’t far to the quarantine room from the lab.  Jack rounded the corner, elbowed his way between the two SFs guarding their ward and pushed open the door, skidding to a halt in front of the incubator.

For a moment, all he could do was stand and stare at the white cloud of energy moving restlessly now within the glass confines.

Reaching out, he touched his fingers to the glass as he had several times that night, drawn to the being cradled within.  Now he knew why.

“Danny?” he murmured.

*

Jack rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and sipped the cold coffee.

They’d tried to dial the planet where Kheb was situated more times than Jack could count, and still the gate was reporting an unknown error.  Sam was working on it with a hand-picked team, two of whom had been flown out from Washington and given immediate clearance.

But they were having no success.  They’d been at it for hours.

Leaving the control room, Jack returned to the quarantine area, sneaking up behind Janet.

“How is he?” he murmured softly.

Janet turned and smiled as she watched him pull up his stool and sit down on the opposite side of the incubator to where she was taking more samples.  There was a gentleness in her actions that hadn’t been there before.  Not that Janet wasn’t always careful with her patients, mindful of their dignity.  But this was Daniel.  

“He’s….”  Janet shrugged.  “I have no idea, Colonel.  The samples I’ve been taking… there are differences each time, changes which could mean anything.”  She sighed.  “Would you mind staying for a few minutes?  I have to get these latest tests to the lab.”

Jack nodded.  “Sure.”  He settled his eyes on the pulsing white energy, still trying to believe it was really the man who’d saved his life on so many occasions, the man who’d squirreled passed his defences and into his life.  The man he’d shared a house with for a couple of months after they’d got back from Abydos.  The best friend he’d ever had, the only friend he’d ever loved.

It had been difficult to hear Daniel say he wanted to leave, that he could do more out there as one of these things than he could here, with SG1.  And in the fight against the Goa’uld, he’d probably been right.  They’d heard stories, via Jacob, of things happening within the realms of the system lords, that might possibly have been of Daniel’s doing.  Little things that Jack had started to refer to as ‘Danny’s signature’.

But Jack missed Daniel’s friendship, his company.  He missed knowing that whatever time he turned up at Daniel’s apartment, he’d be welcomed.  He missed wandering into Daniel’s office at all times of the day and night and dragging the man off to share a coffee and a slice of pie.

Hammond had allowed Quinn to move into Daniel’s office, and Jack never went in there any more.

But more than any of that, he missed the flutter in his stomach whenever Daniel was close by, whenever they spent time together off-duty.  That flutter, that unique feeling, the one that reminded him of what it was like to be a teenager.  One day, he’d told himself, he would act on it.  They’d been so used to Daniel coming back from the dead, that when he hadn’t, at least not to them, it had thrown Jack’s whole world out of whack.

Now, it seemed, Daniel had come back.  But to say it wasn’t the Daniel he knew would have been an understatement.  

He watched the being steadily and as he did, he saw a shimmer of colour pass over it.  He frowned, leaning in to see if his eyes were deceiving him.  Another flicker, a pinkish streak wound its way through the otherwise white mass.  At the same time, the pulsing creature seemed to expand.  

Jack slid down off the stool, moving around to the doorway, not taking his eyes from the incubator.  Leaning into the corridor, he called, “Janet?”

He turned back.  The incubator was filling with the pulsing energy, second by second.  

Jack stepped forward.  “Er… Danny….”

The next sound was the shattering of glass as the mass exceeded the space it had within its confines and broke out.

“JANET!”

Crouching down, Jack scooped the mass of energy from the floor into his arms, which if he’d thought about it, wouldn’t have seemed like a very good idea.  His concern was leaping in bounds.  Daniel had simply… floated out of the SGC when he’d left.  The others like him were always gracious and light.

The mass he tried to hold didn’t feel light.  It was heavy, the colours rolling through it now, shades of pinks and greys.  He tried to lift it but it slipped through his arms, hitting the floor with a sickening thump.

“Shit!”

“Colonel!”  

Janet rounded into the lab, assessing the situation in a moment.  “Just keep it – him – there,” she told him, vanishing again to return a few minutes later with a medical team and gurney in tow.

They’d taken the mattress from the gurney and lifted the sides, using pillows to make a temporary ‘bed’ for the increasingly larger and more colourful mass of energy.

“Okay, Colonel….”  Showing Jack what to do, four of them linked their arms underneath ‘Daniel’ and lifted the form from the floor onto the gurney.

A moment later, it was whisked away to the infirmary.

“Hey!”

*

An hour had passed and the barely organised chaos had dulled to a low level of activity.

They had the gurney in a quarantine tent at the end of the infirmary, despite having no clue as to what was happening or what to do about it.  ‘Daniel’ was still pulsing in a way that looked fairly painful, if he was indeed capable of feeling pain in this form.  Colours were streaming through him now in a way that hurt the eyes if you stared at him too long.

Jack hung around, driving Janet slowly nuts.  He was no longer able to be beside the being that had once been his closest friend, but he was also not able to leave.

They were taking samples from the form every half-hour, and the readings were different each time.  Still, Janet was at a loss.

“You should at least get some sleep,” she told Jack finally, joining him on the nearest bed to the incubation tent where he’d been sitting for almost two hours.

“What’s going on with him?”

“I don’t know.  The test results show different cell mutations each time, but the underlying genetic code still matches Daniel’s exactly.  Maybe… the bits the scientist took from him were vital.  Maybe they did something else before that, infected him with something.”  She sighed, leaning forward, her elbows resting on her knees.

“You think he’s dying.”  Jack let his eyes settle on the blurred shape beyond the transparent curtain.

“I don’t know, Colonel.  That’s the truth.”  She squeezed his arm gently.  “Get out of here, I’ll page you if there’s any major change.”

Jack was about to decline her offer, but he really did need a break.  And he knew he wasn’t doing anyone any good here.

“Okay.  But Doc… don’t let him… pass away on his own.”

Janet gave him a sad smile.  “You have my word, Jack.”

*

He went to Daniel’s apartment but even as he unlocked the door he had no idea what he was doing there.

The key was the one that General Hammond had given him when they’d believed Daniel to be dead the first time.  

He’d tried to give it back to Daniel when he’d taken him home after his standard quarantine in the mountain.  But Daniel had refused to take it, telling Jack to keep it, that he might need it again one day.  

It had been a joke at the time.

When Jack had first met Daniel, the man had had a bag and a suitcase to his name.  Everything he’d owned was in them – books mostly.  A photograph of his real parents.  And a small, plush giraffe with long bendy legs and a long neck, one battered with age.  The one possession he’d managed to hang on to through all the foster homes they’d moved him in and out of.

Daniel had a lot more stuff now.  They were supposed to have cleared his apartment, and to a point they had.  His journals were safely stored at Jack’s house, along with anything that might have given away the existence of the Stargate.  He’d even taken Jackson’s fish, worried that if – when – Daniel returned, the man would come back to a tank full of small, frozen floating bodies.

Daniel collected.  Jack couldn’t help but smile as he stepped further into the apartment.  As if making up for all the years he couldn’t keep anything, Daniel kept everything.  He brought souvenirs back from alien planets, driving the research and quarantine teams nuts because they had to clear each and every object before he could bring it home.

He’d taken a week’s vacation in Egypt last year with a friend of his – Dr Steven Rayner – and seemed to have brought back most of the continent, whatever wasn’t nailed down or too heavy to carry.

Jack crossed to the mantelpiece over the fireplace and picked up a small photograph that was resting against the base of an ornate wooden candlestick.  It had been taken at a barbecue at Hammond’s place in the summer.  The picture was taken by Hammond’s daughter, and was of them all; Sam, Janet, Cass, Teal’c, George, Daniel and him.

He had a copy himself, but this was the first time he’d really looked at it.  Daniel was crouched at the front with Cass, the sun in his hair.  Jack was seated behind him, one arm thrown casually over Daniel’s left shoulder and curved loosely around his neck, he was smiling at the camera while Daniel, typically, was otherwise engrossed in explaining something to their adopted daughter.

They all looked so happy in that photo, so… together.  He smiled to himself.  When he looked at it, he and Daniel looked together.  Not a huge surprise.  He and Daniel had always been like that, physical, happy to touch and hug.  Daniel seemed to crave it, and Jack had always assumed that he’d been deprived.

It was partly the reason for the flutter he’d felt whenever Daniel was around.  He knew he loved the man, loved the way he was so passionate about anything and everything.  Not only when they were out on a different planet exploring and meeting new aliens.  They’d shared more than duty.  Beers and pizza, meals at Daniel’s favourite Italian restaurant, hockey games, movies.  Evening munchies and pancake breakfasts.

Picking up the photo, he tucked it into his pocket just as his cell phone rang.

“O’Neill.”

“Colonel, Nurse Sanders.  Doctor Fraiser asked me to page you.  There’s been a development, Sir, she asked me to ask you to return to the base.”

*

Jack’s heart was racing by the time he was running along the corridor between the elevator and the infirmary.  Janet met him at the doorway, a strange smile on her face.  He opened his mouth to ask ‘what?’, fearing the worst.  And she stepped to one side.

The transparent quarantine tent had been dropped, and where the energy creature had been on the gurney, Daniel lay on his side, completely still save for the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Jack moved forward, approaching the gurney.  Daniel had one arm tucked under his head, the other resting on the mattress they’d replaced for his comfort.  An oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth.  A white sheet was pulled up to his shoulders, wires snaking out from under it at various intervals, hooked up to drips and monitors.  

He looked… human.  More importantly, he looked alive.

“What… what happened?” Jack stammered, eyes not leaving his friend.

Clutching a clipboard to her chest, Janet walked to Daniel’s other side.  “The streaks of colour, the expansion of the energy mass, about half an hour ago it started to solidify.”

“Is he… stable?”

“We don’t know yet.  We’ve started to take blood and tissue samples every fifteen minutes and there have been distinct differences between the two readings we’ve taken so far.”  She watched Jack lean one arm on the raised bar at the side of the bed, reaching over to touch her patient’s hair with the lightest of caresses.

Daniel looked a little younger than he had when he’d… left them.  His hair was slightly lighter, a golden glow like melted toffee highlighting the short, silken locks.  Jack remembered him getting it cut, just before their second run-in with Hathor.  

Very gently, Janet broke into his thoughts.  “It’s not all good news, Colonel.”

Jack looked up, stomach lurching.  Suddenly he was seeing, in his mind’s eye, those two jars.  And his brain, with its highly-honed sense of the macabre, replaced the cuts of white energy with human flesh.  His expression asked the question.

“He’s… missing a kidney, and around forty-five percent of one lung.”  Jack’s hand tightened about the metal bar beneath it, reeling from the news.  “He can live with both defects,” she reassured quickly, “there’s no reason that he shouldn’t survive.”

An inch above Daniel’s head, Jack’s hand started to shake a little.  “One… one kidney….”  He felt a hand squeeze his shoulder and started, turning to see Sam standing just behind him, Hammond and Teal’c behind her.  He hadn’t even realised they were there.

“He’ll make it,” Sam murmured through the tears in her eyes, “you know what a fighter he is.”

Jack knew it all right.  The number of times Daniel had dragged himself back from the dead, they’d all started to lose count.  But that final time….

Jack let his fingers comb through his friend’s hair.  Even with that simple touch he could feel the heat radiating from Daniel.

“He’s… hot.”

Janet nodded.  “His temperature is sky high, one hundred and ten.  His pulse is 45 bpm and his blood pressure’s way too low.”

“So… he’s not completely… human?”

“Not yet.  But I think he’s becoming more human every minute.”

“Is he… in a coma?”

Shaking her head, Janet glanced at the monitors around them.  “He’s heavily sedated.  When he first… appeared in this form, he was changing quite quickly, back and forth.  We thought… hoped that a sedative would ease what looked to be considerable pain.  It kinda… knocked him out completely.  Didn’t stop the changing, just… maybe stopped him fighting it.  I can only hope we did the right thing.”

*

Quinn had been watching the activity for an hour.  

Carter had left to find an empty bunk.  Teal’c had returned to his Kel-Nor-Reem.  Hammond was making phone calls in his office, never seeming to sleep as far as Quinn could fathom.

Cautiously, he made his way along the corridor to the infirmary, and peered inside, not sure he believed the rumours he’d been hearing around the base; that the creature they’d brought back from their latest mission was Daniel Jackson.  The man had died, in this very infirmary, drowned in his own body fluids after the radiation dose he’d received had literally melted his body.

Quinn didn’t understand, then, how the energy creature they’d rescued could possibly be….

He stared.  Colonel O’Neill was sitting next to a bed, his arms folded on the mattress, cushioning his head as he slept.  One of his hands was hanging off the bed, the other was folded loosely around Daniel’s.

And it was definitely Daniel Jackson.

Turning on his heel, Quinn set off for the general’s office.  


Careful not to wake Jack, whose face was lying inches from the mask covering Daniel nose and mouth, Janet untucked her patient’s other hand from under his head and carefully inserted another IV line into it now he’d solidified enough to do that.  The last two samples had shown that the change had stabilised finally.

As she introduced the line into Daniel’s vein, she felt him flinch.

Catching her breath, Janet glanced at his face.  His eyelids flickered, and for a moment, opened, gaze brushing over Jack’s head.  The ghost of a smile touched Daniel’s lips under the mask, and then his eyes closed again and there was no more movement as Janet taped the IV into place.

*

General Hammond sat back as he heard the knock on his door.  

“Come!”  He smiled as Quinn stepped inside.  “Jonas.  What can I do for you, son?”

Quinn sat down at Hammond’s invitation.  “I was wandering when SG1 will be reactivated, Sir?  I’m not very good at being… bored.”

“I have a feeling it’ll be a while before SG1 steps through the gate again,” a small, wondrous smile graced his expression, “especially with a team member laid up in the infirmary.”

“But… Dr Jackson is no longer a member of SG1.”

Hammond’s face darkened for a single moment.  “There aren’t very many on this base who would agree with you there, son.”  He leaned back, fingers touching the small pile of paperwork on his desk.  “Besides, I seriously doubt that Colonel O’Neill will leave his bedside for any longer than it takes for him to fill a coffee mug, grab a piece of pie and take a leak.”

*

Whatever the hour at the SGC, there were usually teams off-world.  

At half three that morning, SG7 returned on-schedule from P231.  The klaxon that heralded the gate activation, the announcement that declared the activation was authorised, and the subsequent activity in the infirmary all meant that the peace of the SGC was broken for around twenty minutes.

In the midst of it all, Daniel woke.

Disorientated and in pain, it was a few seconds before he managed to work out where he was.  And who was with him.

Lifting his hand, pulling uncomfortably on the IV line inserted into him, he touched his cold fingertips to the grey head of hair lying on the bed close to him.

Jack woke instantly, snapping his head up.

“Daniel….”  Blue eyes were blinking furiously, and Daniel was trying to shift the oxygen mask but was too weak to.

Carefully, Jack pulled the mask away from his nose and mouth, making sure the patient could breathe without it there.

“It’s okay, Danny, you’re in the infirmary at the….”  He trailed off, watching as Daniel brought one trembling hand in front of his face, looking from it, to Jack.  “You’re… human again,” Jack tried to explain.  “We found you on a planet, in a lab.  Some alien, was… experimenting on you, had you trapped.”  Jack watched Daniel’s face carefully, tried to read the usually expressive eyes that were watching him right back.

Jack carefully caught Daniel’s other hand between his own.  “You’re safe, and you’re okay.  And I’ve missed you so much….”  He couldn’t help himself.  He just wanted Daniel to know – in case he was planning on leaving again.

Daniel parted dry lips, swallowing a couple of times, trying to speak.  Leaning in closer, Jack moved one hand to Daniel’s hair, hoping his touch would soothe.  “Take it easy, it’s probably been a while since you’ve used your vocal chords.”  He smiled softly.  “You want a drink?”

Daniel seemed to consider that before moving his head ‘yes’.  Jack caught one of the attention of one of the nurses and indicated ‘water’.  She looked at Daniel, smiled, and nodded.

Jack felt Daniel weakly squeeze his hand and turned his attention back.  As he did, he heard a single word whispered.  

“Home?”

Jack nodded.  “Yes.  You’re definitely home, Danny.”

*

Now that Daniel’s change was complete, Janet wanted to hook him to every monitor they had and make the IV lines and catheter semi-permanent.

She enlisted Jack’s help simply because she couldn’t get rid of him, and as they worked she found herself amazed at the tenderness with which the colonel treated her patient.  Jack’s hands on Daniel were infinitely gentle and infinitely careful.  And the way he was surreptitiously glancing over Daniel’s body was fascinating Janet.

Daniel’s body in fact was fascinating Jack.  The scars he had before Kalona were there; one on his right arm from the staff blast in the alternative universe and his appendix scar which Jack realised he was seeing for the first time despite having asked on many occasions.  But there was no evidence of radiation burns.

He’d all but been destroyed by the radiation poisoning.  Yet there wasn’t a single sign that it had ever happened.  Except for the terrible, nightmare memories that would never leave Jack’s mind.

Having checked the wires and tubes snaking onto, into and out of her patient’s body, Janet left the two men alone for a time.

The curtains were still pulled around them, and Jack took advantage.  As he drew the sheet up, he stroked his hand down the slim arm and over the covered curve of one hip.

Lying on his side, Daniel shifted, moving unconsciously into the touch.

Jack caught himself, hand stilling.  There were things he’d known without a doubt when it came to his relationship with Daniel.  He loved him, and Daniel loved him back.  They were the best of friends.  They’d both lost people close to them, suffered both alone and together.  These were feelings that Jack was sure of.

The difference was that he was in love with Daniel, felt it from the tips of his toes straight through his heart and along the hard length of his cock.  And that’s where he wasn’t certain that Daniel would follow him.

He left his hand where it had stilled for a few seconds, then moved it, folding his arms on the mattress in front of him.  Finally left alone, Daniel slipped deeper into sleep.

*

Yawning, Jack stretched.  

Eighteen hours had passed since Daniel had returned to his corporeal state, and Jack had been by his side practically the whole time.

“Get some sleep!” Janet told him.

“I have slept!” he protested.

“Colonel, an couple of hours in a chair does not constitute proper sleep.”  But she knew she was fighting an already lost battle.  “All right.  At least go and get a hot meal inside you.  He’s exhausted and he’s weak, he won’t do much more than sleep until we get enough saline in him to give him some energy over and above what his system’s craving.”

Jack hesitated, but finally nodded.  “Okay, okay.  I’ll get some food.”  Reaching to squeeze Daniel’s hand, he told the sleeping man that he’d be back in a few, and got up to head for the canteen as Janet pulled the curtains open around the bed.  

But she shared Jack’s amazement at their friend’s return, and for a few minutes she stood by the bed and watched Daniel sleep before retiring to her office to start in on the collapsed pile of paperwork covering her desk.


Quinn walked to Daniel’s bedside, hands clasped behind his back.  

For a long time, he just stood, eyes settling on Daniel’s peaceful face.

Silent, still, he cast out with his mind, touching the edge of images, feelings, subliminal thoughts that no one was even aware of, including the man whose mind they were swirling around.

When Quinn spoke, it was nothing more than a low murmur.

“Daniel Jackson.  Where did you come from, you little shit?”  

Concentrating, Quinn scooted around the edges of Daniel’s unconscious dreams.  “You’re dead.  I watched you die.  I watched while you drowned in your own fluids, trussed up like some kind of decaying mummy.”  Carefully, he pushed against the invisible membrane of dreams.  “You died, because the colonel – Jack - stopped that Goa’uld from saving your life.”  

The edges of the dream-state gave way, and his words began to insinuate themselves into Daniel’s mind.

“You were repulsive at the end.  They disposed of your corpse in the basement furnace, but not before they’d stripped the bandages from your remains, one red, sticky dressing by one.  Peeling them away, pulling putrid flesh from muscle and liquefied muscle from flinting bone….”


Daniel screamed, the sound scraping over the back of his throat as the nightmares of fire and blood permeated his sleeping mind.

Janet was out of her chair in a second, rounding the corner to meet the two duty nurses making their way to Daniel’s side.

Already half way down the corridor, Jack broke into a run.

Daniel was fighting the hands trying to still him, panicked by the feelings and images fresh in his mind, caught between waking and sleep.

No one noticed Quinn fading into the background.

Hypodermic in one hand, Janet approached her patient.  “It’s okay, Daniel, whatever it is, just let me give you something to calm….”  The back of his hand came around in an arc, yanking the IV line from the valve, tearing skin as the valve was ripped out of flesh.  The syringe did a graceful spin in mid-air and cracked on the hard tiled floor.

Jack used simple, sheer force to wrap his arms around Daniel’s shoulders and hug him close.  “Easy, Danny….  Just a dream, Grasshopper, just a dream.”  Daniel calmed slowly, trembling against Jack’s hard body, unconsciously breathing him in; safety and love.

Janet came forward with a second syringe, but Jack frowned, shaking his head.  “He just had a nightmare.  He’ll be fine.”  The monitors backed the colonel up, readings starting to even out again.

Finally Daniel outwardly began to calm.  Jack held his hand steady and he didn’t fight when Janet fixed the IV valve and line.  

Jack sat himself on the chair next to the bed as Daniel settled back.  For a minute or so, Janet fussed around the monitors, recording readings, taking her patient’s temperature and blood pressure.  Only when she was sure that it had indeed been nothing more than a nightmare did she leave them alone.

Exhaustion pushed at the edges of Daniel’s consciousness, but there was something he needed to know before he gave in to sleep once again.

“Jack?”

He leaned on the mattress as Daniel turned onto his side, blue eyes touching the deep hazel gaze.  “Here, Danny.”

“What did they do… with my… body?  When I ascended?”

Jack reached out along the sheet, draped his forearm over Daniel’s, wrapping his fingers around his friend’s free hand.  Daniel took that as a sign of Jack’s personal guilt.  But he was wrong.

“We had a memorial service, and we cremated… you, in a small church near my parents’ place.”  He sniffed, his emotion surprising him.  “We didn’t know whether you wanted to be buried or cremated, where you wanted to be laid to rest… not that we were laying you to rest.  Although it felt…” Jack nodded to himself, “it felt like we were.”

Spreading his fingers, Daniel linked them through Jack’s.  “Did you… all the bandages….”

Jack shrugged a little.  “Doc Fraiser said it was best if we left them alone.  She said it wouldn’t be… pleasant if we took them away, or dignified.  Sorry… I kept thinking you might have liked the idea of being a mummy….”

Jack bathed in the warmth of Daniel’s smile.  “Thank you.”

“Just… you’ll stay this time, right?”

“I think so.  They might… come for me, but I don’t want to leave with them this time.”

“Last time?”

Daniel lifted his head a little, and saw the pain in those brown eyes.  “I hurt you.  Jack… I’m so sorry,” his whispered voice broke for a moment.  “The radiation….”

Absently stroking the back of Daniel’s hand with his thumb, Jack nodded, his chin tapping the mattress.  “I know.  You were in agony, I understand that.  You had no choice.”

“I’d have chosen you, Jack,” Daniel murmured, eyes slipping closed.

*

“…You think Randall’s gonna come out of the closet and scare you?  Oh, how do I explain this?  See, its empty, no monster in here.  Well… now there is….”

Daniel’s laughter was a joy to hear.  Jack strolled in to the infirmary after grabbing a few hours of horizontal sleep and an apparently much-needed shower and shave.

Daniel was still the only residential patient, and as such he was being spoilt rotten by Janet and the nurses.  And someone else by the looks of things.

Major Paul Davies was sitting next to Daniel’s bed.  To Jack’s delight, Daniel was sitting up against stacked pillows, wires snaking from the front of his pyjama top, from his arms, the backs of his hands and out from the edge of the sheet to the other side of the bed.  

Despite it all, there was a laptop balanced over his covered legs, and a smile on the boyish face that made Jack’s heart soar.  Even if it had been Mr Wonderful who’d put it there.

Mr Wonderful shot to his feet when he saw Jack standing next to him.

“Colonel.”  He threw a salute at his forehead.

“At ease, Paul,” Jack told him off-handedly, walking around the bed.  He had the odd urge to kiss Daniel on the forehead, or better still, on the mouth.  Instead, he perched himself on the edge of the mattress and looked at the laptop screen.

Paul had brought Daniel ‘Monsters, Inc’ on DVD.  The picture was great, Jack admitted, and he privately adored the movie, one of only two that he’d seen while Daniel had been gone.

“I… should get back to work,” Davies told the other two men.  Daniel grinned at him.

“Thanks, Paul, this is great.”

Davies relaxed minutely.  “Good to see you back, Daniel.  Take care and I’ll… I’ll pop in before I leave.”

Daniel smiled up at Jack as the major left them.

“You scared him away.  Again.”

Jack gave him a satisfied grin and scooted further on to the bed to study the patient.  “How’re you feeling?”  The smile vanished from Daniel’s face, he reached out, his fingers tapping a couple of keys on the laptop and the movie was silenced.  “Danny?”

“Janet told me,” Daniel said quietly, eyes still fixed on the laptop’s screen.  “About… the alien on the planet where you found me.  What he did and what it means.”

Jack sighed softly.  Stretching his arm out, he covered Daniel’s hand where it lay next to the keyboard.  “I’m sorry, Danny.  If we’d been a few minutes earlier….”

But they both knew better.

“She says I’m going to be fine, that people are able to live normally with one healthy kidney and they’re doing about a million tests an hour to make sure my other one’s perfectly all right….”  He was babbling.

Jack squeezed his hand before turning, re-angling his body to face his beloved friend.

“I’ve done some… reading,” he admitted seriously.  Daniel’s eyes widened.  “I know, I know.  But I was worried about ya.  Everything the Doc said, she’s not just saying it to make us feel better.  According to everything I can find, you are going to be absolutely fine.”

Daniel was staring at Jack.  “I can’t believe you did that.”

Jack chuckled.  “I needed to know you’d be okay.”  Left hand still covering Daniel’s behind him, Jack reached out with his right and touched the golden brown hair at Daniel’s temple.  “I know I can be a real bastard to you, and I know that before you… ascended, I’d stamped on our friendship so many times that it was all but destroyed, but… but when I said I admired you… there was so much more I wanted to say.  I care for you, a great deal and I need to tell you because I don’t know if you’ll vanish again, if you’ll leave….”

“Jack….”

“No, listen to me.”  Stroking his palm over Daniel’s sculptured cheek to curve around the neck.  “I love you.”

Locking his own gaze with the chocolate brown one that seemed deeper than it ever had before, Daniel brought his own hand up, covering Jack’s around the side of his throat.

When he spoke, it was a low, rough whisper.  “Is that, ‘I love you, you’re the best friend a man could have’ or ‘I love you, and I’d really like to take you home and bury myself in you until the moon crashes against the Earth’?”

Jack’s mouth opened, but it was a few seconds before any words came out.

“That was… I love you, you’re the best friend a man could have,” but the tightening of his hands touching Daniel, as if for the first time, gave him away.  “And when you’re stronger, I’d really, really like to take you home and bury myself in you until the moon crashes…”  

“…against the Earth,” Daniel finished in a mere whisper, amazed.  “And I love you too.”


Quinn sidled along the corridor, aiming to see how the patient was doing, and if there was anything he could do to push the man's recovery along.

He stopped, mid-footfall, just before the entrance to the infirmary.

Jack and Daniel were kissing.

Where he was sitting on the mattress, Jack's head was turned into Daniel's, their open months moving restlessly together.  One of Jack's hands was stroking idly through Daniel's hair while his other was rested on the man's shoulder almost worriedly.  Daniel's own hands were around Jack's neck, pulling the IV lines with them.

Tearing his eyes from the scene, Quinn backed into the corridor and ran.

Jack finally used the hand on Daniel's far shoulder to push him away gently.  There was an uncharacteristically shy grin on his face as he met Daniel's darkly dilated eyes.

“Jack?  Is this….”

Brushing his fingers over the lips he’d just been ravishing, Jack hushed him.  “This is perfect, Danny.  Never think I don’t want this.”  But his expression gave more away.  

“You want it too much,” he murmured, voice low and rough fingers ghosting over the distinct bulge at Jack’s groin.

Jack reached to return the exploration, but Daniel caught his hand before it moved beyond his abdomen.  

“Gimme a break, Jack, I’ve got a tube sticking out of the end of it,” he told his friend – more than a friend now – more than a little embarrassed.

Jack shuddered at the thought.  But always curious, he asked, “Can I see?”

“No!”  Daniel met Jack’s gaze.

“Go on.”  He loved the flustered expression on Daniel’s face.

“No.  It’s… ‘orrible.”

Leaning back against the edge of the pillows, Jack drew Daniel against him, smiling to himself, loving this man.  He put his hand back on the shoulder on which it had rested, but he couldn’t help roaming from the stark material of the infirmary pyjama top to bare skin and sculptured collarbone.

“I know you’re grinning like an idiot up there,” Daniel murmured, a smile in his voice.  

“Not saying,” Jack retorted, hugging him closer.  “Ya know, I’m not known for my sappy side.”  He felt a rumble of humour pass vibrate the body in his arms.

“Then what’s all the hugging about?”

“Hey, there’s not much else I can do while you’re lying there poorly, now is there?”

Daniel wasn’t going to argue.  He closed his eyes, listening now to the beat of Jack’s heart close to his ear, letting it rock him gently to sleep.

Janet pulled the curtains around Daniel’s bed, eyes widening when she realised Jack was there too.  They widened even more when she noticed his fingers playing lightly over the skin between Daniel’s neck and collarbone.  The usually brash colonel had his head rested in Daniel’s hair, his eyes closed.

She couldn’t think of anything to say, so instead she cleared her throat.

Jack looked across at her, completely unrepentant.  “What?”

She shook her head once, smiling.  “I have to run the usual barrage of tests,” she told him, hesitating.

Jack didn’t budge.

“If you could wait outside?” Janet hinted not-so-subtly.

Jack rolled his eyes.  “He’s comfortable and sleeping,” he pointed out.  “I’ll close my eyes.”

Still not certain, but more than able to see that something had changed between them, she nodded.  “Okay, you can stay.”

Starting with blood pressure, following that with blood and tissue samples, her procedures got more invasive as they progressed.

Daniel woke at the first needle prick.  Jack felt him tense but he remained where he was with his eyes closed.  That was fine by Jack.  If he didn’t want to acknowledge all this, he didn’t have to.

When Janet pulled the sheet away from Daniel, Jack kept his promise to close his eyes.  But not before he’d caught a glimpse of the thick, healthy cock lying against a white-clad thigh.  He’d had to see the tube, and now he wished he hadn’t.

Whatever she was doing down there, it took time, and Jack spent it rubbing Daniel’s arm and back, soothing him as best he could.

Finally, Janet covered him back up, Jack helping to draw the sheet back over his ward.  Within a minute, Daniel’s breathing had evened out again and he was sleeping lightly.

“What’s all this in aid of?” he asked quietly.

“Colonel, before he left us, he had two healthy kidneys.”  Neither of them brought up the fact that Daniel’s kidneys had been destroyed by the radiation just as completely as the rest of him.  “Now, he has one.  We need to make sure that it’s healthy and able to cope.  We’re also still checking that everything else is as it should be.  To which end I’ve scheduled MRI, CAT and ultrasound scans for this afternoon.”

Jack sighed, feeling at that moment that the man he held in his arms was too vulnerable right now to be subjected to so much.

“It’s for his own sake,” Janet told him softly.  “These things won’t hurt him, Colonel, they’re just scans.”

“I know.”  He nodded.

Closing in, Janet checked the IV lines.  “We’ve all missed him.  We all love him.  Maybe not as much as you do,” she smiled, and Jack chuckled.  

“Sorry, Doc.”

Stroking the backs of her fingers lightly over the two narrow tubes falling along the back of Daniel’s hand, she told him it was okay, that she understood his protective streak, even admired it.  And when she left to take the samples to the lab, she left the curtain drawn around them.

*

After three hours of being moved around for the medical scans, Daniel was exhausted.  When they finally wheeled him back into the infirmary, he fell asleep before they’d hooked him back up to the monitors and sorted out more saline.

Jack checked in on him, watching him sleep for a few minutes before pressing a chaste kiss to his forehead and leaving him to get some rest.


After showering, shaving and changing, Jack wondered to the canteen to find something real to eat.  Or as real as food got in the mountain.

Sam and Teal’c were already in there, and Jack checked his watch, realising it was early evening.  Sam looked up and grinned at her CO.

When he sat down, she asked about Daniel before anything else.

“We’ve been hearing – “

“ – all day – “ Teal’c added in.

“ - all day, about you terrorising Major Davies again.”

Jack looked from one to the other, fork halfway to his mouth.  “Did not!”

“He’s been quite insistent that you did,” Sam explained.  “He’s on base to work on some planet-shift calculations.”

“And he has not stopped complaining about your behaviour since his arrival this morning.”

Jack glanced at Teal’c and smiled.  He took his first mouthful and enjoyed it before continuing to defend himself.  “I didn’t say anything to him.  He’d taken Daniel a laptop with a DVD player and that film, ‘Monsters, Inc.’.  I didn’t say anything to scare him.”  He was trying to remember whether or not that was right.

He changed the subject, and they chatted about nothing until he finished his meal and got himself a coffee.

Sitting down again, he started, “Listen kids, there is something you should know.”  

They were alone now in the canteen, and Jack had decided to tell the other two members of his team.  Quinn, in his humble opinion, had never counted.

Sam and Teal’c were watching him now, giving him their complete attention.  “Sir?”

Putting his mug down on the table, Jack leaned forward a little.  “Okay.  How do I put this?  Earlier on, Danny and I… well, we kinda had a talk, and we… we ended up getting all mushy and… I told him I loved him and he told me he loved me back….”  He glanced at Teal’c, saw the small smile on his face and risked a glance at Carter.

She was staring at him.  “Sir?  Are you saying…?”

“I’m saying that…” he sighed, “I’m not sure what I’m saying.”

“You are saying that you and DanielJackson will become lovers once he is recovered,” Teal’c clarified for him.

Jack beamed, he couldn’t help it.  Put like that, it gave him more than he’d had to look forward to in a very long time.  “Yeah, Teal’c, that about sums it up.”

Sam was still obviously having a problem with it.

“I don’t… don’t get it.  You and Daniel?  He’s a… a….”

“A smart, intelligent, beautiful man.”

“Yes, Sir.  ‘Man’ being the operative word here.”

Jack nodded.  “I realise that.  But ya know, I’ve always believed that anyone could fall for Daniel, including me.”

It hadn’t been the answer that Sam was expecting.  She was still trying to figure it out when Teal’c asked, “What about your military’s rules, O’Neill?”

“Screw ‘em.”  Jack shrugged.  “When we lost Daniel, when he ‘ascended’….  It’s true that you only realise what you have when you lose it.  If they try to throw me out I’ll resign.  I think Daniel would too.  I want to be with him, I think he wants to be with me.”

Sam had always found that amazing about the Colonel.  Everything was always so simple, so black and white.  There were always decisions and consequences.  He made the decisions, accepted the consequences.  And he did it sometimes in a heartbeat.

And once he’d made up his mind, there was usually no going back.

“If it starts to affect the team, then I’ll have to rethink things, resign anyway.  If there’s something Daniel taught me the first time we met, it was that there was more to life than the military.  It’s just taken me a couple of years to realise that I’d learnt it.”

*

Standing by Daniel’s bed in the silent and otherwise empty infirmary, Quinn took time to study the long, graceful form under the single white sheet.

The patient had slipped into REM sleep, probably so exhausted that he was unaware of the activity in his brain that would usually cause him to dream.

Quinn had attempted to get himself reassigned to another SG team, but for now the General wouldn’t allow it and so he was as grounded as Carter and Teal’c.  They were both keeping busy, having other things to do on the base.  He didn’t have such things.  He’d read Jackson’s entire library in the first month of being on Earth.  He’d been through the computer on Jackson’s desk, read every file, every book-marked URL, every email, professional and private.

He’d escaped the prison of his destructive race and now felt trapped once again.

“It’s all your fault,” he told Daniel quietly, touching fingertips to the soft hairs on Daniel’s right forearm where it was lying above the sheet.  “If you’d have stayed away, stayed dead like you were supposed to, we’d be on a different planet right now.”

Anger made his punch into Daniel’s mind more vicious than it had been the last time.  Daniel turned in his sleep, heartrate starting to increase.

“You have one kidney,” Quinn told him, opening his victim’s subconscious mind and pushing his words inside.  “What if we’d been later?  What if that scientist had been able to take more?  What else might you have woken up without?”  

Daniel’s dreams started to solidify in his mind’s eye, spurned by the suggestions being placed directly into his thoughts.

“Maybe both kidneys would have been missing?  Or other internal organs?  Liver, heart, no lungs….  Would you have ever woken?”

Dreams transcended into nightmares, the images and feelings become dark, painful and frightening as he experienced the trauma being described to him.

“Or maybe…” he trailed his fingertips over the outline the sheet covered up, “…a more visible defect?  No arms, no legs, no… penis.”

Daniel’s legs were slightly parted, and Quinn pressed just a little harder as his fingers touched the flaccid organ between the other’s thighs.  He traced the edges of the flesh, finding the end where it narrowed to become just the catheter tube, went back a little way, and squeezed hard.

Flashes of bright pain seared into Daniel’s mind, still held in sleep.

Quinn glanced at the monitors and saw there were only moments before the patient’s agitation would become such that it would set them all off.  Tearing the wires from the man’s chest would only alert the doctor immediately.  He was out of time again.

Angry, he threw an image into Daniel’s mind, one of vivisection, of him being opened alive and one by one his organs being removed until his body was an empty husk into which was placed a Goa’uld symbiote.

Quinn had already left the infirmary when Daniel’s pulse rate and waking screams brought Janet rushing to his bedside.

*

Jack stroked the hair at Daniel’s temple rhythmically with his thumb, his hand rested on the side of Daniel’s head.

It had taken over an hour, and a shot of powerful sedative, to calm him down.  Janet had ordered an emergency CAT scan which had revealed nothing, like the one done that afternoon hadn’t.

Jack wasn’t convinced now that these were ‘just nightmares’.  What Daniel had described so vividly had seemed to come from nowhere.  He didn’t remember being in the lab on the other planet.  He may have repressed the memories, but even these nightmare reminders weren’t jogging them loose.

Daniel had complained about the catheter, about it hurting.  An examination had shown up nothing more than a slight irritation at the head of the penis and Janet had promised that they’d remove the tube the following day.

Finally, Daniel had rolled onto his side, facing Jack where he was sitting beside the bed, and fallen under the strong influence of the sedative shot.

Jack sat with him, stroking his hair, other hand supporting his own head as he let his mind wander.

More than anything, he wanted to take Daniel home.  He wanted to take care of him as he rested and recuperated.  He wanted to take him to bed, to lie over him with the sun streaming in through the bedroom window and watch his face as he slid gently in and out of him, making love to him.  He wanted to see the pleasure on Daniel’s face, wanted to watch him as he came for Jack the first time.

And then never let him go.  Never let him out of his sight, out of his arms if possible.

He knew he was being sappy.  But this was Daniel, not some buddy-funk in the bunkrooms.  And if he knew anyone, he knew Daniel.  When they touched it would mean something.

Jack thought of that passion, the energy and devotion, centred on him.  How would Daniel be to fuck?  Boyish, innocent and vulnerable as his favourite expressions were, and the way he tended to wear his fatigues one size too large, didn’t fool Jack – or any of the other interested parties on the base – for a second.

He’d seen Daniel in the gym, working out.  And these white cotton, standard issue pyjamas didn’t leave a lot to the imagination.

Daniel shifted under Jack’s hand, getting comfortable in his sleep.  For a moment, Jack imagined the nightmares were going to return, but Daniel settled again quickly.  He didn’t seem to have bad dreams when Jack was with him.

Sitting back in the chair, Jack put his feet up on the cross bars of the medical bed and closed his eyes, one hand still holding Daniel’s on the mattress.  He was asleep within minutes.

 * * *

When the Asgard called, the SGC jumped.  But when they transported Jack to their ship from Daniel’s side, he protested so desperately and shouted so loudly without allowing them to get a word in edgeways that they put him straight back.

With Sam in command of SG1, she, Quinn and Teal’c had gone to their rescue, Jack torn between the mission and Daniel.  In the end, General Hammond had made the decision for him, ordering him to stay, saying he was not in any fit state to face whatever the Asgard were planning on throwing at them, and that his distraction could well endanger the rest of the team.

And so Jack was left behind to worry about the others.

There were no more nightmares for Daniel, and forty-eight hours later when the team returned, the tubes were all removed, and the monitoring of his vital signs ended.  If he passed the examination the following morning, he would be allowed out of the infirmary and home to rest.

Jack sat in on SG1’s debriefing, listening to Sam confirming everything that was in her report.  The Asgard had come across a ship full of replicators.  The creatures had almost consumed the entire vessel, including the engines, and she was mere days from crashing through the orbit of the Asgard homeworld and colliding hard with the planet, shedding its terrible cargo.

Sam, Teal’c and Quinn together had saved the day.  Jack was happy for them, glad that Sam was confident enough to lead the team.

Once the debriefing was over, Sam went off to the infirmary to see Daniel – he’d been asleep when they’d come in the very early hours of the morning – and Jack followed the General to his office.

“Doctor Fraiser informs me that she’s hoping to release Dr Jackson tomorrow,” Hammond started, sitting back in his leather chair.  Jack sat back too, smiling.

“Fingers crossed,” he commented.

“And she tells me that you’ve volunteered to have him at your house for a week or so, until he recovers enough to be allowed back into active duty?”

“That’s right, Sir.”

Hammond smiled.  “Good.”

Jack sat forward.  “Sir, about Daniel….”

“Don’t, Jack.”

“George….”

But Hammond shook his head.  “Listen, son.  Personally, I couldn’t be happier for you.  You both deserve every shot at happiness you can get.  Professionally, I don’t ask and you don’t tell.”

Nodding, accepting that, Jack leaned forward too.  “I want Daniel back on the team.”

Hammond looked at him like he’d just stated the blindly obvious.  “Of course you do.  And I’ll clear it as soon as Doc Fraiser says it’s okay.”  He was smiling.  “Now all I have to do is work out where to put Jonas.”  Jack bristled, and Hammond regarded him with curiosity.  “Is Daniel the only reason you dislike Jonas so much?”

Jack didn’t have to think about it.  “He stood back and watched Daniel subject himself to a fatal dose of radiation.  And then he lied.  Daniel might have died… ascended and no one would have ever believed he was innocent.”

“Except us.”

“Except me,” Jack corrected with more than a little venom, “and Teal’c.”  In Teal’c’s eyes, Daniel could do no wrong.

“But Jonas came to us, Jack, admitted the truth, cleared Daniel’s name.”

“But knowing what you know now, about how I feel, can you imagine how it felt to have to replace Daniel on my team with a man who could have stopped him from having to leave us?”

Hammond nodded slowly.  He could understand that with ease.  Any arguments that no one could have stopped Daniel from jumping through that glass window wouldn’t be heard in Jack’s heart.  He’d lost the man he loved and Hammond knew it.  Now he had Daniel back, and he wanted Jonas as far from his beloved archaeologist as possible.

“I’ll look into moving Jonas onto a field team,” Hammond told him eventually.  “With his knowledge, he might be invaluable to negotiations.”

Jack wanted to point out that all Quinn’s knowledge was stolen, taken from the library Daniel had lovingly built up.  But he bit down on the words, pointless as they were.

“Thank you, Sir.”


Sam and Daniel were playing chess when Jack sauntered into the infirmary.  It was a game he’d played since he was a kid, when his father had taught him to play, saying that a gentleman needed to know.  In later years, both he and his father had admitted that Jack was probably never going to be that gentleman.  But the knowledge of how to play chess had come in useful nonetheless.

Jack sat on the bed next to Daniel, shoulders touching, needing to be close.  He studied the board.

“Danny, you’re losing!”  He was shocked.

Daniel glared at him for a moment before returning his attention to his next move.  Sam looked up at her CO with a smug grin.  While Daniel decided on where to move, Sam said teasingly,

“The Asgard Aries said you made a ‘real racket’ when they took you.”

Jack looked at her steadily for a few seconds.  He’d gone nuts, being ripped from Daniel’s side like that.  

But now he said nothing, and Daniel made his move, seemingly not having heard her words.

He leaned back against the pillows, leaning into Jack who automatically reached an arm around his shoulders, letting him snuggle.

“You look exhausted,” he murmured for Daniel only.

“This morning was… not nice,” he answered.

This morning, Janet had removed the IV lines, having to tear the skin a little where it had tried to close around the valve.  He’d been subjected to another catalogue of scans, and a kidney angiogram that had been invasive and painful.

Sam made her move and sat back.  She glanced at her CO and missing team mate.  Seeing them now, she knew it shouldn’t have surprised her to hear that there was more to their relationship than just friendship.

“Jonas coped very well,” she said neutrally, hoping to coax them into light conversation.

Daniel frowned.  “Who’s Jonas?”

“Jonas Quinn,” Jack clarified.  “The scientist guy from Kalona.  The General sort of drafted him in….”

Daniel wasn’t hearing him.  Reality was dissolving.

Suddenly he was back on that damned planet, listening to the panicked cries of the scientists, of Jonas detailing what was going to happen.  He didn’t think as he wrestled his sidearm from its holster and shot out the pane of glass in front of them.

Jumping through, he cut himself on the shards the remained in the frame, but he knew beyond a doubt those injuries wouldn’t matter, that in a few seconds they would be the least of his worries.

The pain when he grabbed the central core of the device was beyond anything he’d ever known.  It threw his mind off-balance, and he had to concentrate to continue.  Using his jacket sleeve as protection, he grabbed the core again, yanking it out of the potentially apocalyptic bomb.

When the immediate danger had passed, he looked up, knowing what he’d done, knowing what he’d been exposed to.

In the frame of the broken window, Jonas Quinn stood smiling.

The image melted into flames through which he could make out the sterilised surroundings of the SGC infirmary.

The pain was excruciating.  

His body decaying while somehow remaining alive.  He could feel his organs failing.  His kidneys as they released toxins into his system.  His heart as it began to miss beats, blood slowing in his veins.  His lungs, unable to pull in enough oxygen or to expel the carbon dioxide building within him.

He fought to stay alive, despite knowing he could not survive.  He reached out for someone, needing to know he wasn’t alone, needing to feel someone close to him.  

Fear gripped him harder than the pain as he realised there was no one there.  

He was dying.  Perhaps already dead.

“J - “  The word was cut off as his throat collapsed, crushing his windpipe, strangling him.

He brought the moist remains of his hands to his neck but clawing at the skin there only made it come away on his fingers.  

The darkness crowded in upon him and he opened his mouth only to hear his own last, gurgled cry.


“Daniel!  Daniel, Jesus!  It’s okay, it’s okay….”

Jack was gripping the cotton-clad shoulders, holding Daniel back from trying to escape… whatever he was trying to escape.  

The chess set had scattered over the infirmary floor when he’d abruptly attempted to get out of the bed.

Sam was at his side, leaning over him holding the basin that Janet had handed her under Daniel’s face as he vomited and retched.

When that passed, he was still gasping, struggling desperately to breathe when there was nothing blocking his airways.  

Janet stood for a moment in front of her patient, bewildered at the sudden change, then she grabbed the oxygen mask and tried to get it over his face.

Daniel’s cries were directed at something they could neither perceive nor imagine.  He was clawing at Jack’s hands, trying to free himself from the firm grasp, jerking his head from side to side each time Janet leaned in.

Jack leaned forward to press his front to Daniel’s back, to wrap his arms, his whole body, around his friend in an attempt to still him.

Daniel struggled for a few moments more before slumping into the embrace surrounding him.

“That’s it, Danny,” Jack soothed, holding him, rocking him just a little.  “It’s all right, everything’s all right.”

As Janet finally got the oxygen mask move Daniel’s nose and mouth, slipping the elastic over his hair, Janet handed the sedative back to her nurse, still hovering.

Sam wiped the cold, damp cloth over Daniel’s forehead as Jack continued to calm him.  

A few minutes later Daniel’s breathing had returned to normal and Janet removed the mask, persuading him to take a few sips of water, which he kept down, his head resting back against Jack’s shoulder.

“What the hell happened?” Sam muttered as the nurse finally took the basin from her.

Janet shook her head.  “I have no idea.  You guys were with him!”

“We were just talking, playing chess.  He seemed tired, but apart from that he was fine.”

“So… what were you talking about?”

“I don’t know… just stuff.  I mentioned the Asgard mission.”

Jack lifted his head.  “You mentioned Quinn.  Daniel asked who he was and I was explaining that he was the guy who stood by and watched while Danny exposed himself to a lethal dose of radiation.”  The bitterness hadn’t faded in five months.

Usually, Sam would have told him to give it a rest, but Daniel’s reaction had been extreme.  He’d been sitting quietly against Jack one second, and the next he was fighting them to get out of bed.  The vomiting had started a few seconds later.

Janet took Daniel’s temperature, pulse rate and blood pressure before asking for some privacy to get him out of the soiled pyjamas and sheets.

Daniel didn’t protest when Jack released him, so the colonel joined the major on the other side of the curtain.

“Maybe he’s experiencing repressed memories,” Sam suggested, “brought on by the reminder of what happened on Kalona.”

“He’s only got one kidney, Major, that has to be a constant reminder, surely?”

“But not directly.”

Jack sighed.  “Yeah, maybe.”  He rubbed the back of his neck.  “Whatever it was, I don’t want Quinn near him.  He could do without that kind of upset.”

She thought better than to comment on his protective streak being just a little too wide, and said nothing that might have sounded like she was suggesting he was at all biased against the newest member of their team.  Assuming Jonas was still a member of SG1, which, when she thought about it, was probably highly unlikely.

“Carter?”

“Yes, Sir.  I’ll… I’ll let General Hammond know what happened.”  She frowned, but stepped out of the infirmary, almost bumping into Teal’c as he came in.

“DanielJackson….”

“He’s fine, Teal’c,” Jack told him, a little uneasily.  “Why’d you ask?”

“I am not sure.  I was performing Kel-Nor-Reem.  I was suddenly disturbed by a feeling that something was wrong.”

Jack nodded slowly.  “Something was wrong.  We’re not sure what.”  He glanced back to the curtains, still drawn.  He was about to say something else, but Janet was opening the curtains and Daniel was being wheeled off somewhere.  “Hey!”

Janet glanced back.  “Another CAT scan, Sir.  Nothing to worry about.”

Teal’c watched as his human friend sagged against the wall.  “How much more of this is he going to have to cope with?” he muttered.

“Come, O’Neill.”


They ended up in briefing room.  Daniel had always sworn that you could get the best coffee on the base in the briefing room.

Mug in one hand, other hand thrust into a pocket, Jack gazed out at the Stargate.  Teal’c stood ramrod straight next to him.

“I believe there is more going on here than meets vision,” Teal’c stated.

Jack had long ago given up correcting their resident Jaffa’s attempts at learning Earth sayings.  “Like what?”

“I am unsure.  But I will discover it.”

Jack nodded.  “I think it’s got something to do with Quinn.”

“You do not like JonasQuinn.”

“That’s not news, Teal’c.”

“I too am suspicious.”  It was all Teal’c seemed to want to say, and Jack wasn’t in the mood for small talk.  

They stood together in silence until the door was pushed open and Janet led General Hammond into the room.

“Colonel, good, this means I only have to explain once.”  Jack shot her a wry smile as he and Teal’c sat down at the long, polished table.  Not for the first time, Jack wondered who polished it, and when, being as he’d been around on base at all hours of the day and not and hadn’t seen anyone cleaning in here.

Janet opened her report on the tabletop.  “Daniel has escalated levels of Dopamine and decreased levels of Serotonin.  We’ve given him something to try to stabilise the chemicals but whatever caused this is recent.  Earlier scans didn’t show anything like this.”

“Is there any evidence of what might be causing this?” Hammond asked her.

“No.  I can’t find anything that would lead to this.”

The General nodded.  “Major Carter is running scans for the usual suspects in and around the infirmary.”

“He’s asleep at the moment,” Janet informed them.  “I think he’d appreciate not waking alone.”

Jack took the hint, throwing a mock salute at the others before getting to his feet.

* * *

Jack’s face light up when he saw Daniel sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in his blue fatigues that Teal’c had rescued from his untouched locker.

“Hey!  Ready to face the universe again, big fella?”  Jack reached out, squeezed his shoulder, but his overt cheeriness wasn’t mirrored on his friend’s face.  “What?”  Daniel looked from Jack, to Janet as she came to stand behind him.  “What?”

She took a deep breath.  She’d known that this was coming, that they hadn’t figured it out for themselves.  The thought hadn’t even crossed their minds.  This morning, she’d had to break the news to Daniel.

“Colonel….”

Daniel sighed, lifting his hand.  “Jack… I’m not going to be cleared for active duty on the front line.”  He watched his best friend, and ex-CO’s eyes widen.

“What?  Why the hell not?!”  He glared at Janet.  “You said he was fine.”

“He is fine, Colonel.  His Dopamine and Seratonin levels are back to normal.  That doesn’t change the fact that he has one kidney and half a lung missing.”  She was as gentle as she knew how to be.  “He’s going to be assigned to SG9, archaeological surveys.”

Jack looked at Daniel’s miserable expression and took a deep breath, rubbing his friend’s shoulder.

“Heaven for you then,” he said with a forced smile.  Daniel nodded once, eyes cast downwards.  

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, and Jack was about to step away when Daniel looked up.  There were tears in the large, blue eyes and Jack’s heart broke anew.

“Danny….”  Wrapping his arms around Daniel’s shoulders and head, Jack pulled his friend close, hugging him, feeling Daniel’s strong arms come around him.  

Silently, Janet made a tactful withdrawal, leaving the two men alone.

Shudders started through the vulnerable body in his arms as Daniel began to sob out his disappointment.  Jack just held on tighter, resting his cheek in Daniel’s soft hair.  “Ssh, it’s okay,” he murmured, “it’s okay.”

He felt Daniel’s head move against him, side to side, but there were no words.

“Let’s go home, okay?  Get you out of here for a while.”

He thought he felt a quick nod, and smiled to himself.  


Janet reeled off a list of instructions.  No stress, no excitement, no over-exertion.  Neither man dared look at the other.  Any pain, any reoccurrence of what had happened the previous day, and Jack was to call her and bring Daniel in.

Jack agreed to all her terms, and finally they were out of there.

Jack drove, taking them away from the mountain.  As he slowed for a red light, he glanced across at his passenger.

Daniel was staring out of the side window, completely still, one hand in his lap, the other touching his face.

Without a word, Jack reached over and picked up the hand in Daniel's lap, squeezing gently.  

The light changed to green, and just as Daniel turned, Jack took his hand back to change gears.  He missed the grateful smile bestowed upon him.


First stop was Daniel's apartment to collect whatever Daniel wanted, mostly clothes and, Jack suspected, books.

For a few moments, Daniel just stood in the alcove between lounge and kitchen.  Jack gave him the time he needed to simply reacquaint himself with his old life.  

He realised he knew nothing of the life Daniel had been living these passed five months.  Where had he lived?  What had he done?  Had he travelled?  Had he visited his old friends again after that first time?  Had he made the difference he seemed to desperate to make when he took the decision to leave?  'What decision?' Jack reminded himself.  'He was seconds away from death.'

"I missed you, Jack."

The words were spoken so quietly that Jack almost didn't catch them.  But he'd become attuned to Daniel's voice over the years and he always listened, despite what everyone else thought.

He looked over at his friend.  "I missed you too, Danny."

A sad smile touched the other's lips, and he came back through into the main room, heading for the bedroom at the back of the apartment.  Half-way along the corridor, he stopped.  "Jack, where are my fish?"

"Don't worry about them, they're already moved in to my place.  New tank with full environmental controls, the works, they love it.  Especially Moe."

Daniel turned, leaning one shoulder against the wall, covering exhaustion with curiosity.  "Moe?"

"You know, you can't keep pets and not name them."

"I had named them."

"What?"

"They're all called Iohotep."

Jack stared at him.  "Well, now they're called Moe, Homer, Marge, Bart, Burns, Lisa, Maggie, Millhouse, Fat Tony and Smithers."

Daniel smiled, a genuine, amused smile.  He pushed off the wall and disappeared into the bedroom.  "Bet you can't tell who's who," he called back.

"Can too!" Jack defended himself.  He could.  He'd spend a lot of time caring for those fish.  They were Danny's pets, and he wasn't going to lose a single one of them.  Sam had helped him pick out the tank, and they'd enlisted a couple of SFs to help them move the fish once the environment was ready.  

Jack found a carrier bag and sorted out some CDs and DVDs from Daniel's collection.  He'd get everything moved eventually.  Daniel was moving in with him and it wasn't open for debate.  But at the moment he suspected Daniel just needed to get used to being human again, being alive, being home.

Daniel found his little-used suitcase, with the luggage tickets from his trip to Egypt still attached, and grabbed some clothes to load into it.  Someone had covered everything in the wardrobe in plastic bags, lovingly kept the place and everything in it dust-free and clean.  He thought he could guess who.

Loading in underwear, pyjamas, trousers, jeans and sweaters, he realised he needed a bigger case.

“We don’t have to move everything at once,” Jack told him gently from the doorway.

Daniel smiled up at him.  “Move?”

“We’ll talk about it later, but for now, I can send someone round to collect whatever we don’t take now.  Your journals are already there.  As is Gerty.”

Daniel blushed instantly.  “Really?”

It was Jack’s turn to look embarrassed.  “I just… I wanted something that….”  He looked away.  He had the old, cherished plush giraffe on the spare pillow on his bed.  Daniel was never going to let him live it down when he saw it.

The other man had come around the bed to stand a couple of feet from him.  “That what, Jack?”

He looked up, gaze caught by the wide blue eyes.  “It smells of you,” he admitted, closing his eyes to avoid the humour in the intense regard.  A second later, he felt lips pressed against his own.

He didn’t need a written invitation.  His arms came up, engulfing Daniel in his embrace, opening his mouth under Daniel’s, coaxing him on.

Daniel’s arms went around Jack’s neck, fingers playing in the soft, greying hair, palm stroking down over a broad shoulder and muscled arm.

‘Should have done this so long ago,’ Jack thought to himself, moulding Daniel against him as tightly as he dare.  ‘Should have let him know.’

Breaking the kiss, Jack cuddled his best friend to him, burying his face in the short, golden mane.  The idea of losing Daniel again was right at the forefront of his mind and it was more than he could bear at that moment.

“Home,” Daniel told Jack quietly.  Jack nodded.  Home.  These were feelings that would be much better dealt with lying naked and sated in bed with a naked and sated Daniel draped over him.

*

Daniel obviously felt the same way.

Jack put the case and bag down next to the stairs and turned as Daniel closed the front door.  A heartbeat later, he was being pushed back against the nearest wall, Daniel's mouth covering his, Daniel's hands settling boldly on his shoulders.

Jack let himself fall into the kiss, lips parting, tongue stroking over Daniel's.  He put his arms around the other man's waist, holding him gently, restraining himself, not wanting to hurt his friend.

In frustration, Daniel pulled back.  "I'm not going to break, Jack," he muttered roughly, meeting the wide, chocolate gaze determinedly.

As if it was the permission he'd been silently seeking, Jack pushed one hand into Daniel's hair, fingers spread to comb through the thick silken strands.  And kissed him.

Jack put everything into the wet caress.  Fear, loss, loneliness, heartache, all the blurred images that visited him in the night, all the gentle breezes that over the months he'd imagined to be Daniel.  This was real.  This was what he'd believed he would never have.

Daniel was a reality now, the strong, male body in his arms, pressing urgently against him.  And the bold hands on his shoulders were moving, under his leather jacket and up again, pushing the heavy cloth until it slipped down Jack's arms and he had to release Daniel from all but the lip-lock to let it fall to the floor.

Hands flying back to Daniel, settling on his hips, Jack pulled his tongue back to speak against Daniel's mouth.

"Bedroom."

They moved awkwardly, still kissing, hands still roaming.

Jack dropped Daniel's blue standard-issue jacket somewhere up the stairs.  Once through the bedroom door, they broke apart a couple of feet to remove black T-shirt and creme polo-neck before falling together again, skin touching skin.

For a moment, Jack's mind questioned what he was doing, but he was long passed caring about Daniel's gender.  He thought Daniel had probably moved beyond the issue too, the way the man was kissing him.  Drawing one hand down Daniel's back - nail's first - Jack hummed in satisfaction to have Daniel press harder against him.  

He brought that hand around Daniel's right side, fingers tracing the fading appendix scar.  He had been a little surprised to still find it on his lover's body, but unsure why.  Not that it mattered.  Oma had abandoned Daniel, it seemed, and now Jack had him back where he belonged.  He wasn't ever letting go.

Jack left his hand over the scar until they broke the kiss, both breathing heavily.

"Always wanted to see this," he murmured, squeezing Daniel's side ever-so gently.

Daniel unwound one arm from around Jack's body to cup the side of his throat, thumb brushing into the soft spikes of hair.

"Dare I ask why?" he replied, leaning in to suck Jack's bottom lip before tracing its curve with the tip of his tongue.

Jack didn't waste time answering.  He caught that tongue between his front teeth, biting carefully before sucking on it hungrily.

Leaving the scar, Jack moved his hand up, brushing warm fingertips over a tiny, hard nipple.  Daniel shivered at the touch, the muscles under Jack's fingers tensing for a moment.  He moved to the other nipple, caressing it before pinching lightly.

A low growl rose from Daniel's chest and was swallowed into the kiss.  Jack smiled to himself.  He'd always imagined Daniel as a sensualist; responsive, open and willing.

“The things I want to do to you,” he growled in response.

Daniel simply smiled, and stepped away, unfastening his loose pants and letting them drop.  There’d been no underwear in his locker, so he’d simply come home commando style.  Jack’s eyes widened appreciatively.  Daniel’s cock was thick, jutting straight out, still rising.

Sucking cock wasn’t something Jack had devoted his life to, but Daniel looked good enough to eat.  He could only stare as Daniel crossed to the bed and lay down on his side, one hand supporting his head, the other tapping softly on the light duvet.

Jack’s hungry expression dissolved into a wide smile and he unfastened his own zipper.

Walking naked to the bed, Jack knelt up on the mattress next to Daniel’s knees.  He reached out, stroking his hand over one muscled thigh as Daniel rolled onto his back.

There was so much in Jack’s mind, so much he wanted to say, that he couldn’t find the words and wasn’t sure if they’d be appropriate anyway.  Instead, he leaned over, his hands either side of Daniel’s arms, kissing his way up the well-defined, beautiful torso to end up suckling on the tongue that came out to meet him.

After a few seconds, he made his way back down again, stopping at Daniel’s chest to first lap at, then gently suck, one nipple then the other.  Daniel’s back arched, lips parted in a long moan.  His reaction cried out for more, and fascinated, Jack gave it.

He applied teeth, carefully nipping one pink bud.  Daniel’s cry went straight to Jack’s cock, which twitched with barely suppressed impatience.  He gave the other nipple the same treatment, storing the information away for later.

For now, he too wanted more.  

Shifting down, Jack lowered his head and slid his lips over Daniel’s cock.  Daniel froze, and Jack suddenly felt fingers under his chin.  He smiled around the thick erection when he realised what his lover was doing.

Sucking upwards, Jack lifted his head.  Daniel was supporting himself now on his elbows.  

“Too much?”

A nod in reply.

Taking Daniel’s cock lightly into his hand, Jack shifted again until he was lying between Daniel’s spread legs.  Daniel kept trying to reach for him and he knew he wouldn’t get too much grace.  

Jack traced the soft crease of Daniel’s thigh with his fingers, following them with the tip of his tongue.  Reaching the taut, heavy balls, he opened his mouth and sucked first one then the other into his mouth, lathering them with his tongue.

Kissing his way back, he felt Daniel freeze again when his tongue touched the tight ring of muscle he’d been aiming for.  Something else that could wait for now, Jack decided.

He retraced his path, sucking on Daniel’ balls, deep-throating his cock, licking a wet path up over his stomach, dipping into his belly button and loving Daniel’s sexy giggle as he did so.

As soon as Daniel could reach Jack, he wrapped one arm around his neck, pulling him down into a deep kiss.  With the other hand, he took hold of Jack’s cock, drawing it through his tight fist.

Jack made a sound that shot along Daniel’s nerves.  His hand joined his lover’s, bring their cocks together and stroking hard and fast.

Close to orgasm, Jack let go, moving his hand down to caress Daniel’s balls and press his fingers into the perineum.  Daniel thrust up, his movements becoming more desperate.  As Jack’s index finger penetrated him without warning, he yelled out, cock pulsing, coming almost painfully hard.

Feeling Daniel coming in waves of orgasm, Jack reached his own climax, his seed mixing with his lover’s.

A few seconds later, his arm muscles gave out and he collapsed on Daniel’s chest, in a mirror image of the one he’d held in his mind for so long.  He felt strong arms hold him tight, and without a word he fell asleep.


It was dark outside when Jack next opened his eyes.  He lifted his head and found himself being watched.

“Danny….”  

Moving up the hard body beneath him, Jack kissed Daniel long and slow.  A happy hum vibrated against their lips and Jack grinned down at him.  “I love you,” he said, suddenly breathless.

“Love you too, Jack.”  It seemed like the easiest thing in the world to say it.  “But….”

Jack nodded.  “Me too.”


When Jack emerged from the bathroom, he grabbed his blue towelling robe from the back of the door and shrugged into it.  His first point of call was the main bathroom to turn the central heating on, the next was the kitchen to put some coffee on.

He checked the refrigerator and cupboards before wandering into the lounge.  Jack was rarely caught speechless.  Daniel was crouched in front of his fish tank, fingers touching the glass.  He was half-naked, wearing only a pair of light grey, flannel pyjama bottoms slung low on his hips.

“We’re going to need supplies,” Jack stated, the only words he could string together as he stared, eyes raking over the beautiful male form that was his now.

“We are gonna be okay, aren’t we Jack?” Daniel asked without looking away from his fish.

Jack smiled to himself.  “Daniel, we’ve always been together, we just haven’t realised it until now.”  

After a moment, he went in search for his jacket, returning with the photo he’d stolen from Daniel’s apartment a few days ago.  Crouching down next to his lover, wincing a little as his knees cracked, Jack put the photo in his hand, pressing a kiss to the back of his neck.

“Hey!  What didn’t you steal from my apartment?” Daniel asked, but his voice trailed off at the end as he studied the photograph closely for the first time.  “I’ve never seen that before,” he said simply.

“I hadn’t realised either.”  Jack glanced up at the fish, swimming calmly around in the lovingly-kept clean water.  “They missed you.”

“They look happy.”  Daniel stood, placing the photo up on the mantelpiece.  “Thank you for taking care of them.”

Jack followed Daniel’s movements with his eyes, and realised something else.  His Danny had suddenly come over all shy.

Rising to his feet, Jack reached across the short distance and trailed his fingertips down his lover’s back.  Stepping closer, he pressed harder, turning his touch into a gentle massage.  Two steps later, he was close enough to Daniel’s back to feel the heat coming from the other man.

Jack started at the top of Daniel’s neck, brushing a line of kisses down the line of his spine to the line of his shoulders.

Daniel’s arms reached back, hands curving tightly around Jack’s hips.  He dropped his head forward, moaning low in his throat when Jack’s teeth bit gently into the skin over the spine at the back of his neck.

“Don’t run from me, Danny, not now, please.”

Head against Jack’s shoulder, he opened his eyes and smiled up.  “I’m not running, Jack.  Just… trying to get used to being… whole again.”

Jack wanted to ask about it, about everything Daniel had experienced, but not now.

“Can I help?  Is touching good?”

Daniel chuckled.  “Touching’s good, feeling you.  The sensations are more… real like this.”

Dipping his head to nibble the smooth skin along Daniel’s shoulder, Jack hummed softly.  “We can do real, Danny.”  Sliding his hand down to Daniel’s flannel-covered hip, he pushed the material down slightly until the loose elastic dipped in a curve under the firm ass.

Untying the belt around his own waist, Jack let his robe fall open and pressed the long length of his awakened cock between the taut cheeks.

Daniel made a sound, half-way between a moan and a yelp.

“S’okay, Danny, won’t hurt you.”  In reply, Daniel arched his back causing Jack’s erection to slide further between his buttocks.  Jack’s breath caught in his throat.  “Daniel….”

“You won’t hurt me.  Please, Jack, I want this.”

“I can’t….”

Sighing, Daniel took Jack’s hand from his right hip and swept it around to where his own cock was tenting the front of his pyjama bottoms.

“You can.”

Daniel moved his feet apart as he leaned forward, one hand steadying himself against the mantelpiece.

Jack stared at him.  “Here?”  Daniel didn’t answer him, simply rocked his hips and looked back over his shoulder.  Moving closer, Jack sucked two of his fingers into his mouth, wetting them.  “If I hurt you…”

“…I’ll scream,” there was a wonderful smile in Daniel’s voice.  “I’m not new at this Jack.”

“I kinda gathered, and to say I’m surprised would be an understatement….”  One hand on Daniel’s back, Jack put his moistened fingers against his lover’s anus and pressed through the tight muscle.  Daniel moaned and squirmed, obviously uncomfortable, until the ring gave way and Jack’s fingers slid inside him.  Discomfort spiked into pain momentarily, and then Jack twisted his hand and stroked lightly over the prostate.

Daniel thrust back, crying out his long-needed fulfilment.

The sound thrummed along Jack’s nerves.  “Oh, God, Danny….”

Daniel yelled out when the fingers left him.  But Jack stroked his side as he spat into his palm a couple of times and took himself in hand.

“Not prepared for this, Daniel,” he muttered, stepping forward to press the head of his cock against his lover’s entrance.

“Just do it, Jack!”

For once, the colonel followed an order.  He pushed, hard and unmercifully, watching wide-eyed as the tight channel of Daniel’s rectum swallowed him all the way to the hilt.  For a few moments he wasn’t aware of anything but the exquisite pleasure which bordered teeteringly on white-hot agony.

And then he became aware of a low sobbing sound, and the body he was buried in.

“Daniel….”  Wrapping his arms around his lover’s waist, Jack leaned carefully against Daniel’s back, breathing deep gulps of air.  Beads of sweat were starting to run down the curve of Daniel’s spine.  Jack lapped at the moist paths, not moving, letting Daniel get used to being opened and filled.

“Please… Jack,” the breathless plea finally came, “just… go slow.”

Jack nodded, swallowing, standing straighter to allow himself to withdraw and push slowly inside Daniel again.  He thought he could feel Daniel relaxing around him and start to meet him in a rhythm all their own.

Stroking one hand over Daniel’s hip, Jack pulled the soft grey material down over Daniel’s cock, leaving the pyjamas pulled tight over Daniel’s thighs, taking the heavy erection into his hand.

Daniel jerked at the touch, pushing back hard, impaling himself on Jack’s dick before clenching his anus as tightly as he could and thrusting forward through Jack’s encasing hand.

Jack squeezed his fingers, the muscle along his cock lighting sparks behind his eyes.

“Danny….  God…!”

Another thrust, and Daniel came as he slid through the circle of Jack’s hand, spilling himself over the strong fingers and the ashes in the grate.

Feeling Daniel orgasm triggered Jack’s.  His knees almost gave way as he filled Daniel’s insides with his semen.  Only when the stars stopped dancing behind his eyes did Jack pull out as carefully as he could, laughing shakily as he folded Daniel in his arms and drew the sated man back against him.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to stand for too much longer, and Daniel seemed to know it too.  “Bathroom,” he muttered, and Jack nodded, pressing a kiss to Daniel’s neck before releasing him.

Daniel headed to the upstairs bathroom while Jack staggered to the one downstairs.  He worried about his lover as he cleaned himself up.  Flexing his knees, he didn’t bother fastening his gown as he padded through into the kitchen, listening all the time to the noises coming from upstairs.

Finally, as Jack poured the coffee, he heard the toilet flush.  A second later Daniel’s soft footfall was on the stairs and in his next breath he was surrounded by a very male warmth and scent.

Jack put down the mugs and turned, wrapping Daniel as tightly and close as he could in his arms and body.  “Love you,” he muttered, stroking Daniel’s hair, his neck and back.

“Jack… don’t think I let just anyone do that.”

“Never, Danny,” Jack assured him, either missing or simply ignoring the lightness in Daniel’s tone.

Standing for a while, just enjoying being held, Daniel couldn’t help but smell the aroma of the coffee.  “Oh Jack, do you realise how long it’s been?!”  He pulled away a little, trying to reach for one of the mugs.

“I know, believe me.  I’ve felt every damn day.”  

Brow furrowed, Daniel worked out what Jack had meant in time to stop himself saying anything stupid.  He lifted his head, kissed Jack’s damp hair, and spoke quietly.  “I’m back now, I won’t leave you again.”  

The determination in his voice put thoughts of what Janet had told them out of Jack’s mind.  He straightened, and caught Daniel’s gaze.  “Danny…?”  Following it, Jack laughed suddenly.

“Oh God….”  He feigned hurt as he let his lover loose.  

With silent thanks in his eyes, Daniel reached forward and wrapped both hands around one mug, breathing in the strong aroma.  “Oh, wow….”  Carefully, he tipped the mug and took his first sip of coffee in five months.

Jack watched him with undisguised affection.  He had a thought, and had to search a couple of cupboards before he found what he was looking for.  

“Daniel?”  Stepping up behind his lover, Jack waved the bar of dark chocolate under Daniel’s nose.  The beautiful dark golden head turned, following this new scent.  “Bedroom.  Now.”  Daniel glanced at Jack, at the chocolate, and back at the coffee.  “You can bring the pot, how’s that?”

Grabbing his own mug, Jack led Daniel back upstairs.


“So, Dr Jackson,” Jack intoned as he watched Daniel lower himself onto the bed on his stomach, leaning up on his elbows and sipping his coffee, having put the pot on the bedside table.  “Why is it that I’ve known you five years and didn’t know that you fucked guys?”

Daniel smiled to himself, feeling Jack’s nakedness settle on him, straddling his thighs.

“Because, Colonel O’Neill, apart from the fact that it wasn’t any of your business, in the five years you’ve known me, that was the first time I’ve fucked or been fucked by a guy.”  Shifting under Jack’s weight, he resolutely ignored the caresses to his back and the swell of his ass.  “And what about you, Jack?  You didn’t seem to need an instruction manual.”  He risked a peek back.

Jack was blithely opening the wrapping of the chocolate bar on Daniel’s back.

“Jack….”

“Danny, it was a long time ago.  Sometimes you take what you can get.”  Moving the chocolate bar to the duvet next to Daniel, Jack took a piece from the corner and leaned down along his lover.

Turning his head to one side, Daniel opened his mouth, moving his lips over Jack’s fingers and the chocolate he held.  He sucked slowly, tongue swirling around Jack’s skin and the chocolate melting between his fingertips.  Jack let out a long moan, pressing his mouth to Daniel’s neck.

“Oh God…” he ground out as Daniel made love to his fingers.  “Danny….”

Finally, Daniel released him, returning his mouth to his coffee mug.  

“Oh, no you don’t!”   Threading his fingers into Daniel’s hair, Jack pulled his head around and sealed their mouths together.  Daniel tasted of chocolate and coffee, overlying the very male essence of him.

“You’re jealous of my coffee,” Daniel stated, licking Jack’s lips as they parted.

“Only cause you seem to love it more than me,” was the sulky response.

Daniel smiled, “you know I don’t.”  He watched his lover slide off his back to one side of him, still wrapped partially over him.  He locked his gaze on Jack’s face, trying to read something there and when he couldn’t find the answer, he went back to his coffee.

“What?”

Daniel glanced back, all innocence.  “What?”

“You want to know something, I recognise that searching look.”

Daniel shrugged, not the easiest of gestures in his position.

“If you want to know something, ask me.”

“I was just trying to imagine the type of person someone would have to be for you to trust them enough to let them fuck you.”

Jack nodded once.  “Male person, you mean?”

“Obviously, and by fucking you I meant….”

Jack held up his hand on the way to popping some chocolate into his mouth.  “I know what you meant.  And there never has been anyone.”  He met Daniel’s wide, blue eyes.  “I have to admit that whole thing kinda freaks me out a bit.”

“You’re quite willing to give but not take?” Daniel asked carefully, keeping any judgement or criticism from his tone.  “Do you think any less of me because…”

“No!  No, nothing like that.  It’s the control thing.  And the trust thing.  And before you ask, yes I trust you and yes the thought still freaks me out.”

“Umm.”  Daniel reached for the coffee pot, refilling his mug.  He was frankly impressed that they were having this particular conversation.

“You enjoy it, right?  I mean… you enjoyed what we did in the living room?”

There were a whole load of emotions and worries in Jack’s voice that Daniel didn’t even want to think about.  He put them all at rest with a single smile and a definite, “oh, yeah.”

Taking another piece of chocolate, Jack crawled a little further up Daniel’s body and fed it to him, feeling his cock twitching yet again as the hot tongue swept over his fingers.  Hooking one leg over Daniel’s, he drew it under him, letting him slide his hand between the muscled thighs to stroke the underside of Daniel’s balls.

Feeling his lover’s satisfied hum vibrating around his fingers, Jack pushed his thumb against the slightly exposed muscle of Daniel’s anus.  

Jack felt the smile against his hand and pressed further until his thumb popped inside the heated channel of Daniel’s body.

“I know how good that feels,” Jack murmured, tone low and suddenly obscene.

Meeting the intense regard, Daniel smiled.  “It feels incredible,” he confirmed.

“A dick’s a lot larger than a thumb.”

“That just makes it better.  That feeling of being open and filled, of having someone so damn close.”  Leaning into Jack, Daniel kissed him, just a light touch of his lips.  “Having you inside me was perfect.”

Pushing his thumb as deep as it would go, Jack listened to Daniel, felt his arousal thrum impossibly through him.  “Thought you’d worn me out,” Daniel murmured, turning carefully on to his side, lifting his leg over Jack’s arm.  

Jack turned too, taking Daniel’s mug from him, moving the chocolate so that he could lie face to face with his lover.

Bending Jack’s knee gently, Daniel sucked his index finger to wet it before pushing slowly into Jack’s ass.

Neither spoke a word as they masturbated one another, taking their time, the edge gone from their arousal.

Daniel added another finger, scissoring them slightly, loving the sounds the older man made.  Jack’s hand on his cock was making it difficult to hang on to his control, and the fingers inside him were stroking his prostate with every gentle thrust.

After a long time they came together, moaning drawn-out orgasms into one another’s mouths.


Jack woke up later, Jack’s head against Daniel’s shoulder, Daniel snoring softly into Jack’s hair.  It was still dark outside the bedroom window, and he was happy just to lie still for a time, plastered to his lover.  But the call of nature finally got the better of him, and moving woke Daniel.

“Need to pee,” Jack muttered, peeling himself away and dropping off the bed, padding to the en suite.  Daniel waited, reaching for his mug.  His coffee was cold now.  He told Jack that as they passed between the bed and the bathroom.

Jack took the pot and nuked it in the microwave, pouring Daniel a mug and taking it back upstairs.  Daniel was lying on the bed on his back, duvet half-covering him, nibbling at a piece of chocolate.

“Coffee.”  Jack put the mug onto the bedside table.

“Thank you.”  Daniel didn’t move, just let Jack climb under the duvet with him.  Fucking – making love – was one thing, actually snuggling in bed together was another.

But Jack seemed happy to spoon up to Daniel as he sat up against the headboard to sip the black coffee.

“Tell me what it was like?” Jack asked quietly, head against Daniel’s shoulder.

“What what was like?”

“What… you ascended into.”

Daniel looked at him, a tear blossoming in his eye.  Quickly he wiped it away.  “Sorry.”

Jack shook his head.  “No, don’t be.  You don’t have to talk about it.”  

“I want to.  I need to.”  Wrapping both hands around the hot mug, Daniel stared into the coffee.  “It’s just… nothing what was I expected it to be.”

Jack shifted, leaning up on one arm in front of him.

“It’s like… feeling everything and nothing.  Stretching out to feel the world around you, the universe itself, yet everything’s… strangely muted.  But… it wasn’t enough.  All the time I felt like something was missing and when I figured out it was you guys – the… the family and friendship we shared – I realised that I hadn’t left my mortal life behind at all.”

“Is that why we found you in that lab?”

Daniel nodded, still not looking up.  “I started… exploring more and more planets, coming back to earth to spend time around you, doing what we used to do.  But as always I… went too far.  I was captured.  And then…” he shook his head, “then it felt like someone was tearing me apart from the inside out.”

Bridging the gap between them, Jack cupped his hand around the side of Daniel’s neck, stroking the warm jaw with his thumb.

“You used to come back here?”  Daniel nodded.  “So that was you, a couple of days after you ascended, in the corridors at the SGC?”

“Yeah.  I touched you and… you smiled.  Then you came home and I came with you.  You were going to go for food with the others but you changed your mind and I kept wondering why.”

Jack smiled sadly at the memory.  “I thought it was you.  I imagined… that you’d come back to say ‘hi’.  I did kinda hope that if I went home, you’d come with me.  But I didn’t know if you were still there or not.”

Taking one hand from his mug, Daniel wrapped his arm around Jack’s shoulders, leaning forward until their foreheads touched.

“You know… the day after… you ascended, I wrote in your journal.”

Jack felt the creasing of Daniel’s forehead.

“You did?”

“I felt… I came home and I was just lost.  So I went to your place and all your journals were there.  I found the latest one and I turned to the back page and just sat and… wrote.”  He lifted his head slightly to catch his lover’s expression.  “I can write, you know,” he teased, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

“Reports Jack, you can write reports.”

“Well, that night I just wrote what I felt.  I’d never done it before.”

“Can I read it?”

Jack hesitated, but he’d bought the subject up.  “Sure.”

Sliding away from Daniel and off the bed, he hurried down stairs and took the last journal from the bookshelves where all Daniel’s journals were now kept.

He skipped to the back page as he settled back onto the bed, and handed it to Daniel who read it out loud.

“Wednesday, January 30th 2002.  Got up, showered and shaved, dressed and went to work.  Like on every other day.
Thursday, January 31st 2002.  Not just any other day.  Not just any other mission.  I guess I’d known throughout the five years we’d been gating off-world that we were walking a fine line.  Daniel seems to have had nine lives.  But the ninth doesn’t belong with us.  I sat with him for hours, watching his body fail him the way he’d calmly told me it would.  He was out of it, Janet told me she’d had to knock him out because otherwise the pain would be too bad.  I think that was the first time I felt like crying.  When Daniel had told me it hadn’t been real.  I mean, he was sitting there in front of me, in the infirmary like he had so many times before.  I lost count of the number of times I’ve been called to the infirmary because Danny had been there again.  But this time he didn’t recover.”

Daniel turned the page, going backwards in the book.  Jack moved to sit beside him, wrapping himself around his lover as Daniel read.

“I’ve sat and watched Danny sleep before, but never quite like this, never knowing that he was slipping away from me every minute.  When his appendix exploded, I sat with him when he came out of the op.  He was sleeping then, under the drugs they’d given him in the OR.  I don’t know if I ever told him that I was with him all that time.  So much I never told him.  Sitting there, I thought I should tell him it all.  I’d never get another chance.  Maybe he’d even hear me.  I told him everything, all about Charlie and how much it still hurt – I was balling my eyes out after that start but I carried on.  I told him about Sara leaving, how she’d been gone when I’d got back from Abydos and how I started to wish I’d stayed out there with him.  I told him how much his friendship meant to me.  Finally, how much I loved him.  I didn’t want him to die.”  

Daniel’s tears fell steadily as his eyes flicked up to the opposite page.

“I had to stop eventually.  I was crying like I hadn’t cried in years.  Danny just lay there, unmoving, Don’t think he heard a word of my once-in-a-lifetime confession.  I think he knows it all anyway.  Apart from the bit about me loving him.  It would explain why he climbed into my mind and spoke to me at the end, asked me to ask Jacob to stop trying to save him.  I knew it wasn’t my losing my marbles.  I had to trust myself, because asking Jacob was the hardest thing I’d ever done.  Letting Daniel go.  But he’s not dead.  At least he’s still out there, somewhere.  So any grieving we do is for us.  I get that.  Carter gets it too I think.  Teal’c’s taken it hard, but I can’t be there for them right now.  I feel like someone’s reached inside me and pulled everything out.”

He turned the page.

“This is how it felt when Charlie died.  The world carried on turning, life didn’t stop and I wanted to scream at the world for not caring.  Danny’s gone.  How the hell I’m supposed to go on without him I have no idea.  I don’t know if he’s aware of us any longer, if he remembers me.  I’ll never forget him.”

Closing the book, dropping it to the duvet with his empty mug, Daniel turned, wrapping himself around Jack.

“I love you, Jack,” Daniel promised him, “I didn’t know.  I didn’t know any of it.”

“Even if you had, Danny, there’s nothing different you could have done.  You’d still have gone through that glass….”

Daniel froze in his arms.  An image from a dream sticking in the forefront of his mind.

“Daniel?”  Jack’s concern was immediate.

“I’m….”  For a moment he tried to cement the image into the real memories he had of that fateful afternoon on Kalona.  Did Jonas really smile at him as he stood there, frozen in realisation that what he’d just done would kill him in a matter if hours?

“Daniel, come on, stay with me.”

Refocusing his gaze on his lover, he smiled shakily.  “I’m okay.  But….”  He steadied himself.  “Jack, what’s Jonas Quinn doing on the base?”

Jack stroked his hair, gently scrunching the locks in his fingers.  “Last time I tried to tell you, Danny, you freaked out on us, those two chemicals that Fraiser’s always talking about – Dopey and Sneezy – went all screwy in your brain.”

Daniel didn’t bother to correct Jack, he knew his lover so much better than that.  Instead, he nodded.  “I know.  But I’m okay.  He’s just another stranger we met on a planet.  Only… I have this… feeling.  I don’t want to discredit him or anything if you’ve accepted him as my replacement….”

Jack touched his fingers to Daniel’s lips.  “I hate the guy.  As far as I’m concerned he was responsible for you going away.  Hammond made me take him onto the team but you can ask Carter or Teal’c and they’ll tell you, Quinn and I are far from being best buddies.”  He replaced his fingers with his lips for a moment.  “It should have been him who went through that glass, not you.”

“Jack… I remembered something about that afternoon, about what happened.  When I looked up with the bomb’s core in my hand, he was standing there.  And he was smiling.”

Jack stared at him.  “What?”  His voice had a suddenly deadly depth to it.

“I might have imagined it….”

“Daniel….”

“Yesterday in the infirmary, it was like I was reliving it.  It didn’t strike me at the time.”

“At the time you had a lot more to think about.”

Daniel nodded.  “I don’t know what it means, if it means anything.”  He sighed, and it turned into a yawn.

“Come on, Danny, get some sleep.  Janet would have my balls under the knife if she knew I’d kept you up all night.”

Clearing the bed of obstacles, Jack waited until Daniel had turned and settled on his side before spooning around him, pressed against his back, one leg pushed between his two.  He stayed awake until Daniel’s breathing evened out and became a soft snoring which he listened to for a while.  Finally he let himself drift, waking himself only twice to reassure himself that Daniel was really there.

*

Daniel sat on the infirmary bed.  An hour of tests and scans was about as much as he could cope with.  Janet still had him hooked up to a couple of monitors.  She had samples of every body fluid he could think of.

"Is Ferretti okay?"

Janet glanced at the only other patient in the infirmary.  Four beds down, at the end, Ferretti was sleeping peacefully.

"He's fine.  He got separated from SG2 while they were off-world.  The rest of the team came home last night and took a second unit back with them, they found Ferretti and brought him home in the early hours of this morning.  He's got a couple of staff weapon burns, but nothing too serious.  We kept him in for observation."

Daniel nodded, watching the sleeping man for a moment before returning his attention to what was happening to him.  Janet caught his expression.  

"Let me go and get the results from the lab and if everything's clear, I'll unhook you and you can go home, okay?"

"Thanks."  The relief was clear in his voice.

Saving his notes to disk, Janet exited the computer program and swung out of the room.  For a moment, Daniel found himself admiring her grace and focus, the sway of her hips.  He smiled to himself.  There was a lot that was different about loving a man but at least most of it was physical.


Quinn moved in the anonymity of the corridor until he could see Daniel through the doorway into the infirmary.  He needed line of sight, needed to pick up on Daniel's thought patterns before he showed himself.  This was more difficult if the subject was awake.  The subconscious tended to be more guarded, thoughts overlying feelings and emotions, disguising them.

Finally, Quinn latched onto what he was searching for and smiled as he stepped inside, hands joined behind his back.

"Doctor Jackson," he greeted quietly, "I am glad to see you well."  In his mind, his tenuous link with the other's consciousness flared and he saw memories being recalled, images enfolded in dark fears.  He kept his expression friendly while he pushed gently, careful not to get swept up in the other man's thought patterns.

Daniel looked at him, initial hostility and suspicion swamped by his innate desire to think the best of everyone until they proved him wrong.  In the cold light of day, his suspicions seemed unfounded and unreal.

"Jonas, hello."

Quinn brought to mind a series of images.  He'd had to do some research, but earth had an amazing information network and he'd found enough on there to set his imagination free.  "I wanted to come and see how you were before Colonel O'Neill..." at the mention of Jack's name, Daniel's thoughts turned to him, as Quinn had known they would, and without a single external sign he pushed the ideas from his own mind to Daniel's.  At the same time, he continued calmly, "...took you home."

But Daniel was no longer listening.  There was a certainty in his head, images streaming in his mind's eye as surely as if he were watching it play out in front of him.

Jonas.  And Jack.  In Daniel's old office.  Jonas was leaning back over Daniel's desk, pants open, head thrown back.  Jack was looming over him, one hand steadying Jonas, pressing against the small of his back.  His other hand was clawed in Jonas' hair.  Jack pants were open, pushed down a little, and both Jonas' hands were buried between them, wrapped around their clashing cocks.

Now standing in the room with them, Daniel staggered back, the sounds they were making drilling into his brain, mocking and taunting him even as they were too wrapped in one another to notice him.

Still standing serenely in the infirmary in front of his victim, Jonas glanced at the monitors recording Daniel's physical state.  The man was so easily excited and Jonas wondered briefly if all humans were as impressionable.  He carried on talking, the timbre of his voice unchanged.

"I like being here, on your planet, and I just wanted to thank you for giving me this chance."  He paused, watched carefully as Daniel's eyes began to refocus.  Quickly he selected another scenario and readied himself.  "It's a great honour to work so close to Colonel O'Neill."

Once again, dream became reality and Daniel was back in his office.  This time the wet sound of sucking was coming from the couch.  He looked over, unable to stop himself, and saw Jack half-sitting, half-lying on the battered sofa, head back, eyes closed.  Jonas was leaning over him, kneeling on the floor, his head working at Jack's groin.  Daniel shook his head, trying to deny what he was seeing even as Jack twisted his fingers in Jonas' hair and came hard down his throat.

"Dr Jackson!"

Ferretti dropped to a crouch, just in time to stop Daniel's skull from hitting the tiled floor.  He immediately felt a warm, sticky liquid coating his fingers and swore softly.  He hadn't been in time to stop Daniel's head from cracking against the metal edge of the bed as he fell forward.

"Doc!"

Daniel was gasping, desperately fighting to pull enough air into his lungs.  Looking around quickly, Ferretti reached up and grabbed the oxygen mask from the rack, yanking it down.  That action activated the oxygen feed and he carefully placed at mask over Daniel's nose and mouth, holding it in place.

He turned to the door, shouting again, "Doc!" before looking back at the man lying on his side on the floor.  Daniel's eyes were wide, seeing something invisible to Ferretti.  "It's okay, Daniel," he told the other man with a certainty he didn't feel.  "You're okay."

"Do..."

"I'm here!"  Ferretti glanced around at Janet, utterly relieved.  "What happened?"

"I dunno.  I heard a noise, like a cry, I think it woke me, I saw him... I knew he was going to fall off the bed."  He explained about the injury, although the blood flow felt as if it had stopped.

Janet leaned over, quickly checking for possible spinal injuries and when she didn't find anything obvious, she dropped back into a crouch.  Two more nurses had appeared, and Janet asked them to help her get Daniel up onto the bed.  Ferretti volunteered his help but was refused.  "You're wounded," she told him flatly.  So he settled with supporting Daniel's head and keeping the oxygen mask in place as they lifted him.

Quickly and efficiently they settled him in the same position on the bed, and shooing them all, including her other patient, she pulled the curtains to do a proper examination.

All the time, she talked to him, asking him questions, willing him to respond.  It took a couple of minutes, but he seemed to slowly come back into himself.  Pulling the mask from his face, he looked at her, big blue eyes mirroring his confusion.

"Where...?"  The question died on his lips.  He knew where he was.  Despite her telling him to lie still, he pushed himself up until he was sitting on the bed, legs pulled up for balance.

"What happened?" she asked gently.

He thought for a moment, trying to unravel his memories, which seemed a mess.  "Jonas... came in to see me.  Then...."  His brow creased, and he looked away.  The knowledge of Jack and Jonas was there in his mind, yet he would have sworn that he'd seen them together... how could he have though?  He hadn't been around while Jonas had.  Only at the end, when he'd been lying swathed in bandages and sedated.

"Daniel?"

 He looked at Janet.  "I don't know."

"Jonas came to find me, said he thought you were having some sort of fit."  She waited, but he didn't respond.  "Your results from earlier check out fine, but I want to test your Dopamine and Serotonin levels again, just to make sure.  Okay?"

Daniel nodded, clearly subdued.  "Okay."

*

"So this is where you've been hiding!"

Daniel turned his head, but didn't budge from where he was leaning in the doorway of what was once his office.  He didn't bother to answer Jack's remark.  Instead he went back to staring into a room that he used to consider his second home, after Jack's place.

Raising his eyebrows, Jack stepped between Daniel and the door frame to enter the room.  Quinn hadn't changed much of the decor.  Daniel's masks and books still remained in place.  Only his photos were gone.

"I haven't been in here since Hammond let Quinn move in," Jack told Daniel, aware of the stony silence.

"Really?"

Noting the oddly vicious tone of his lover's voice, Jack nodded.  "Really.  This'll always be your place to me."  He padded around, picking up books, touching the artefacts.  "I hadn't realised how much the time I used to spend hassling you to come and get a coffee with me, or to come eat with me actually meant until you weren't here any more."

He glanced at Daniel, wanting to see the effect his words were having.  Daniel was studying the floor, but Jack knew he was listening.

"What's up?"  Nothing.  "Ferretti told me about what happened in the infirmary.  And then Fraiser told me what happened in the infirmary.  Do you want to tell me?"

"Jack, did you and Jonas fuck?"

It took a moment for Jack's mind to accept that Daniel had actually asked the question.  He leaned back against the desk, more to steady himself than any defensive gesture, and crossed his arms.  It was all he could do to keep his anger within and not to lash out physically.  His mouth opened and closed until finally the words came out.

"Did we fuck?!  Did you really ask that?"  There were tears in Daniel's eyes now, and they melted Jack's anger like salt in snow.  "Danny....  Where the hell did this come from?"

"I...."  He shook his head once, misery in his demeanour.

Jack went to him, wrapped his arms around him and held him tight, not caring that for a few seconds Daniel was trying to pull away from him.  He held on while the weak struggles faded and Daniel sank into the embrace.  That worried Jack almost as much as the question he'd been asked.  Daniel wasn't one to acquiesce easily.

"Tell me what happened." Jack prompted gently, after a couple of minutes.

Daniel shook his head against Jack’s.  “Can we go home?”

“Sure.  Let’s get outta here.”

*

The journey back was once again made in silence.  When they reached Jack’s house, Daniel disappeared upstairs for a while.  

Jack waited until he heard the shower start, then scribbled a note which he left on the kitchen table before going out again for supplies.

Daniel stood in the shower, letting the hot water cascade over his skin, watching as the droplets caught in the thick hair at his groin.  It seemed that all his body’s hair had, for some reason, been highlighted with gold.  Even the tiny hairs on his arms seemed now to catch the sun in a way they never did before.

Jack had asked him what it had been like to be ascended and his explanation had been weak at best, pathetic at worst.  The truth was he’d believed in what he’d told Jack when he’d communicated with him, touched his mind just before ascending.  The simple fact that he’d been able to do that had made him believe he was making the right choice and after all, what choice was there?  Ascend or die a choking, painful death, drowning in his own bodily fluids.

He’d been taught much and learnt more.  But time after time he’d kept remembering what the Nox had said to them.

‘The very young do not always do as they are told.’

He’d missed the team, missed his friends, missed Jack so much he’d started to obsess about seeing his best friend again.

He’d visited Earth, but as close as he’d come to reaching out to Jack, he’d always shied from actually touching him after that first evening when he’d followed him home.

Oma had found him once wandering aimlessly around the beautiful gardens on a planet he couldn’t remember the name of.  She had stayed with him for a time, tried to understand his loneliness.  But in the end, she’d been unable to stop him from travelling further and further, for longer and longer.  Until he’d been captured by the aliens on the final planet he’d visited.

And then he’d known real fear, because for once no one was out there to back him up.

Jack’s voice then, in the lab, had been like a lifeline.  Seeing them all there in the lab had been like a vision.  And that’s what he’d believed it to be as the pain had taken hold and his consciousness had faded to black.

He should have been happy.  He was back where he belonged.  More than that, he was in Jack’s house, sleeping in Jack’s bed and that was what he’d wanted for so very long.

So why wasn’t he jumping for joy?  He didn’t believe what his mind had told him about Jack and Jonas.  Not for a second.

Janet had said that his brain chemicals were all messed up again.  Something was causing it and he could tell she was worried about what.  He was going to feel down, she’d said, for a few hours until the drug she’d given him balanced the chemicals out.

Reaching for the shower gel, Daniel squeezed some into his palm.  The scent reminded him of Jack, of how he smelt in the mornings, all freshly showered and shaved.

Daniel’s cock twitched, and it brought a wry smile to Daniel’s face.

He wrapped his soap-filled hand around himself, massaging his hardening erection and heavy balls.  He’d always enjoyed his own touch, even if he enjoyed the touches of others more.  And the aroma of the gel was bringing to mind all sorts of memories and fantasies.  They merged in his imagination as he recalled showers on the base with Jack and altered the scenes to bring the two of them face to face under the beating water.

In one fantasy, Jack dropped to his knees and sucked Daniel off like a starving man.  In another, he did the same to Jack.  In one cherished scenario, Jack spun him against the steamed, tiled wall and fucked him hard until they both came.

Daniel hadn’t even got to really jerking off, was simply touching himself with Jack in mind when he came all over his hand, the water washing away the evidence within seconds.

He felt better, however fast it had been, and turned the water off, stepping out of the shower to find a towel.


By the time Jack got back, Daniel was lying on the sofa, feet up, watching the Discovery Channel, while a pot of fresh coffee popped and spluttered in the background.

“Got your note,” Daniel called out as Jack dumped all his bags at once onto the kitchen floor.

Wearing a loose, white long-sleeved T-shirt and light faded, butter-soft jeans, Daniel sauntered into the kitchen.  He bent to take a couple of jars from the first bag and straightened to meet Jack’s wide-eyed gaze.

“What?”

A couple of seconds later, he was pressed up against the counter, Jack’s fingers in his hair and on his butt, Jack’s tongue diving for his throat.

Daniel wound his arms around his lover, holding Jack tight against him.  He didn’t let himself think.  Despite having put the knowledge of Jonas and Jack out of his mind, it still hovered at the edge of his thoughts.

Releasing Daniel’s mouth, but not the rest of him, Jack leaned back.

“Danny….”

“You and Jonas,” Daniel finished for him.

“There is no me and Jonas, believe me.  I’d rather sleep with Teal’c.  Hell, I’d rather sleep with anyone.  But I didn’t.  Christ, Danny, I was grieving for you.”

Daniel stared at Jack’s eyes and knew he was telling the truth, like he’d known before, on the base.

“I’m so sorry, Jack.”

Jack stroked his hands down Daniel’s denim-clad thighs and back up to his hips.  “Don’t be sorry, just tell me what the hell gave you the idea that I was… ‘doing the nasty’ with Quinn?”

Daniel chuckled, moving his head side to side.  “I don’t know.  I was sitting in the infirmary, Jonas came in to say hello and… I must have blacked out.  When I came to I just knew… as if I’d seen you two….”

“Daniel….”  Jack kissed him again, long and deep.  “I swear to you….”

“…I know, Jack.  I believe you, I… trust you.  I know you’re telling me the truth.  I just wish I knew what was happening to me.”

Moving his hands up Daniel’s sides, Jack attempted to soothe him.  “A week ago you were an ascended cloud of energy.  Some bastard alien captured you, took bits of you away and you descended back into corporeal form minus one kidney and a quarter of a lung.  It’s going to take time.”  He noticed Daniel was looking at him with the strangest expressions.  “What is it?”

“Corporeal form?”

Jack caught the humour in Daniel’s voice and stared at him, open-mouthed.  In the next moment, his fingers got to work tickling his lover.  

As much as he loved to feel Daniel squirming against him, Jack didn’t keep the sweet torture up for long.  He used the momentum to lift Daniel on to the work surface behind him.

Laughing, Daniel wrapped his legs around Jack’s waist, his arms around Jack’s neck and drew him close.

“Fraiser’s going to be coming here to check you out for the next couple of days,” Jack murmured, errant hands working their way underneath Daniel’s T-shirt.  “She thinks being on the base is what’s causing your brain to short-circuit.”

Daniel tipped his head to one side, giving his lover better access to the sensitive skin there.  “So not only can’t I rejoin SG1, I can’t go back to work.”

“Don’t worry about it.  Once your system’s settled, we’ll get you off-world, somewhere hot with lots of ancient ruins and buried artefacts.”

Pressing closer, Jack could feel Daniel’s arousal through the soft, tight denim.

“I can’t believe I do this to you,” he murmured, stroking his palm heavily between Daniel’s legs.

Daniel had been doing some exploring of his own, and now he leaned back and wrenched Jack’s sweater over his head, along his arms and dropped it to the floor.

“Me neither,” he whispered, “I jerked off in the shower half an hour ago.”

Jack’s grinned at him, “Daniel Jackson!  I’m shocked!”  Under the T-shirt, he pinched one hard nipple.  “You came without me.”

Daniel peered up under thick eyebrows, his blue eyes the epitome of innocence.  “I was thinking of you,” he told his lover in his defence.

“Really?”  Jack leaned closer, lifting Daniel’s T-shirt and worrying it until Daniel lifted his arms and let it be removed.  Rubbing his palm against the bulge at his lover’s groin, Jack instructed, “Tell me.”

Daniel reached down, unzipped Jack’s jeans and stuck his hand into his briefs, groping obscenely.  “Only if you tell me one of yours.”

Jack’s breath caught, and it took him a moment to find his voice.  “Carry on doing that and I won’t last long enough.”  He unfastened Daniel’s button and fly, didn’t find any underwear to get in his way, and wrenched the tight denim down over his lover’s ass just low enough to be able to free his balls.  “Come on Danny, give.”

Slowly thrusting up into Jack’s greedy hand, Daniel curled his fingers tightly around Jack’s cock and met his rhythm.

“We’re in the shower, on base, filthy from a mission.  I have my eyes closed under the water, and you just walk up to me and kneel down in front of me.  You don’t say a word, but you look up at me as you suck me, really hard and really fast.”

As he spoke, Jack increased his pace, tightening his hand as his own arousal built at Daniel’s breathy description.

“I’ve got… my fingers in your hair, holding you in place, fucking your mouth and throat.”  Daniel’s eyes closed, his hand matching Jack’s pace.  “I come so hard and you swallow every damn drop.”

“Danny, God!”  Jack thrust through Daniel’s steel grip and spilled over his hand, yelling his lover’s name into the kitchen.

A second later, Jack slipped through the loosening hand and stepped back, leaning down and taking Daniel’s weeping cock into his mouth.

He sucked hard, feeling Daniel’s fingers combing through his hair, knowing his lover was holding back.  Reaching between the solid thighs, Jack cupped Daniel’s balls and pushed one finger back, pressing up against his anus.

Daniel screamed once, biting back the sound as he shot down Jack’s throat and was swallowed hungrily.

He dropped forward, caught in Jack’s arms.

“Good enough?” Jack asked with quiet humour.

“Oh yeah,” Daniel confirmed once he could talk.  “Better.”

*

“Food’s almost ready,” Jack murmured into Daniel’s ear as he wound his arms around his lover’s waist.

Daniel leaned back against Jack’s solid form.  “They’re really beautiful,” he murmured, still looking up at the stops of light in the clear, dark sky.

Jack tipped his head back.  It had been so long since he’d just watched the stars.  “Different, though, when you think what’s actually up there.”

“Yeah.”  

There was a sad note to Daniel’s voice that touched Jack.  Yet he knew what this was about.  They’d talked about practically everything, except this.

“We’ll be okay, Danny,” was all Jack could say.  They’d hadn’t spoken about it because there was no answer this time.  “Give it a couple of weeks, if we’re not happy, we’ll find another way.”

“I don’t want to lose what we have with the Stargate,” Daniel started, but Jack finished it for him.

“I don’t want to lose you, not again.  That’s the most important thing now, Daniel.  Never forget that.”

* * *

Jack slid the file back across the long, polished table and leaned back, eyes settling on Hammond.

“Colonel.”

“General.”

Hammond sighed softly.  “You know that this is how it has to be.”

“Daniel is a member of my team, General.”

“Not any more, Colonel.”  Hammond tried to say it as gently as he could, aware of Dr Jackson’s eyes on him from the other side of the table.  He turned to address Daniel.  “I’m sorry, son, I know how disappointed you must be.  But it’s for your own good, and the good of the team.”

Daniel nodded minutely and looked away, glancing at Jack.  Those who caught the colonel’s responding expression were touched by the empathy there.

Hammond looked around the table, his own heart sinking.  Teal’c was staring at the polished wooden surface, expression as neutral as ever.  Carter was watching Daniel with that ‘big sister’ sympathy she always held for him.  Daniel and Jack were sharing periodic glances that were saying more than either of them were obviously aware of.  The only one smiling was Jonas, and he was trying to hide it.

“At least you’ll be on the same planet,” Hammond tried to find the silver lining of this very dark cloud.

“But I’ll be digging in a sandpit while Jack and the others are exploring and meeting the natives.”  The sheer misery and pleading in Daniel’s words was difficult to hear.  Hammond felt like a prize-winning shit for splitting them up now, after they’d only just been reunited.

“Once we find the natives, DanielJackson, we will bring them to meet you,” Teal’c stated with certainty.

The General nodded and smiled, relieved.  “Yes, Teal’c.”

“If Colonel O’Neill does not kill them first.”

Everyone at the table stared at the Jaffa.  They could never be sure when he was being serious and when he was making an attempt at Tau’ri humour.

After a few long seconds of silence, Hammond turned back to the table, gaze stuck on Teal’c for a few further moments.

“I’m sorry, people.  You have your orders.”

He rose, forcing himself to walk out of the room.  He considered them – with the exception of Jonas – to be his extended family.  He was as relieved as anyone to have Daniel back.  But he couldn’t bend the rules on this.  Doctor Fraiser had made her medical opinions and conclusions very clear.

The rest sat in silence until Jack – who could always be relied on to do so – stomped out.

Daniel followed, then Sam and Teal’c together.

Leaving Quinn sitting on his own, no longer trying to hide his smile.


“Daniel!”  

He came to a stop at Sam’s call, but he didn’t turn around, merely waited for her to catch up.

Stepping around him, she shrugged, suddenly not at all sure of what she wanted to say.  “I’m sorry,” she settled for eventually.  “I’m just... I’m glad you’re back.”

He stared at her, then smiled, and she took that as permission to throw her arms around him and hug him.

“Me too, Sam,” he murmured softly.  

As she put him down, he saw Jack amble up to them, hands in his pockets, looking both sheepish and miserable.

“I too will miss you, DanielJackson.”  

He turned, and saw Teal’c standing a little way behind them.

Jack closed in.  “Come on, kids, group hug.”

Sam stared, and then laughed as Jack put an arm around her and one around Daniel, motioning with his head to Teal’c.

“I am unfamiliar with the term ‘group hug’.”  But he figured it out, gathering first Daniel, then Sam up against him.

At the end of the corridor, Hammond paused to watch the at once touching and amusing display.  As he stepped away with a private smile, he noticed Jonas watching too.

“Five years of living each others’ lives, trusting one another to get home, forms a bond.  Don’t take offence if they don’t let you in easily, it just takes time.”

Jonas smiled, hard eyes following the General until he was out of sight before glancing back at the small group in the other corridor.  They’d broken apart, Jack’s arm still around Daniel’s waist.  Sam was laughing.

He walked away.

*

Colonel James Walsh walked out of SG9's briefing feeling a churning apprehension in the pit of his stomach.

His worries were confirmed and peaked by Colonel O'Neill seeking him out minutes later and stepping into his path, stopping his progress towards the armoury.  Once he got there he was considering shooting himself in the least painful place he could think of to get him out of this one.

"Jim."  Jack's tone was outwardly friendly, inwardly predatory.

"Jack, hey."  James tried to smile, but it faltered when the other man slinked closer and leaned forwards to close the gap between them.

"Daniel Jackson's been reassigned to your team."

"I... I know."  Inwardly, he hated himself at the moment.  Although the same rank as Jack, James had never been involved in special ops.  He could face down an enemy better resourced and better armed than his own men and not have a single second thought, but everyone on the base knew that when Daniel Jackson had vanished, Jack O'Neill become impossible and unapproachable.

Daniel was back now, and no one cared where he'd been, just that Jack seemed to have calmed down, and was smiling whenever he was on base.  They wanted to keep it that way.  Everyone knew Daniel was staying with the colonel, some people were jealous.  Everyone was relieved.

But Jack wasn't smiling now.  And James' relief had turned sour, making him feel slightly sick.

"Couple of things you should know," Jack was continuing in the deadliest tone James had ever heard.  "Daniel gets excited about stuff.  He's not great at following orders.  It's a dangerous mix.  But if he comes home with so much as a scratch, I'll make sure that your next mission is to somewhere very, very cold with lots of snow and ice.  For a long time."

As threats go, it wasn't the most terrifying James had heard, but he knew that this threat was more of a promise.  He nodded quickly, catching himself in time to retort, "I'll look after him, Jack, you don't have to worry."

Jack's face broke into a smile more frightening than the stare.  "That's all right then," he stated in a tone that said it definitely wasn't.  A few seconds later, he marched away.

*

At three that afternoon, with SG1 taking point, the two teams stepped through the event horizon.

As they came out onto the planet on the other side, Jack's gaze followed Daniel's every move.  He'd been unhappy as they'd kitted up, miserable as they'd all gathered in the gateroom.

He was still anxious, Jack could tell simply by the set of his shoulders.

But within fifty feet of the gate stood the ruins of what looked, to Jack’s Daniel-trained eyes, like a place of worship.  Even in its crumbling state, it was impressive.  What remained of the circular walls stood over twenty feet high.  In the warm glow of the planet's sun, there looked to be a hint of colour - bright pinks and oranges - still visible on the stone.

Entranced, Daniel started off towards the incredible find.

"Daniel!"  He stopped in mid-step, turning, eyes widening into that patented 'just remembered I'm supposed to wait for orders' expression of his.  Jack smiled generously.  "Want to wait for backup there, big guy?"

Daniel felt a flush of embarrassment, although he wasn't sure why.  But Jack was already issuing silent orders to Carter and Teal'c.

Heading for the remains, Jack, Sam and Teal’c in front, the others bringing up the rear, Daniel felt a pang of jealousy.  Jonas was in his position behind his old team, exactly where he wanted to be.  He had Jack, he knew now that he would always have Jack, but still he wanted to be back on the team because he wanted to be close to Sam and Teal’c too.  They were his family.

As if reading his thoughts, Jack cast a glance back in Daniel’s direction, smiling gently.  Daniel smiled back, a little sadly, knowing the colonel understood, and they carried on.

The ruins were even more impressive up close.

Daniel’s attention was coaxed from SG1 as the three checked for hostiles.  Dr Terry Graham and Dr Sandra Lass, SG9’s two resident archaeologists, were already working happily with Daniel, listening to him, lapping up his knowledge like Grade A students.

Returning from their sweep of the area, Jack watched his lover for a few warm minutes, listening to the sound of his voice as he imparted his teachings and infused the other two with his infectious excitement.

Daniel ventured inside what had once been a temple of some sort, his very own worshippers in tow, and came out again a minute of so later, studying the grounds around them and then looking out at the tree line and woodlands beyond.

“Jack,” he didn’t pause, knowing he already had the colonel’s attention.  “Someone’s looking after this place.”

Jack looked around him and nodded his agreement.  “Okay, so we’ll go and find them.”  He brutally quashed the sudden qualms in his stomach and turned.  “Colonel Walsh!”

“Yes, Sir!”  James marched toward the other man, weapon held in check.  He wasn’t going to push his luck.  He and Jack might have been the same rank, but Jack was 2IC of the SGC and life was easier if he wasn’t messed with.

“Dr Jackson believes there are locals around here somewhere.  We’ll do a recon, you look after the brainy kids.”

James grinned at the description.  “Yes, Sir.”

“Carter, Teal’c, Quinn, let’s move out.”


They walked in silence, listening out for any noise around them.  The planet seemed almost silent.  There was no wind in the trees, no sounds of wildlife in the forest.  No sign of life at all.

But the thing about Daniel was, he was usually right.  So they carried on, and ten minutes later Daniel was once again proven correct.

On the edge of the forest they found civilisation.  Small shacks built of the same stone as the ruins at the gate.  From where they stood, it looked as if they were on the outskirts of a small village.

As they approached, five human-looking figures appeared from what might have been the main thoroughfare and came towards them.  They weren’t armed from what Jack could tell, but he tightened his hold on his P-90.

Vaguely waving one hand, he shouted, “Hi!  We come in peace.”

Daniel’s greeting speeches had always sounded so much more intelligent.

“Ne errae fro ti lebad.”

Jack’s eyebrows rose, but he shook his head, glancing behind him at Teal’c, then finding Quinn standing behind the Jaffa and looking questioningly at him too.

“I do not understand the language, O’Neill.”

Jack nodded, turning back.  “I’m sorry, we don’t… speak your language.”  He shrugged uselessly.  They’d had this problem on several missions in the last five months.

“Ti matu fro lebad tho t’patek.”

Jack shook his head.  “We came through the Stargate.”  They looked as bewildered as he was, and remembering an old trick of Daniel’s, he crouched down and drew a circle in the dusty soil on the ground.  “Stargate.”

The one who’d been talking nodded with a curious smile.  “Patek.”

“Patek is Stargate.”  Okay, maybe he could get the hang of this.  “We have some people looking,” he pointed to his eyes, “looking at the ruins.”  Roughly he drew what he could recall of one of the walls of the circular place of worship.

“T’sek’nin-stal.”

“Te-sek-in-stal,” Jack tried to repeat.  “That’s what this is?”

“T’sek’nin-stal nard pit t’patek.”

“Ruins something Stargate.”  Jack shook his head.  No wander Daniel seemed to have the patience of a saint.  It was obviously what was needed to learn languages.  He rose to his feet, aware of his team moving out from behind him.  

Suddenly the natives moved back several, quick paces.  “Sig lo t’ank sigs!”  One of the others had spoken and his tone was excited.  They were backing away, pointing to the left of the group.

Confused, Jack glanced around then back again.  They were staring at and indicating Quinn.  Jack sighed.  Didn’t anybody like the guy?

“Okay, Quinn, go get Daniel.”

Carter looked from the natives to her CO.  “Sir, are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.  He’ll probably be able to hold a full-scale conversation with these guys, find out what’s upset them all of a sudden.”  He hoped that was what Carter had meant by her question.

Quinn didn’t question the order.  He nodded, checked his Zat gun and headed back the way they’d come.


The only sound around the ruins was Daniel’s voice as he answered questions and listened to the opinions of the other two archaeologists.

Colonel Walsh listened to the words as vaguely as most soldiers did when spending time with Dr Jackson.  It was relaxing somehow, just hearing the melodic tones of the man’s voice.

The carvings on the inner walls of the temple were incredibly detailed.  There were depictions of men walking through the Stargate, of the event horizon as it sprang to life when the wormhole was formed, of the shimmering puddle itself.

“I would say that this civilisation worked the Stargate out a long time ago,” Daniel concluded, still puzzled.

Dr Graham put Daniel’s confusion into words.  “Then why abandon this place for long enough to let it crumble, and then start to look after it again?”

Dr Lass paused in her sketching.  “Goa’uld?”

Daniel glanced at the many carvings again.  “There’s no evidence here of Goa’uld invasion.”

“Then why?”

*

“He’s gone to fetch our linguist,” Jack explained uselessly.  

But the one who’d spoken first made he understood.  He turned and all but ran back into the village.  Not too long afterwards he returned with an older woman in tow.

“Kel ki t’tak lo t’an sentak.”

Jack didn’t even try to repeat that.  He shrugged.  But the newcomer stepped forward.  “Nem said, I am Kel, the speaker of the old language.”

Jack smiled openly.  “Hey!  Now that’s better.  I was just saying that I sent Quinn back to fetch our linguist.”

The older woman frowned.  “Quinn, he is the one Nem says is Kalonian?”

Jack’s suspicions were immediately aroused.

“Yes… how did you know that?”

Kel beckoned them to follow her.


Sitting in what they guessed was the equivalent of her living room, they waited for the explanation.  Jack had a bad feeling about what was coming next.

“We too are Kalonians.  Many thousands of rises ago, our ancestors found the giant circle.  They believed it to be a passageway through which the ancient Gods once travelled.  They built the temple close to the gate and worshipped, waiting for the Gods to again visit our world.  But they became impatient, and a group of them started to try to activate the passageway themselves.  When they finally succeeded, they stepped through it.  It was years before they returned, and for that time, the others who waited believed that the Gods had punished the travellers for their arrogance in using the passageway.

“When they finally returned, there were celebrations in the villages, and those who had come back told many stories of their adventures.  They had met the Gods themselves, they said, and had been given the gift of what they called ‘powerful thought’.”

Jack frowned.  It hadn’t been the tale he’d been expecting to hear.  “Powerful thought?”

“As far as we know, the ability to make others believe that which is not true.”

Quiet alarms started ringing in Jack’s mind.  “I take it there’s more to this story?”

“There were plagues in the villages where the travellers had settled.  Violent killings, vicious attacks, all without reason.  People were experiencing terrible dreams that haunted them in their waking hours.  When our elders realised what was happening, they rounded up the travellers and sent them back through the passageway, banning them from ever returning.”

Dots in Jack’s mind started to join themselves together.  “How did you know that Quinn was Kalonian?”

“We can… feel them, feel their minds unconsciously seeking out other minds.  We believe it is now a part of our genetic code.”

“So you’re saying he has this… ability?”

Kel nodded quite certainly.  And the whole pattern suddenly made itself visible in Jack’s mind.  He bounded to his feet.  “Oh, God… Daniel.”


James looked around as Quinn came through the trees and approached the ruins.  

“Mr Quinn,” he called, “is everything all right?”

Jonas nodded, waiting until he was closer before explaining.  “Colonel O’Neill asked me to bring Dr Jackson to them.  We’ve located the natives but the language they’re speaking isn’t like anything we’ve ever come across before.”

Daniel, overhearing, stepped out into the warm sunshine.  “You’ve found the people who live here?”

“Yes, Dr Jackson.”

Any wariness Daniel had of Quinn was wiped out by an overload of excitement.  “Take me to them!”

“That was exactly what I was ordered to do,” Quinn replied with a small smile.

James wasn’t sure.  “You’ll be okay, Dr Jackson?” he asked.

Nodding, Daniel patted his side arm.  “I’m capable of looking after myself,” he reassured, “despite what Jack still thinks.”

James smiled knowingly.  “Bring us back a souvenir.”

Quinn led the way into the trees with Daniel at his side.  They walked in silence for a while until Quinn was sure they were out of earshot of Walsh and his men.

“Do you remember what happened to you on Kalona?” he asked quietly.

Daniel’s head snapped around.  He hesitated before answering.  “Yes, yes I do.  But I don’t want to talk about it.”

Quinn smiled to himself.  “It was an accident waiting to happen.  They’d been playing with that device for so long, playing with a fire more dangerous than anyone understood.”

“Jonas….”

“How did it feel, firing at that window, at your own reflection, knowing what it was you were jumping into?”

Daniel turned, eyes blazing.  “I don’t….”  Suddenly he was back there, watching his reflection shatter as he fired at the thick glass and leapt through it.  Tripping in the dense forest floor, Daniel fell, hands clutching his head, not knowing he was falling so not even attempting to ease his collision with the ground.

Quinn stepped forward, watching in amusement as Daniel hit the ground hard.  He wondered if the sharp crack was a human bone or something on the forest floor.  He didn’t much care.

“How did it feel, Daniel?” he asked a little louder, pressing into his victim’s mind.  He crouched down, putting his hand on Daniel’s shoulder, the physical touch making his mental torture stronger.  “What was it like when you felt that first radiation burn on your hand and knew what it meant?”

A muted sob escaped Daniel’s chest.  His mind was a furnace of pain and confusion as he relived his fatal experience, magnified a hundred-fold in clarity, more real than it had been when it had actually happened.

Jonas moved his hand up over Daniel’s neck, sliding his thumb around the base of the throat in mock- strangulation.  Into Daniel’s mind he put the idea of being unable to breathe as his throat collapsed due to the decay of his body, taking him forward in his experience, passed where it had actually ended for him.

Daniel’s breathing became laboured and gasping, despite there being nothing physically stopping him from drawing in air.

“What was it like to die?”


Jack ran through the woodland, heading back to the ruins.  Behind him, Carter and Teal’c were in pursuit, having no idea what had sent their CO racing off.

“Sir!” Sam called, “What’s wrong?”

But Jack wasn’t going to waste his breath explaining.  He was picking his feet up and slamming them back down with as much caution as he had time for.

Sam glanced at Teal’c who was keeping pace with her.  He merely shrugged.


Reaching to the holster at his hip, Quinn lifted the Zat gun and activated it.  “I can’t have you translating what those people have to say about me,” he told the man who was lying on the ground gasping for breath around painful sobs.  “In fact, my life would be a lot simpler without you in it at all.”  Fingering the trigger, he enjoyed a few more moments of toying with his victim’s mind.  “Sorry, Daniel.  I know you saved my people and everything, but I just do not like you.”

Aiming the Zat, he fired.

A blue web of fierce electricity surrounded Daniel’s body as it shook and jerked it the deadly embrace.

As it phased out, it left Daniel unconscious in the undergrowth.


They all heard the weapon fire.  Jack took the next few steps in impossibly long strides.  He leapt through and stopped five feet from Daniel’s body as Quinn reset the Zat to fire again.

“Danny!”

Glancing up, knowing he was too far from Quinn to stop him, Jack threw himself in the path of the gun’s next discharge.  

The weapon enfolded him in the same agony as it had Daniel.

When it finally let go, Jack dropped over the other man’s inert form like an abandoned doll.

Furious, Quinn stepped around his fallen CO and aimed the Zat once again at Daniel’s head.

Teal’c fired before Quinn’s finger could twitch on the trigger.  The blast from the staff weapon punched through his shoulder, the instant severing of muscles and nerves making him drop the Zat moments before the blazing pain dropped him into shocked unconsciousness on the ground.

Carter crouched next to Jack, calling his name, shaking his shoulder.  It took a few seconds, but he came to and lifted himself from the still body of his lover.  Sam was already checking Daniel’s neck for a pulse.

“He’s alive, Sir,” she stated with relief, “pulse is strong.”

“Oh God.”  Sitting back in the dirt, Jack hoisted Daniel up into his arms, holding him more to reassure himself at the moment than Daniel.  Breathing heavily, he hugged the still form to him, stroking the silken hair, tucking his lover’s head under his chin.  “Danny…. God, Danny….”  He murmured the name like a mantra.

James burst through the trees close by them.  “What the hell…?”

“We need to get Daniel and Quinn back to Earth,” Carter told him calmly.  “I’ll explain later, once someone’s explained it to me.”

He knew better than to ask questions.  Like why Colonel O’Neill was rocking Dr Jackson in that way.  The simple fact that Daniel was unconscious in his arms and as pale as the leaves around them notched James’ concern for himself up a little.

Teal’c bent down, scooped up Quinn’s body and threw it over his shoulders in a fair impression of the fireman’s lift.  “If you could lead us back and activate the Stargate, Colonel Walsh.”

“Sure thing.”

Pulling himself together, Jack looked to Carter to help him get Daniel to his feet.  As Jack slid his arm under Daniel’s he felt his ward shift of his own accord.  “Daniel?”

“Jack?”  It was a piteous sound.  Daniel’s head felt as if his brain had been scrambled.  Simply opening his eyes was enough to escalate the pain to torturous levels.  “Jack….”  Pulling himself away from the hands upon him, Daniel dropped to all fours and threw up violently.

Jack stroked his back, taking the water canteen from his backpack and unscrewing the lid.  “Easy there Daniel, it’s okay.”

Daniel vomited until it felt like his stomach had given up everything it had and was trying to force itself up through his gullet.

He took the canteen from Jack and sipped it carefully, calming himself, trying to hang on to Jack’s soothing murmurs though the clanging in his head.

As soon as he could, he let them help him to his feet.  All he had to do was get through the gate, then he could collapse.  

But the journey home was the most painful of his life.  Every move jarred the pressure in his head, feeling with every step that it might explode at any moment.  His stomach continued to lurch, but there was nothing left and when he retched, only blood was reaching his mouth.

Carter and Jack were either side of him, literally holding him up as he stumbled into the wormhole.

He didn’t remember coming out at the other end.  As they hit the ramp, he collapsed against Jack, the claustrophobic yet blissful darkness finally claiming him.

* * *

Sam watched Daniel shooing Jack from the barbecue.  She smiled to herself.  

Having her best friend back felt like a gift from heaven.  Daniel’s smile challenged the sun in its brightness as he tried to save his ginger and chilli marinaded steaks from Jack’s scorching influence.

She loved him.  No question.  And it was almost completely platonic.  Except that the toffee-gold glow of his hair in the sunlight, the slight tan of his skin in contrast with the white cotton shirt hanging loose over tight, faded blue jeans, made him look just gorgeous.  She knew she wasn’t the only one to think that.

Jack, dressed just as casually in black jeans and a light blue denim shirt, had barely taken his eyes from his lover all afternoon, let alone his hands.  

They were among friends in Jack’s backyard, and Jack wasn’t making the slightest effort to desist from flirting.

Trying to hide his dislike of the taste of Jack’s beer, Teal’c crossed the patio to stand next to Daniel.

“Why do you cook meat in this unhygienic manner when there is a perfectly efficient cooking device in the kitchen?”

“The taste, Teal’c,” Daniel stressed, “it tastes better, believe me.  Well, you will once you’ve tried it.”

He reached for the warm bottle of beer standing on the flagstone at his feet.  Draining it, he caught Jack’s eye where he was standing talking to Janet.  Wiggling the bottle in mid-air, he grinned as his lover sidled over.

“More beer, Chef?”  Jack took the bottle from the long fingers, stroking over them teasingly.  Daniel nodded.  “Your wish is my command.”

Janet moved to stand next to Sam.  “They look good together,” she murmured, glancing at Hammond who was gazing down into the garden pond, trying to work out whether or not there were any fish in the dark and dingy water.

Sam had to agree.  As much as it had surprised at the start Jack looked happy, and Daniel looked radiant.  She looked from the two men to Janet at her side.  “He is okay, isn’t he?”

Janet nodded.  “He’s doing fine.  Another week or so, and the general should be able to tell him that’s he’s going to be reassigned to SG1.”  She smiled indulgently, catching the wide-eyed expression on Sam’s face.

“You’re kidding?”

“Nope.  We decided there was more to being on SG1 than just being on the front line.  You all need Daniel, he needs you.  You’re his family now, he’s yours.  We persuaded one another that you were all better off with Daniel on your team.  Jack won’t have to threaten the other team leaders, he’ll be able to keep an eye on Daniel, might even be able to talk him into following an order or two.”

Sam laughed.  “Here’s hoping.”

Jack slipped a cold bottle into Daniel’s hand, pressing himself against his lover’s back.  

It had been touch and go for a while after they’d stepped back through the gate.  They’d rushed Daniel to the infirmary where an MRI scan had revealed swelling of the frontal lobe.

The medical team had operated to relieve the pressure on his brain, but he’d slipped into a coma before they’d got him on the operating table.

Afterwards, Jack had stayed at his bedside, talking to him, reading to him, for ten days.  And in the early hours of the eleventh morning, Daniel simply opened his eyes and asked for a coffee.

The only other thing Jack had done in those eleven days was to have Jonas Quinn sent back to Kalona, where he was immediately put under arrest for treason.  Jack had made sure that the attempted murder of Doctor Daniel Jackson was added to whatever list of crimes the justice system was going to dream up for him.

“Love you,” Jack murmured softly, wrapping his arms around Daniel’s waist and reaching for one of the vegetable kebabs.

Daniel slapped his hand away, turning the steaks carefully.  “No amount of sweet-talking is going to get you food any faster,” he told Jack determinedly.

“Really?”  His voice was barely a whisper for only Daniel to hear.  “What if I promise that later on, I take you and that chocolate sauce you have in the fridge to bed and licked it from all the parts of your body you like me to lick?  What if I promise to smother your cock in it, and suck it slowly, using my tongue to reach all the places my lips just can’t… reach?”

Not for the first time that afternoon, Daniel simultaneously loved and hated the tight material of his jeans.  At least having his shirt out was hiding his body’s immediate reaction to Jack’s words, to his nearness, to his just being on the same planet.

“Well….”

“Gotcha!”  Jack announced triumphantly, and stole a kebab, strolling away with a victorious grin.

George stared as he sauntered passed.  “Hey!  Where’d you get that?  Daniel wouldn’t let me have one!”

Jack savoured the mild chilli on the end of the kebab.  “You have to know how to get around him.”  He winked.  A tiny part of him was enjoying making his CO face exactly what was between the SGC’s second-in-command and its beloved doe-eyed civilian advisor.

George simply smiled.  He was happy, he realised.  His own family was safe at home thanks to Jack O’Neill.  This was his second family, and they deserved to be happy too.

“Jack?”  Jack tore his eyes from where Teal’c was still questioning the merits of chargrilled food.  “Is he… living here?”

Jack didn’t answer for a second, studying his CO’s expression.  But he couldn’t keep the smile from breaking through.  “Yeah.  We’re keeping his apartment just to keep up appearances.”  Despite everything that was ingrained, he couldn’t quite keep the bitterness from his voice.

“Look after him, Jack.”

“I intend to, General,” he used the term affectionately.  “But you know… it would be a lot easier to do that out in the field if…”

“You’ve got it, Jack.  He’s back on the team.”

“…if Daniel was back on….”  He stared.  “Really?”  George nodded.  “Oh God….  Oh… thank you!”

George watched as Jack bounced back to where Daniel was patiently explaining to Teal’c that some people preferred their steaks still bleeding.  

He heard words on the warm, summer air, and then watched as Daniel threw his arms around Jack’s neck and hugged him hard and tight.

With one another was where they belonged.  He didn’t doubt that now.


fin
elfin



Instant Feedback!  (No Flames Please)