New SG-1 Fic - Gene Genie
Written for the jd_ficathon...
.... hands up if you didn't think I'd make it.
Yeah, me neither.
Title: Gene Genie
Author: Berty (bertybertle)
Summary: Scheherazade had 1001 nights to get her man - Jack's got 30 minutes tops.
Word Count: 4800 approx.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, as if you didn't know that already. No infringement blah blah blah.
Written For: sorcha_gaia
Prompt: Mid season 7, hurt/comfort, more of Daniel's Ascended memories come out in an interesting/useful way.
Notes: Huge thanks to catspaw_sgjd for a last minute and brilliant beta. She also thought up the rather fabulous title for me. Thanks, Cats. I owe you one. All remaining mistakes are totally mine.
In the dark, cold expanse of space spins a dark, unremarkable planet. On the dark, unremarkable planet there is a dark, coniferous forest. In the dark, coniferous forest stands a dark, forgotten cave. And in the dark, forgotten cave sits a middle-aged USAF Colonel. Scowling.
Darkly.
“Well,” he says as the previously hidden stone door finally stops its grating progress and shuts with a final, satisfied snick, plunging them into complete darkness. “This is familiar.”
~~::~~::~~::~~::~~
They’re only fifty minutes into the mission - chasing up some tip-off on a downed Goa’uld probe that has only yielded a charred hull - when Daniel suddenly straightens and gets that faraway look in his eye. The one that makes Jack’s palms sweat.
“Uh…I’ve been here before,” he announces, his head scanning back and forth, searching for something.
“Déjà vu?” Jack offers with a little smirk, but Daniel is already in his own little world, marching off in the opposite direction from the burned-out hulk on a path it’s obvious only he can see.
“Daniel? Daniel, wait up!” Jack calls after him, receiving a little wave and an indistinct response that he guesses is supposed to be reassuring. “Crap,” he mutters and shrugs his pack on. “Carter, Daniel thinks he’s got something. You and Teal’c stay here and work on the… charcoal. I’ll go and see what he’s got. We’ll radio in every thirty.”
But Carter too is absorbed in her techy headspace and only manages a short, “Yessir,” before plunging back into the ruined craft.
Jack looks to Teal’c for support, but he’s practising being inscrutable, so Jack just rolls his eyes and stamps off after the rapidly disappearing Dr. Jackson.
Sometimes Jack wonders why he bothers to come along at all.
~~::~~::~~::~~::~~
Jack clicks on the light on his P-90 and casts its stark glare quickly around the walls, then back at Daniel who scrunches up his eyes until Jack angles the beam away from him again.
“So,” Jack begins, propping himself against the cave wall as comfortably as he can. His ankle aches like a bitch and has set up a nice counterpoint to the throb in his recently healed shoulder and the pounding in his head. He’d landed badly, having to pull out everything to make it through the rapidly closing and impressively heavy-looking door that had been trying to cut him off from Daniel. “Nice…” he waves his good arm at their prison, “… cave.”
Daniel blinks at him, seems to come back to himself and quickly crosses the distance between them, ripping open his pack and pulling out his med kit. “Um… yes. Are you okay? You fell pretty hard.”
“Yeah, about that. You want to explain why I just had to throw myself through a door to a hidden cave behind my teammate who has over six years field experience, and who should know better than to walk into an open cave mouth without back up?”
Daniel’s hands are busy, turning Jack’s head so he can look at the scrape on his temple. His fingers are warm and competent, and Jack submits to his ministrations without complaint.
“Yes, I know, sorry,” Daniel says, his fingers lingering on Jack’s jaw for a second. “I just… I remembered being here before.” He runs his hands over Jack quickly and efficiently, checking for other injuries. Jack wishes that his aches and pains would quit for a second, so he could properly appreciate the touch. Daniel rarely touches him these days. “Does it hurt anywhere else?”
“Twisted ankle, bruised shoulder, nothing impressive,” Jack replies shortly. “And I’m pretty certain that Carter said that no one from Earth had visited this planet before.”
“I don’t think I was coming from Earth at the time,” Daniel says quietly, popping two ibuprofen into Jack’s palm, then offering him his canteen. “I think I came here when I was…” He makes an elegant, airy wiggle with his fingers.
“Ah,” Jack nods carefully to avoid jiggling his sore head. “You spent a lot of time in caves, did you?”
“I don’t remember, but this is more than that. It’s a…”
Daniel stands and looks around, the dry, sandy ground scraping under his boots. It’s hard to see beyond their immediate vicinity. “Uh…. think ‘light’”.
“Light?” Jack asks, but already the cave is filling with an amber glow, revealing drifts of shining metals, piles of crystals, crates and an assortment of obviously alien technology. It’s all carefully sorted into different heaps and reaches back into the cave as far as Jack can see as he cranes around Daniel’s legs to get a proper look.
“Whoa! Cave of wonders,” Jack says in an awed yet slightly ironic tone.
Daniel turns to him with a surprised grin on his face. “Exactly!”
Jack spends the next few minutes trying to reach Carter and Teal’c, but whatever material the cave is formed from, it isn’t radio friendly. He scans the walls around the door for signs of a release mechanism. He checks his watch and wonders how long it will take before they are found. He takes a quick inventory of their packs to find out what they have. It isn’t like he hasn’t been caught in similar situations before.
When he’s done all that, he attempts to estimate the size of the cave, the oxygen therein and how long it will last, but gives up, because what the hell can he do about it anyway? And there’s always the C4 in his pack if things get desperate but they’re far from that point yet. So he begins to watch his fellow prisoner. After all, there are worse places to be than trapped in a dry, apparently unoccupied cave with Daniel.
Jack’s been watching Daniel a lot since he returned from his trip to eternity. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the horror of watching Daniel’s failing body cease to exist, transformed into a seething ball of light. At first Jack was angry and disappointed with Daniel - it felt like desertion. But the year that he was gone smoothed the edges of that and exposed the grain beneath - sorrow, loneliness, guilt. With hindsight it was easy to think of the things he should have said.
Then Teal’c had blindsided him while Daniel had been struggling to maintain the integrity of his core personality after the Stromos’ survivors had decided to set up shop in his head. As they’d watched and waited helplessly, the Jaffa had revealed details of a conversation he’d had with Daniel about how he’d felt like he’d never belonged anywhere. Despite Teal’c’s calm assurance that Daniel had confirmed that he now knew this to be wrong, the idea had settled in Jack’s gut like a ball of ice, heavy and ever-present. It’s been eating at him ever since. Jack knows that his own actions had a good deal to do with Daniel’s feelings of disassociation.
And now Jack feels like he’s living on borrowed time - just waiting for the day that Daniel decides that he’s had enough of mortality again before he takes off. So he keeps watching, making sure, looking out for signs that Daniel is about to leave them… leave him… again. And waiting for an opportunity, for the right time, for the courage to give Daniel a reason to stay. If he still wants one.
Oblivious to Jack’s scrutiny, Daniel moves from pile to pile in a seemingly random pattern, muttering to himself. His fingers are never still as he gestures, snaps and points, and his tongue peeps out from between his lips as he concentrates.
“I assume you remember that we touch nothing but the lamp,” Jack drawls as Daniel works his way to the closer heaps again.
“That’s… funny,” Daniel nods absently, sparing Jack a short glance.
Jack hauls himself up and limps to the pile next to Daniel’s current one, toeing it cautiously with a booted foot. “So, what are we looking for?”
“Well, I’m not entirely certain, but… should you be on that ankle? With a head wound?”
Jack feels a brief, irrational flash of something warm that he’s been able to distract Daniel from his search for a few seconds. “Relax, Daniel, I feel fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m not completely decrepit yet.”
Daniel rolls his eyes, then gives him a strange, shy smile and turns his attention back to his treasure. “Uh, well, I’m not sure what it is, but I can tell you that if they’d known what they had, they wouldn’t have stashed it away in here.”
“Riiiiiight,” Jack sighs. “Here being…?”
“Well, it’s obvious really.” Daniel waves a hand in an utterly non-descriptive and unhelpful way.
“Humour me,” Jack grates.
“It’s a storage facility. The people who accumulated all this stuff were scavengers. Scrap merchants. They traded components from a number of alien technologies all across this galaxy.”
“Huh! They gonna be along any time soon?” Jack asks, scanning the cave one more time, his hand coming up unconsciously to his rifle.
“Unlikely. They died out several hundred years ago.” Daniel hums to himself and shifts a few larger pieces of material before abandoning the pile in favour of one further back in the cave.
Jack follows him slowly.
“Do you have any idea of what this thing looks like?” Jack complains, watching as Daniel picks up and discards fist-sized components of a dull grey metal.
“Uh… well I think it might be… Can you think it a bit brighter in here?”
Jack obliges. “And what’s with the lights?”
“It’s Ancient tech - this was a shelter before the traders moved in. It’s responding to your genetic marker,” Daniel tells him without pausing.
“Ah, my precious genetic material,” Jack says sourly. He still hasn’t fully come to terms with the fact that he has a clone wandering around back on Earth with all his memories and feelings wrapped in a gangly, teenaged, hormonally-challenged body. Rationally he knows that his secrets are safe with the kid, but it makes him uncomfortable all the same. No one else is supposed to know certain things about Jack O’Neill - even when it’s… himself. A couple of times he caught Jon looking at him with an expression that was too old for his apparent youthfulness - a knowing kind of pity that made Jack’s guts squirm. Other times, he caught Jon looking at Daniel…
“Hah!” Daniel crows, snapping Jack out of his introspection.
He holds up a piece of dark grey machinery that looks indistinguishable from all the pieces that he’s already discarded. He smiles broadly and bounces a bit in excitement. “Found it.”
Jack waits for the rumble of rocks as the ceiling falls in on them, or some booming, disembodied voice telling them that they’ve desecrated a sacred space, or a big ball of rock to chase them down the corridor. But when, to his surprise, it doesn’t come, he hobbles over to stand beside Daniel. “That’s great!” he enthuses. “What does it do?”
“Well, I… it, uh, I have no idea.”
“Well, switch it on and find out,” Jack says patiently.
“I can’t. It’s part of a bigger piece of equipment. You need the other pieces to make it work.” His smile is faltering, his eyebrows drawing together and making that little crease on his forehead that Jack always wants to smooth with his thumb.
“And when you say work, you mean…”
“I…” Daniel’s frown deepens and he blows out an explosive sigh. ”I can’t remember.” The thrill of discovery is lost and he holds his prize limply at his side as he walks back to the entrance to the cave. He puts the thing carefully on his pack, then turns and sits on the floor, his shoulders slumped.
“It’s important, I know that. I just don’t know why,” he says wearily.
Jack limps back and thumps down beside Daniel, sorry to have burst his bubble so soon.
“Hey,” he offers with a bump of his good shoulder. “What do you remember from when you were…?” Jack attempts to replicate Daniel’s gesture from before, but his fingers are squared and thick, and he looks like he’s waving.
“Not much,” Daniel replies, pulling off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. He tips his head back against the wall, his eyes shut. “I’ve tried hypnosis and meditation, but other than that thing with Rya’c and Bra’tac…”
“The thing which incidentally saved their lives,” Jack corrects him pointedly.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Daniel concedes. “I know. It’s just so frustrating. I know it’s all right there, but all I get are tiny snatches of things. Glimpses. Nothing makes sense. It’s like… an echo of a hunch of a feeling.”
“You remember you came to visit me?” He tries to say it casually but knows that he’s failed even as it comes out of his mouth. Jack has been waiting for Daniel to say something about this ever since they found him again. But the memory of it is presumably something else that Daniel had to give up when he was returned to them. Jack figures he owes it to Daniel to fill in any gaps that he can, even the painful ones. Even the ones he prefers not to remember himself.
Daniel opens his eyes and looks sharply at Jack. “Really? No one told me that.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t exactly in my report,” Jack admits, looking away from the directness of Daniel’s gaze.
“How come? What happened?”
“It was when I was captured by Ba’al.”
Daniel is silent, forcing Jack to look at him. His face has hardened, his eyes downcast and his jaw tight. “I read about that,” he mutters.
Swallowing down the lingering bleakness, Jack forces himself to continue. “Yeah… that. Good times. Anyway, after the seventh or eighth time…” Jack glances at Daniel’s face again, and switches tack. “You came to my cell, all insubstantial and cryptic.”
“Insubstantial?”
“Yeah. I threw my shoe through you.”
“Okay,” Daniel replies beginning to sound confused.
“You tried to persuade me to ascend.”
There’s a beat of silence before Daniel asks, “Why didn’t you?”
Jack shrugs, then winces when his shoulder twinges spitefully. “Not really my style, Daniel. Besides, until the end, I didn’t think it was really you. Thought I was going nuts.”
“What changed your mind?”
“The fact that you were sarcastic and as irritating as hell. If you’d been a figment of my imagination, I’d have imagined you less annoying. And quieter.”
That surprises a chuckle out of Daniel. “So you sent me away?”
“Couple times. You kept coming back. Every time they dragged my sorry ass back to the cell, you’d turn up...” Jack waves a hand at him, up and down.
“All insubstantial and cryptic?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry,” Daniel says with a slight smile.
“Nah, nuts or not, it was good to see you. In fact I’m pretty sure that you were the one that got me out of there in the end, despite what you said about not being able to interfere. It was all a little bit too convenient. Not that Carter’s not good, but… I was pretty much finished.”
“I hope it was. Me, I mean.”
Jack shifts a little, trying to find a comfortable position, then steals a glance across at the thoughtful man beside him. “You came to the infirmary too, after, to check up on me. Make sure I got out. I asked you to stay, but you said you couldn’t. Said what you were doing was important.”
“Well that worked out well,” Daniel says sarcastically, his head thumping back against the wall again, a picture of frustration and despondency.
Jack realises with a jolt that this is it - the opportunity he’s been hoping for… dreading… avoiding. This is his chance to tell Daniel what he hoped he’d known all along - that Jack was the reason Daniel should stick around. That here was where he belonged. That all Daniel had to do was push a little harder, dig a little deeper and Jack would have been unable to deny the thing that they’d both been dancing around for years.
He figures if he starts with a little truth, then the bigger ones might just follow easier. “I’m glad you came back, no matter what the reason. It wasn’t the same without you. I know what we do is life and death, survival of the planet and all that, but it’s more fun when you’re along.”
“Fun? You think I’m fun?” Daniel tips his head in Jack’s direction with surprised look on his face that makes Jack’s chest ache a little. How can Daniel not know that Jack would rather spend time with him than any other person in this galaxy? Jack’s done such a good job of hiding those bigger truths that he’s suppressed even the parts that Daniel ought to have known.
“Of course.”
Daniel narrows his eyes. “You told Colonel Edwards that I was a pain in the ass on our last mission,” he accuses.
“Ah, you heard about that?’ Jack wrinkles his nose and makes a mental note to recommend SG-11 for the most humiliating cultural exchanges he can find for the foreseeable future. “I didn’t want him to get any ideas about poaching my anthropologist. If he wants one, he needs to find his own.”
Daniel raises a sceptical eyebrow, but doesn’t challenge him on it. Jack tries to keep his expression impassive, aware that Daniel is still watching him closely. He can almost hear Daniel’s mind working, shuffling things around, making something new from what he already has.
It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. Jack’s glad he’s sitting down already, otherwise he’d probably have fallen over by now.
“How’s the head?” Daniel asks unexpectedly when Jack thinks he’ll have to say something to break the loaded silence that has sprung up between them.
“It was nothing, Daniel, don’t fuss.”
Daniel’s hand is firm against Jack’s jaw, turning him. Jack tips his head accommodatingly to let Daniel see for himself that there’s no bleeding to speak of. Daniel kneels up to get a better view and his thumb settles against Jack’s cheek as he angles the injury into the light again.
“Looks okay. No rakish scars this time, Jack,” he murmurs.
Daniel’s too close. Jack can’t take a breath without it holding his scent and his warmth. His hand on Jack’s face is steady and assured. It takes everything Jack has not to lean into that touch, just the tiniest bit, to remind himself that Daniel is real and here and that despite everything that he’s fucked up, every harsh word he’s spoken and every opportunity he’s let slip by, he has another chance.
“Rakish?” Jack croaks, nowhere near his normal bantering tone. Daniel’s lips are right there at Jack’s eye level as he cranes closer to study Jack’s forehead. As Jack stares, mesmerised, Daniel’s tongue slips out and runs along his bottom lip. With his other hand, Daniel brushes Jack’s hair away from the scrape, sending a bolt of want through Jack strong enough to make his eyes fall closed for a second. Daniel repeats the movement, his fingers a ghosting sensation against Jack’s scalp.
“Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“I mean it. I’m really glad you came back.”
Daniel’s fingers still momentarily, then begin their hypnotic stroking again. “Me too,” he mutters, his lips quirking into a slight smile.
And it would be so easy for Jack to make a joke now, like he has a dozen times before when things have become intense. A single word or gesture now will stop Daniel, put that distance between them that Jack has always insisted on, knowing that once he began down that path he wouldn’t be able to pull himself back.
But the courage he’s been searching for, the answers he’s been unable to avoid are there, at last. And he doesn’t.
Instead, his heart pounding ridiculously in his chest, he leans into Daniel’s palm, not heavily, not overtly, just enough that he hears the subtle rasp of his stubble and Daniel’s slight hitch of breath, then feels the dry press of lips against his temple, quick and tentative.
Daniel hovers, waiting for Jack’s response, his warm breath whispering fast across Jack’s oversensitive skin. And after all these years, after fighting it for so long, after all the reasons why it’s a bad idea, it is amazingly simple to just tip back his head, look directly into Daniel’s eyes and offer up his mouth for a kiss.
Although there’s barely four inches between them, Daniel leans in so slowly that it seems to take an age before their lips brush softly together. Jack has thought about this moment, even when he’d convinced himself that it could never happen. He’s wondered how it would feel, but in all that time he has never considered the sensation of relief that spreads through him, a rolling, building wave of release that Jack can’t contain. He groans low in his throat, a noise somewhere between a sigh and a sob.
Daniel deepens the kiss, his mouth soft and coaxing. Jack follows willingly, parting his lips for Daniel’s tongue to gently trace their shape, trading breaths and chasing the taste of each other.
When he draws back slightly, Jack tries to follow, but Daniel’s hand is on Jack’s good shoulder, holding him in place.
Jack’s whole body aches for more, the pain in his ankle and arm forgotten in the yearning for Daniel’s touch. The hand on his shoulder and the fingers on his jaw are not enough. Jack feels somehow incomplete without his skin and Daniel’s pressed together; he knows it’s ludicrous - how can he miss something he’s never known? - and yet he feels its absence like a physical loss.
Daniel’s eyes are wide, filled with surprise and hunger. Jack gets a glimpse, for a second, of the man he met almost ten years ago - penniless, idealistic and brilliant. But now Daniel has other qualities, hard won and as integral to his personality as anything he’d been before. He’s known loss and despair, joy and hope, and wonder enough to keep even his mind filled.
With an uncertain smile, Daniel ducks his head again - a quick press of lips, there and then gone. Then again. And again. Each time he draws back to watch for Jack’s reaction, as if waiting for a rebuke before ducking forward again and taking another kiss - like he’s stealing them.
“Okay,” he sighs finally, sitting back on his heels and giving himself some distance so he can regard Jack with a wary eye. “What just happened?”
Jack’s grin is unstoppable. “You tell me. You started it.”
“You must have hit your head harder than we thought,” Daniel says, his hands folding over and over themselves in his lap now they are not firmly anchored in Jack’s hair.
“You giving me an out, Daniel?” Jack asks slowly, lifting his chin and daring Daniel to disagree with him.
Daniel shrugs a little, and watches him closely. “Impending death by asphyxiation? Influenced by alien technology?”
Jack shakes his head.
“What then?”
“Had some time to think while you were gone,” Jack explains, as if it were as simple as that.
“I’ve been back for four months, Jack!”
“I never claimed to be a quick study,” Jack responds, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Daniel is practically sitting in is lap, Jack could almost think that none of the previous few minutes had happened, so familiar is the easy pattern of their banter. But Jack’s lips are tingling, and Daniel’s eyes are warm and hopeful.
“So what you’re saying is…” Daniel tips his head and waits.
“Don’t go,” Jack blurts hoarsely, then swallows and tries again. “Don’t go away again. Please,” he adds as an afterthought. He feels kind of sick and breathless, and wonders if that head wound is worse than he thought after all. But the ball of ice in his gut is getting smaller, leaving room for some hope of his own.
Daniels eyebrows are almost comically high on his forehead. “Oh!”
“Yeah,” Jack mutters.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” And he knows he sounds emotionally stunted and… well, a bit of a dick, but saying the right thing has never been his forte, and Daniel seems to be getting it anyway without his input.
He’s getting it so well, in fact, that now he really is sitting in Jack’s lap, his thighs either side of Jack’s and his hands framing Jack’s face, kissing him long and wet and dirty.
Jack doesn’t know what to process first; the weight and solidity of Daniel’s body against his, the heat and slickness of his tongue, the perfect ache in his own groin as he hardens or the fact that the cave is getting brighter and brighter, the light brilliant enough to register even through his closed eyelids.
When Daniel moves to kiss his jaw and press his nose to his neck, Jack breathes and opens his eyes. And it’s not that the door has opened by itself, or that Carter and Teal’c have found a way in, but the cave itself is glittering with golden radiance, apparently in response to Jack’s own mood. And how cool is that?
But what he says is, “This is such a bad idea.”
The effect is instant. Daniel stiffens, draws back slowly and Jack watches as his face becomes utterly blank. Shock, Jack thinks distantly.
“Oh! No... not this.” Jack says quickly, and he gestures between them. “This is great! I meant... this.” He flaps a hand at the cave, the piles of treasure, the door that Carter and Teal’c will be appearing through shortly.
Daniel’s shoulders loosen and he smiles a little shakily. “Right,” he sighs. Wariness still lingers in the lines around his eyes and there’s a subtle vulnerability in his gaze that Jack only now realises has been there for years, that he’s been missing it all along. “So…”
“Later.”
“Okay,” Daniel responds quietly, climbing awkwardly off Jack’s lap and finding his glasses.
Jack grabs his wrist tight, forcing him to make eye contact. “Promise?”
Of course it isn’t really a question. What he means is, “I promise,” and it’s been a long time since he said that. He thinks it’s something he’ll need to work up to. But he will.
Daniel nods and his smile becomes more certain. He dusts off his knees, stands up and holds a hand out for Jack.
“So what we need is the magic word,” Jack muses, letting himself be pulled up to face the door again. He scratches the back of his neck and tries to ignore the bulge in his pants while he’s trying to get a glimpse of the bulge in Daniel’s.
“I think you’re getting your stories mixed up. That’s Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” Daniel tells him, running a hand around the seal.
“What, so no ‘Open sesame’?”
The door obediently begins to slide back, making Daniel turn toward him slowly, caught between an irritated glare and a disbelieving grin.
Their teammates are framed in the cave entrance. Carter’s hand is poised over her laptop, but it’s clear from her owlish blinking that she had nothing to do with the door. Teal’c simply looks on with his habitual slightly bored expression.
“Hey guys!” Jack grins.
“Sir, Daniel, is everything okay?”
Daniel steps back to let the others see inside. “We’re fine. I remembered this, uh…”
“Cave of Wonders,” Jack supplies for him. “Carter, we need to dial back in and request personnel to secure this position.”
“Yes, sir,” she replies, her eyes going wide at the piles and piles of doohickeys and thingamajigs. Jack can see her fingers itching to get in there, but he has a date with a hot bath, an ace bandage and an itinerant archaeologist who’s about to become a lot more… tinerant.
“O’Neill, you are injured,” Teal’c remarks. “Do you require assistance?”
Jack hops over to Daniel, who has recovered enough to have collected his pack and his treasure, and throws an arm around his shoulder. “It’s okay, Daniel’s already volunteered to get me back to the infirmary. You guys can wait here while we get the General to send a team in.”
Daniel looks surprised, but slides an arm around Jack’s waist. “Smooth,” he says quietly as he helps Jack out of the cave.
“You have no idea,” Jack murmurs.
And it may be another three years before they realise that Daniel’s discovery is actually a power interface for Arthur’s Mantle, critical to their fight against the Ori and ultimately the survival of the planet, but Jack will always consider that the second most important thing they found that day for several reasons.
But that, as they say, is another story.
Fin
.... hands up if you didn't think I'd make it.
Yeah, me neither.
Title: Gene Genie
Author: Berty (bertybertle)
Summary: Scheherazade had 1001 nights to get her man - Jack's got 30 minutes tops.
Word Count: 4800 approx.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, as if you didn't know that already. No infringement blah blah blah.
Written For: sorcha_gaia
Prompt: Mid season 7, hurt/comfort, more of Daniel's Ascended memories come out in an interesting/useful way.
Notes: Huge thanks to catspaw_sgjd for a last minute and brilliant beta. She also thought up the rather fabulous title for me. Thanks, Cats. I owe you one. All remaining mistakes are totally mine.
In the dark, cold expanse of space spins a dark, unremarkable planet. On the dark, unremarkable planet there is a dark, coniferous forest. In the dark, coniferous forest stands a dark, forgotten cave. And in the dark, forgotten cave sits a middle-aged USAF Colonel. Scowling.
Darkly.
“Well,” he says as the previously hidden stone door finally stops its grating progress and shuts with a final, satisfied snick, plunging them into complete darkness. “This is familiar.”
~~::~~::~~::~~::~~
They’re only fifty minutes into the mission - chasing up some tip-off on a downed Goa’uld probe that has only yielded a charred hull - when Daniel suddenly straightens and gets that faraway look in his eye. The one that makes Jack’s palms sweat.
“Uh…I’ve been here before,” he announces, his head scanning back and forth, searching for something.
“Déjà vu?” Jack offers with a little smirk, but Daniel is already in his own little world, marching off in the opposite direction from the burned-out hulk on a path it’s obvious only he can see.
“Daniel? Daniel, wait up!” Jack calls after him, receiving a little wave and an indistinct response that he guesses is supposed to be reassuring. “Crap,” he mutters and shrugs his pack on. “Carter, Daniel thinks he’s got something. You and Teal’c stay here and work on the… charcoal. I’ll go and see what he’s got. We’ll radio in every thirty.”
But Carter too is absorbed in her techy headspace and only manages a short, “Yessir,” before plunging back into the ruined craft.
Jack looks to Teal’c for support, but he’s practising being inscrutable, so Jack just rolls his eyes and stamps off after the rapidly disappearing Dr. Jackson.
Sometimes Jack wonders why he bothers to come along at all.
~~::~~::~~::~~::~~
Jack clicks on the light on his P-90 and casts its stark glare quickly around the walls, then back at Daniel who scrunches up his eyes until Jack angles the beam away from him again.
“So,” Jack begins, propping himself against the cave wall as comfortably as he can. His ankle aches like a bitch and has set up a nice counterpoint to the throb in his recently healed shoulder and the pounding in his head. He’d landed badly, having to pull out everything to make it through the rapidly closing and impressively heavy-looking door that had been trying to cut him off from Daniel. “Nice…” he waves his good arm at their prison, “… cave.”
Daniel blinks at him, seems to come back to himself and quickly crosses the distance between them, ripping open his pack and pulling out his med kit. “Um… yes. Are you okay? You fell pretty hard.”
“Yeah, about that. You want to explain why I just had to throw myself through a door to a hidden cave behind my teammate who has over six years field experience, and who should know better than to walk into an open cave mouth without back up?”
Daniel’s hands are busy, turning Jack’s head so he can look at the scrape on his temple. His fingers are warm and competent, and Jack submits to his ministrations without complaint.
“Yes, I know, sorry,” Daniel says, his fingers lingering on Jack’s jaw for a second. “I just… I remembered being here before.” He runs his hands over Jack quickly and efficiently, checking for other injuries. Jack wishes that his aches and pains would quit for a second, so he could properly appreciate the touch. Daniel rarely touches him these days. “Does it hurt anywhere else?”
“Twisted ankle, bruised shoulder, nothing impressive,” Jack replies shortly. “And I’m pretty certain that Carter said that no one from Earth had visited this planet before.”
“I don’t think I was coming from Earth at the time,” Daniel says quietly, popping two ibuprofen into Jack’s palm, then offering him his canteen. “I think I came here when I was…” He makes an elegant, airy wiggle with his fingers.
“Ah,” Jack nods carefully to avoid jiggling his sore head. “You spent a lot of time in caves, did you?”
“I don’t remember, but this is more than that. It’s a…”
Daniel stands and looks around, the dry, sandy ground scraping under his boots. It’s hard to see beyond their immediate vicinity. “Uh…. think ‘light’”.
“Light?” Jack asks, but already the cave is filling with an amber glow, revealing drifts of shining metals, piles of crystals, crates and an assortment of obviously alien technology. It’s all carefully sorted into different heaps and reaches back into the cave as far as Jack can see as he cranes around Daniel’s legs to get a proper look.
“Whoa! Cave of wonders,” Jack says in an awed yet slightly ironic tone.
Daniel turns to him with a surprised grin on his face. “Exactly!”
Jack spends the next few minutes trying to reach Carter and Teal’c, but whatever material the cave is formed from, it isn’t radio friendly. He scans the walls around the door for signs of a release mechanism. He checks his watch and wonders how long it will take before they are found. He takes a quick inventory of their packs to find out what they have. It isn’t like he hasn’t been caught in similar situations before.
When he’s done all that, he attempts to estimate the size of the cave, the oxygen therein and how long it will last, but gives up, because what the hell can he do about it anyway? And there’s always the C4 in his pack if things get desperate but they’re far from that point yet. So he begins to watch his fellow prisoner. After all, there are worse places to be than trapped in a dry, apparently unoccupied cave with Daniel.
Jack’s been watching Daniel a lot since he returned from his trip to eternity. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the horror of watching Daniel’s failing body cease to exist, transformed into a seething ball of light. At first Jack was angry and disappointed with Daniel - it felt like desertion. But the year that he was gone smoothed the edges of that and exposed the grain beneath - sorrow, loneliness, guilt. With hindsight it was easy to think of the things he should have said.
Then Teal’c had blindsided him while Daniel had been struggling to maintain the integrity of his core personality after the Stromos’ survivors had decided to set up shop in his head. As they’d watched and waited helplessly, the Jaffa had revealed details of a conversation he’d had with Daniel about how he’d felt like he’d never belonged anywhere. Despite Teal’c’s calm assurance that Daniel had confirmed that he now knew this to be wrong, the idea had settled in Jack’s gut like a ball of ice, heavy and ever-present. It’s been eating at him ever since. Jack knows that his own actions had a good deal to do with Daniel’s feelings of disassociation.
And now Jack feels like he’s living on borrowed time - just waiting for the day that Daniel decides that he’s had enough of mortality again before he takes off. So he keeps watching, making sure, looking out for signs that Daniel is about to leave them… leave him… again. And waiting for an opportunity, for the right time, for the courage to give Daniel a reason to stay. If he still wants one.
Oblivious to Jack’s scrutiny, Daniel moves from pile to pile in a seemingly random pattern, muttering to himself. His fingers are never still as he gestures, snaps and points, and his tongue peeps out from between his lips as he concentrates.
“I assume you remember that we touch nothing but the lamp,” Jack drawls as Daniel works his way to the closer heaps again.
“That’s… funny,” Daniel nods absently, sparing Jack a short glance.
Jack hauls himself up and limps to the pile next to Daniel’s current one, toeing it cautiously with a booted foot. “So, what are we looking for?”
“Well, I’m not entirely certain, but… should you be on that ankle? With a head wound?”
Jack feels a brief, irrational flash of something warm that he’s been able to distract Daniel from his search for a few seconds. “Relax, Daniel, I feel fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m not completely decrepit yet.”
Daniel rolls his eyes, then gives him a strange, shy smile and turns his attention back to his treasure. “Uh, well, I’m not sure what it is, but I can tell you that if they’d known what they had, they wouldn’t have stashed it away in here.”
“Riiiiiight,” Jack sighs. “Here being…?”
“Well, it’s obvious really.” Daniel waves a hand in an utterly non-descriptive and unhelpful way.
“Humour me,” Jack grates.
“It’s a storage facility. The people who accumulated all this stuff were scavengers. Scrap merchants. They traded components from a number of alien technologies all across this galaxy.”
“Huh! They gonna be along any time soon?” Jack asks, scanning the cave one more time, his hand coming up unconsciously to his rifle.
“Unlikely. They died out several hundred years ago.” Daniel hums to himself and shifts a few larger pieces of material before abandoning the pile in favour of one further back in the cave.
Jack follows him slowly.
“Do you have any idea of what this thing looks like?” Jack complains, watching as Daniel picks up and discards fist-sized components of a dull grey metal.
“Uh… well I think it might be… Can you think it a bit brighter in here?”
Jack obliges. “And what’s with the lights?”
“It’s Ancient tech - this was a shelter before the traders moved in. It’s responding to your genetic marker,” Daniel tells him without pausing.
“Ah, my precious genetic material,” Jack says sourly. He still hasn’t fully come to terms with the fact that he has a clone wandering around back on Earth with all his memories and feelings wrapped in a gangly, teenaged, hormonally-challenged body. Rationally he knows that his secrets are safe with the kid, but it makes him uncomfortable all the same. No one else is supposed to know certain things about Jack O’Neill - even when it’s… himself. A couple of times he caught Jon looking at him with an expression that was too old for his apparent youthfulness - a knowing kind of pity that made Jack’s guts squirm. Other times, he caught Jon looking at Daniel…
“Hah!” Daniel crows, snapping Jack out of his introspection.
He holds up a piece of dark grey machinery that looks indistinguishable from all the pieces that he’s already discarded. He smiles broadly and bounces a bit in excitement. “Found it.”
Jack waits for the rumble of rocks as the ceiling falls in on them, or some booming, disembodied voice telling them that they’ve desecrated a sacred space, or a big ball of rock to chase them down the corridor. But when, to his surprise, it doesn’t come, he hobbles over to stand beside Daniel. “That’s great!” he enthuses. “What does it do?”
“Well, I… it, uh, I have no idea.”
“Well, switch it on and find out,” Jack says patiently.
“I can’t. It’s part of a bigger piece of equipment. You need the other pieces to make it work.” His smile is faltering, his eyebrows drawing together and making that little crease on his forehead that Jack always wants to smooth with his thumb.
“And when you say work, you mean…”
“I…” Daniel’s frown deepens and he blows out an explosive sigh. ”I can’t remember.” The thrill of discovery is lost and he holds his prize limply at his side as he walks back to the entrance to the cave. He puts the thing carefully on his pack, then turns and sits on the floor, his shoulders slumped.
“It’s important, I know that. I just don’t know why,” he says wearily.
Jack limps back and thumps down beside Daniel, sorry to have burst his bubble so soon.
“Hey,” he offers with a bump of his good shoulder. “What do you remember from when you were…?” Jack attempts to replicate Daniel’s gesture from before, but his fingers are squared and thick, and he looks like he’s waving.
“Not much,” Daniel replies, pulling off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. He tips his head back against the wall, his eyes shut. “I’ve tried hypnosis and meditation, but other than that thing with Rya’c and Bra’tac…”
“The thing which incidentally saved their lives,” Jack corrects him pointedly.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Daniel concedes. “I know. It’s just so frustrating. I know it’s all right there, but all I get are tiny snatches of things. Glimpses. Nothing makes sense. It’s like… an echo of a hunch of a feeling.”
“You remember you came to visit me?” He tries to say it casually but knows that he’s failed even as it comes out of his mouth. Jack has been waiting for Daniel to say something about this ever since they found him again. But the memory of it is presumably something else that Daniel had to give up when he was returned to them. Jack figures he owes it to Daniel to fill in any gaps that he can, even the painful ones. Even the ones he prefers not to remember himself.
Daniel opens his eyes and looks sharply at Jack. “Really? No one told me that.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t exactly in my report,” Jack admits, looking away from the directness of Daniel’s gaze.
“How come? What happened?”
“It was when I was captured by Ba’al.”
Daniel is silent, forcing Jack to look at him. His face has hardened, his eyes downcast and his jaw tight. “I read about that,” he mutters.
Swallowing down the lingering bleakness, Jack forces himself to continue. “Yeah… that. Good times. Anyway, after the seventh or eighth time…” Jack glances at Daniel’s face again, and switches tack. “You came to my cell, all insubstantial and cryptic.”
“Insubstantial?”
“Yeah. I threw my shoe through you.”
“Okay,” Daniel replies beginning to sound confused.
“You tried to persuade me to ascend.”
There’s a beat of silence before Daniel asks, “Why didn’t you?”
Jack shrugs, then winces when his shoulder twinges spitefully. “Not really my style, Daniel. Besides, until the end, I didn’t think it was really you. Thought I was going nuts.”
“What changed your mind?”
“The fact that you were sarcastic and as irritating as hell. If you’d been a figment of my imagination, I’d have imagined you less annoying. And quieter.”
That surprises a chuckle out of Daniel. “So you sent me away?”
“Couple times. You kept coming back. Every time they dragged my sorry ass back to the cell, you’d turn up...” Jack waves a hand at him, up and down.
“All insubstantial and cryptic?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry,” Daniel says with a slight smile.
“Nah, nuts or not, it was good to see you. In fact I’m pretty sure that you were the one that got me out of there in the end, despite what you said about not being able to interfere. It was all a little bit too convenient. Not that Carter’s not good, but… I was pretty much finished.”
“I hope it was. Me, I mean.”
Jack shifts a little, trying to find a comfortable position, then steals a glance across at the thoughtful man beside him. “You came to the infirmary too, after, to check up on me. Make sure I got out. I asked you to stay, but you said you couldn’t. Said what you were doing was important.”
“Well that worked out well,” Daniel says sarcastically, his head thumping back against the wall again, a picture of frustration and despondency.
Jack realises with a jolt that this is it - the opportunity he’s been hoping for… dreading… avoiding. This is his chance to tell Daniel what he hoped he’d known all along - that Jack was the reason Daniel should stick around. That here was where he belonged. That all Daniel had to do was push a little harder, dig a little deeper and Jack would have been unable to deny the thing that they’d both been dancing around for years.
He figures if he starts with a little truth, then the bigger ones might just follow easier. “I’m glad you came back, no matter what the reason. It wasn’t the same without you. I know what we do is life and death, survival of the planet and all that, but it’s more fun when you’re along.”
“Fun? You think I’m fun?” Daniel tips his head in Jack’s direction with surprised look on his face that makes Jack’s chest ache a little. How can Daniel not know that Jack would rather spend time with him than any other person in this galaxy? Jack’s done such a good job of hiding those bigger truths that he’s suppressed even the parts that Daniel ought to have known.
“Of course.”
Daniel narrows his eyes. “You told Colonel Edwards that I was a pain in the ass on our last mission,” he accuses.
“Ah, you heard about that?’ Jack wrinkles his nose and makes a mental note to recommend SG-11 for the most humiliating cultural exchanges he can find for the foreseeable future. “I didn’t want him to get any ideas about poaching my anthropologist. If he wants one, he needs to find his own.”
Daniel raises a sceptical eyebrow, but doesn’t challenge him on it. Jack tries to keep his expression impassive, aware that Daniel is still watching him closely. He can almost hear Daniel’s mind working, shuffling things around, making something new from what he already has.
It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. Jack’s glad he’s sitting down already, otherwise he’d probably have fallen over by now.
“How’s the head?” Daniel asks unexpectedly when Jack thinks he’ll have to say something to break the loaded silence that has sprung up between them.
“It was nothing, Daniel, don’t fuss.”
Daniel’s hand is firm against Jack’s jaw, turning him. Jack tips his head accommodatingly to let Daniel see for himself that there’s no bleeding to speak of. Daniel kneels up to get a better view and his thumb settles against Jack’s cheek as he angles the injury into the light again.
“Looks okay. No rakish scars this time, Jack,” he murmurs.
Daniel’s too close. Jack can’t take a breath without it holding his scent and his warmth. His hand on Jack’s face is steady and assured. It takes everything Jack has not to lean into that touch, just the tiniest bit, to remind himself that Daniel is real and here and that despite everything that he’s fucked up, every harsh word he’s spoken and every opportunity he’s let slip by, he has another chance.
“Rakish?” Jack croaks, nowhere near his normal bantering tone. Daniel’s lips are right there at Jack’s eye level as he cranes closer to study Jack’s forehead. As Jack stares, mesmerised, Daniel’s tongue slips out and runs along his bottom lip. With his other hand, Daniel brushes Jack’s hair away from the scrape, sending a bolt of want through Jack strong enough to make his eyes fall closed for a second. Daniel repeats the movement, his fingers a ghosting sensation against Jack’s scalp.
“Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“I mean it. I’m really glad you came back.”
Daniel’s fingers still momentarily, then begin their hypnotic stroking again. “Me too,” he mutters, his lips quirking into a slight smile.
And it would be so easy for Jack to make a joke now, like he has a dozen times before when things have become intense. A single word or gesture now will stop Daniel, put that distance between them that Jack has always insisted on, knowing that once he began down that path he wouldn’t be able to pull himself back.
But the courage he’s been searching for, the answers he’s been unable to avoid are there, at last. And he doesn’t.
Instead, his heart pounding ridiculously in his chest, he leans into Daniel’s palm, not heavily, not overtly, just enough that he hears the subtle rasp of his stubble and Daniel’s slight hitch of breath, then feels the dry press of lips against his temple, quick and tentative.
Daniel hovers, waiting for Jack’s response, his warm breath whispering fast across Jack’s oversensitive skin. And after all these years, after fighting it for so long, after all the reasons why it’s a bad idea, it is amazingly simple to just tip back his head, look directly into Daniel’s eyes and offer up his mouth for a kiss.
Although there’s barely four inches between them, Daniel leans in so slowly that it seems to take an age before their lips brush softly together. Jack has thought about this moment, even when he’d convinced himself that it could never happen. He’s wondered how it would feel, but in all that time he has never considered the sensation of relief that spreads through him, a rolling, building wave of release that Jack can’t contain. He groans low in his throat, a noise somewhere between a sigh and a sob.
Daniel deepens the kiss, his mouth soft and coaxing. Jack follows willingly, parting his lips for Daniel’s tongue to gently trace their shape, trading breaths and chasing the taste of each other.
When he draws back slightly, Jack tries to follow, but Daniel’s hand is on Jack’s good shoulder, holding him in place.
Jack’s whole body aches for more, the pain in his ankle and arm forgotten in the yearning for Daniel’s touch. The hand on his shoulder and the fingers on his jaw are not enough. Jack feels somehow incomplete without his skin and Daniel’s pressed together; he knows it’s ludicrous - how can he miss something he’s never known? - and yet he feels its absence like a physical loss.
Daniel’s eyes are wide, filled with surprise and hunger. Jack gets a glimpse, for a second, of the man he met almost ten years ago - penniless, idealistic and brilliant. But now Daniel has other qualities, hard won and as integral to his personality as anything he’d been before. He’s known loss and despair, joy and hope, and wonder enough to keep even his mind filled.
With an uncertain smile, Daniel ducks his head again - a quick press of lips, there and then gone. Then again. And again. Each time he draws back to watch for Jack’s reaction, as if waiting for a rebuke before ducking forward again and taking another kiss - like he’s stealing them.
“Okay,” he sighs finally, sitting back on his heels and giving himself some distance so he can regard Jack with a wary eye. “What just happened?”
Jack’s grin is unstoppable. “You tell me. You started it.”
“You must have hit your head harder than we thought,” Daniel says, his hands folding over and over themselves in his lap now they are not firmly anchored in Jack’s hair.
“You giving me an out, Daniel?” Jack asks slowly, lifting his chin and daring Daniel to disagree with him.
Daniel shrugs a little, and watches him closely. “Impending death by asphyxiation? Influenced by alien technology?”
Jack shakes his head.
“What then?”
“Had some time to think while you were gone,” Jack explains, as if it were as simple as that.
“I’ve been back for four months, Jack!”
“I never claimed to be a quick study,” Jack responds, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Daniel is practically sitting in is lap, Jack could almost think that none of the previous few minutes had happened, so familiar is the easy pattern of their banter. But Jack’s lips are tingling, and Daniel’s eyes are warm and hopeful.
“So what you’re saying is…” Daniel tips his head and waits.
“Don’t go,” Jack blurts hoarsely, then swallows and tries again. “Don’t go away again. Please,” he adds as an afterthought. He feels kind of sick and breathless, and wonders if that head wound is worse than he thought after all. But the ball of ice in his gut is getting smaller, leaving room for some hope of his own.
Daniels eyebrows are almost comically high on his forehead. “Oh!”
“Yeah,” Jack mutters.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” And he knows he sounds emotionally stunted and… well, a bit of a dick, but saying the right thing has never been his forte, and Daniel seems to be getting it anyway without his input.
He’s getting it so well, in fact, that now he really is sitting in Jack’s lap, his thighs either side of Jack’s and his hands framing Jack’s face, kissing him long and wet and dirty.
Jack doesn’t know what to process first; the weight and solidity of Daniel’s body against his, the heat and slickness of his tongue, the perfect ache in his own groin as he hardens or the fact that the cave is getting brighter and brighter, the light brilliant enough to register even through his closed eyelids.
When Daniel moves to kiss his jaw and press his nose to his neck, Jack breathes and opens his eyes. And it’s not that the door has opened by itself, or that Carter and Teal’c have found a way in, but the cave itself is glittering with golden radiance, apparently in response to Jack’s own mood. And how cool is that?
But what he says is, “This is such a bad idea.”
The effect is instant. Daniel stiffens, draws back slowly and Jack watches as his face becomes utterly blank. Shock, Jack thinks distantly.
“Oh! No... not this.” Jack says quickly, and he gestures between them. “This is great! I meant... this.” He flaps a hand at the cave, the piles of treasure, the door that Carter and Teal’c will be appearing through shortly.
Daniel’s shoulders loosen and he smiles a little shakily. “Right,” he sighs. Wariness still lingers in the lines around his eyes and there’s a subtle vulnerability in his gaze that Jack only now realises has been there for years, that he’s been missing it all along. “So…”
“Later.”
“Okay,” Daniel responds quietly, climbing awkwardly off Jack’s lap and finding his glasses.
Jack grabs his wrist tight, forcing him to make eye contact. “Promise?”
Of course it isn’t really a question. What he means is, “I promise,” and it’s been a long time since he said that. He thinks it’s something he’ll need to work up to. But he will.
Daniel nods and his smile becomes more certain. He dusts off his knees, stands up and holds a hand out for Jack.
“So what we need is the magic word,” Jack muses, letting himself be pulled up to face the door again. He scratches the back of his neck and tries to ignore the bulge in his pants while he’s trying to get a glimpse of the bulge in Daniel’s.
“I think you’re getting your stories mixed up. That’s Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” Daniel tells him, running a hand around the seal.
“What, so no ‘Open sesame’?”
The door obediently begins to slide back, making Daniel turn toward him slowly, caught between an irritated glare and a disbelieving grin.
Their teammates are framed in the cave entrance. Carter’s hand is poised over her laptop, but it’s clear from her owlish blinking that she had nothing to do with the door. Teal’c simply looks on with his habitual slightly bored expression.
“Hey guys!” Jack grins.
“Sir, Daniel, is everything okay?”
Daniel steps back to let the others see inside. “We’re fine. I remembered this, uh…”
“Cave of Wonders,” Jack supplies for him. “Carter, we need to dial back in and request personnel to secure this position.”
“Yes, sir,” she replies, her eyes going wide at the piles and piles of doohickeys and thingamajigs. Jack can see her fingers itching to get in there, but he has a date with a hot bath, an ace bandage and an itinerant archaeologist who’s about to become a lot more… tinerant.
“O’Neill, you are injured,” Teal’c remarks. “Do you require assistance?”
Jack hops over to Daniel, who has recovered enough to have collected his pack and his treasure, and throws an arm around his shoulder. “It’s okay, Daniel’s already volunteered to get me back to the infirmary. You guys can wait here while we get the General to send a team in.”
Daniel looks surprised, but slides an arm around Jack’s waist. “Smooth,” he says quietly as he helps Jack out of the cave.
“You have no idea,” Jack murmurs.
And it may be another three years before they realise that Daniel’s discovery is actually a power interface for Arthur’s Mantle, critical to their fight against the Ori and ultimately the survival of the planet, but Jack will always consider that the second most important thing they found that day for several reasons.
But that, as they say, is another story.
Fin