SG1 Schmooplets
Look, I WARNED you guys! Remember that big list of things I wanted? Here they are. Disclaimer: These come with no artistic integrity, no connections between ficlets, no warranties as to characterization or plausibility, and no pretense as to quality. Hell, they aren't even proofread. One involves curtains. Read at your own risk.
Shopping for condo furnishings in DC (Season 8, PG)
"There is no way I need curtains."
"Yes, you do."
"The damn condo comes with perfectly good blinds. There is no way I'm buying curtains."
"Blinds make you paranoid."
"They do not. What?"
"Yes. You're always glancing at them, and checking to see if they're closed, and if you can close them any tighter. They make you paranoid."
"Well, that's because they're… they're…" Jack waved his hand in a gesture that was meant to sum up the ridiculousness of the concept, but probably only looked like flailing. "Full of holes! Little spaces between every slat!"
"Which is ridiculous, but I'm not here to talk you out of your blind paranoia, only to work around it. I have never once gotten you naked in front of a window with blinds, so you need curtains."
Jack blinked. "Wait, this is about us getting naked?"
"Well, for God's sake, what else would it be about?"
"Huh," Jack said. "Right, curtains it is."
The one where Jack goes all out and gets down on one knee (post-series, PG-13)
The restaurant was perfect; low music, great food, wine, privacy, lushly understated décor, attentive but unobtrusive waiter. The whole damn evening was perfect, and the only problem was that Daniel didn't seem to actually be enjoying it.
Oh, he obviously enjoyed the food and they never objected to each other's company. But Daniel kept shooting quick, paranoid glances around, and giving Jack looks of slightly suspicious befuddlement, until Jack finally reached across the table to take his hand and brush his thumb gently over Daniel's knuckles.
"Jack, what the hell is going on?"
"I'm not allowed to take you out?"
"Of course. But someplace like this-- it makes me nervous about what you're trying to apologize for."
"Nothing," and maybe this whole thing was just a mistake, maybe Daniel wasn't on the same page with him at all here. "It's not like that."
Daniel took a few more bites, then looked up suddenly. When he spoke, it was with the wondering tone that always came when he solved a puzzle. "This is a retirement thing. Taking me someplace overtly romantic, because you can now."
For someone so brilliant, he could be incredibly dense. "Well, yeah. And is that… a bad thing?"
"No. Not at all. No, it's a -- Good, it's a good thing." A blush was just starting to creep over Daniel's cheeks. Maybe this was okay. It was time. Now or never. Man up, sink or swim, do or die, ask or don't ask but make a fucking decision, O'Neill, and make it now.
He reached his other hand out to capture both of Daniel's and squeezed firmly until Daniel looked up to meet his eyes, until he was sure he had his attention.
"Daniel, I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
Daniel dropped his eyes too quickly, body language radiating avoidance and discomfort. "But?" he asked, his voice tinged with dread.
Fuck. How the hell do these things go so wrong? Why was it so damn difficult with Daniel?
"No but. What? I don't -- no but."
"Okay." Daniel spoke a little too fast, but at least lifted his eyes back to Jack's. "It's just that… well, I thought that we were already doing that."
"We are. It's." Daniel had always been able to do this to him, since the first time they met. Derail his conversational train, make the impossible seem natural and the simple seem unimaginably complex. Jack gave up, and instead slid the ring from his pocket and set it very carefully on the table beside their clasped hands.
Daniel went very still.
"I would get down on one knee," Jack started, and Daniel interrupted with a gentle laugh in his eyes.
"Oh, better not." Daniel's smile encompassed it all, somehow: The knee replacement, but also all the constraints they had lived under all these years, all their adjustments and compromises and the ways they had carved this thing between them out from the all the competing requirements of the most important jobs they would ever do. That entire metaphor, sketched in the slight twist at one corner of his mouth.
"I wanted to ask you before the big shindig tomorrow," Jack explained. "So you can wear it then and tell people, if you want. Or wait and give me an answer later, if you prefer."
Daniel freed one hand from Jack's grasp and laid it by the ring, not quite touching. "Do you want people at the retirement party to know?"
"Daniel, I want to take out a god-damned billboard."
Daniel ducked his head then, head jerking slightly with a silent laugh. He picked up the ring and looked up again to meet Jack's eyes as he slid it very deliberately on.
The one where they hold a tiny little hush-hush ceremony with just SG1 that gets out of hand (Season 7, PG)
Jack took a deep breath and looked across the group of people in his living room, Sam and Janet and Cassie on the couch, Teal'c in the chair beside them. He ran his mind back over what he wanted to say. He wanted it to sound rehearsed, or at least better rehearsed than it was (because even saying it once, to his mirror, had seemed like a temping-fate jinx of the very worst kind). Hell, he wanted to sound suave, but at least not stupid would work.
Beside him, Daniel set down his champagne flute. When he spoke he didn't sound rehearsed, of course. Just smoothly, calmly, confidently off-the-cuff in a way Jack couldn't imitate if he rehearsed a hundred years.
"Thank you for coming. Normally something like this would serve the purpose of-- well, of declaring ourselves to the community. Of telling the world. We can't do that, but nevertheless, the urge is still there. You are our closest friends, and we wanted you to hear this."
When Daniel turned to him, the smile on his face was so wide and warm and sincere and utterly happy that Jack nearly surged forward and kissed him right then. He didn't know how he was going to speak.
Just at that moment, the doorbell rang.
Jack just about jumped a mile, the shot of pure adrenaline mixing with his already heightened emotions and nearly putting him out of his skin. He looked around frantically, eyes scanning the champagne and flowers (one bouquet, understated, still enough to raise eyebrows). He didn't often freeze like this under stress.
Sam had already scooped up the four champagne flutes in one hand and the two Coke bottles in the other. "Go answer the door, sir," she said urgently. "We'll take care of it." Sure enough, Janet was already moving as well, whisking the flowers away to the spare bedroom.
His front step was occupied by Lieutenant Tyler and Sergeant Call, most recently of SG-14, in impeccable dress blues. They both came sharply to attention when he opened the door, and he managed to keep his cool enough to sketch them a brief salute back.
"Lieutenant. Sergeant." If military speak was good for nothing else, it at least excelled at completely meaningless filler verbiage.
Call handed him a stiff envelope that was obviously a card and said, "Congratulations, sir," and Jack figured he was obviously about three steps behind this conversation. Tyler was looking him up and down with a somewhat baffled expression on his face, eyes lingering on his slacks and shirt before saying, "Pardon the uniforms, sir. We weren't clear on the dress code," and this conversation just got more and more bizarre. Tyler stepped forward confidently, and Jack stood aside to let him in.
The afternoon only got more surreal, as Tyler and Call were quickly followed by Lieutenant Ortiz of SG-9, then Captain Vandenberg of SG-13, also with a card from his team, then Sergeant Siler and a gatetech Jack only dimly recognized, then two nurses bringing him a bottle of wine, then Lieutenant Phipps with the congratulations of SG-7 and regrets from SG-8, who were currently offworld.
Daniel had slipped smoothly into the role of diplomat, circulating and exchanging carefully calibrated quantities of small talk with everyone. Every few seconds he shot Jack a slightly panicked look, and Jack tried to convey a sense of baffled helplessness over the heads of the increasing crowd.
When Walter Harriman came up the walk, it all became clear.
"You!" Jack leveled an accusing finger. "This is your fault."
Walter looked excruciatingly nervous.
"Let me guess: your intentions were good?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know what they say about the road to hell, don't you?"
"Sir."
Ah. Another man who had learned the uses of military verbal filler.
"You're forgiven," Jack said, and let him in. Harriman visibly switched gears, then, and instead of joining the party he hustled Jack back toward his bedroom, asking him why he was opening his own door and how long it would take him to change and if there were any plans he should be aware of. Jack wasn't sure why Harriman should be aware of anything, given recent evidence, and pointing out that he wasn't planning on changing seemed about as much use as arguing with the tide, and he was altogether glad to be away from the door. So.
About twenty minutes of very slight hyperventilation later, Jack heard Daniel's voice at his door.
"What do you mean, he's not supposed to see me? When did I become the-- You know, just let me in."
Daniel came up behind him, and Jack concentrated on adjusting his tie for the seventeenth time.
"You look great. But you know, I really didn't care if you wore the uniform or not," Daniel said.
"Funny. You'd think what we wanted might have some relevance here."
"Oh God. No, that's really not the way this thing works, is it?"
"Not so much." Jack finally dropped his hands from the tie. "What's going on out there?"
"Lots of people. Nyan, Rothman, Davis, Ferretti. Walter set somebody to handle the door, somebody else to bring your folding chairs up from the basement, somebody else to put on music, and somebody else to handle the wine and champagne. He says we're ready."
"I'm a little scared of that man."
"Only a little?" Daniel asked, and Jack surprised himself with his sudden laughter. It felt good. Genuine. He clapped Daniel's arm as he laughed, and was almost startled by the way the tension physically drained out of him.
"Jack." Daniel's voice was urgent, important. "You don't have to go out there. This wasn't what you signed up for, at all. I can send everybody home right now and it doesn’t change a thing, I swear."
"No. God, Daniel, I want this. It isn't that."
Daniel just looked at him, the what is it, then? hanging unspoken between them. It didn't really need to be asked; Daniel could read that easily enough. "You know they all had figured it out by now."
"I know. That doesn’t mean this can happen."
"They want you happy. Maybe just don't examine the gift-horse too closely?"
Jack nodded, and reached out to kiss Daniel. Daniel stopped him smoothly, the very lightest touch of a finger to his lips. "Hold that thought. Save it for out there."
A few short minutes later, Jack stood in front of the crowd, and Daniel stepped up to join him, raising a hand for silence and then looking around in the same baffled awe that Jack knew was reflected in his own eyes.
"Thank you all for coming. You weren't invited, not because we didn't want you here, but because we thought it wouldn't be possible," Daniel started. As he spoke, his eyes moved over the crowd with the ease of a practiced public speaker, but his hand slipped sideways to find Jack's. Jack held on for dear life, and Daniel gave him three deep, slow squeezes.
"Sometimes, it's good to be proven wrong."
The one where don't ask, don't tell is repealed and they are married practically before the ink is dry (post-series, PG)
The memo was the second paper in the stack on his desk when he walked in that morning. By 8:05 he had read it, and by 8:06 he was being put through to Dr. Jackson's office.
Daniel's voice was slurred, likely at the tail-end of an ill-advised all nighter, but the sudden, melting pleasure in the way he said Jack's name made Jack's heart thump hard.
"When are you offworld next?"
"Uh…" The slight creak on the line would be Daniel spinning in his chair to find his calendar. "Three days, as far as I know."
"Daniel, will you fly to California today and marry me?"
"Yes," Daniel said, instantly and without hesitation, without even a second to process. It sounded like an answer he had known for a very long time. Then his brain caught up. "Jack, what-- how in the world--"
"Nice thing about being at the Pentagon, is I get my memos before you people." It wasn't an answer, only a statement that there was an answer, not random career suicide. Apparently that was good enough for Daniel.
"What should I tell Landry?"
"Tell him the truth. And if he goes nuts, make him check his email. Just get yourself on the next plane to, well, where do you want?"
"San Diego?" Daniel offered. "It's damned cold here right now."
"Okay. Get yourself on the next flight to San Diego, with a suit and an overnight bag. I'll handle everything else."
It sounded like Daniel was clicking away at his computer, already looking at flights. But he would probably be checking his email, too. Jack stayed on the line 'til he saw it.
"Oh," said Daniel. "Wow."
"Yeah," Jack agreed, around the lump in his throat that was, God, thirty-five years of his life and six years of his life with Daniel, and of the thousands of impossible things that had happened since he first stepped through that gate, this was the most impossible of all. "Wow."
The sex with lots of talking and lots of endearments and lots of "I love you"s. (Season 4, R)
Jack clenched his hands around the back of Daniel's head, too far gone to try and stop, and came with a stifled groan. It pulsed through him in intense waves, making every muscle in his body clench and spasm and leaving him wrung out and limp. Daniel eased him through it, lips and tongue moving gradually and ever more gently until he finally held completely still, letting Jack come down in a mouth turned soft and tender.
"Jesus," Jack whispered.
Daniel pulled off then, and crawled his way up Jack's body to settle against his side in a long, warm, familiar drape. He kissed Jack very slightly, closed-mouthed.
"No. Try again."
"Holy shit?"
"Uh-uh." Daniel turned his head slightly, letting his moist lips slide over the skin of Jack's jaw. "Still not what I'm looking for."
Jack wrapped one arm around Daniel to caress the back of his head and went for it. "I love you."
The sudden stillness was frightening. Then Daniel let out a long, shaky breath.
"What I was looking for was something like 'let me catch my breath and I'll repay the favor.' I wouldn't --" Jack felt the slight shudder run all the way through Daniel, felt the convulsive squeeze of his hand on Jack's side. "I wouldn't push, on the other thing. If you're not comfortable."
"But it's true," Jack whispered. "And it was damned well my turn."
"But I never--" Jack just looked at him, and Daniel gave a slight laugh. "At least, never that I thought you could understand. I mean, I avoided French, Spanish, Italian…"
"Ich lieben dich, right? Or something."
"Liebe," Daniel corrected automatically, lips sliding lightly over the skin of Jack's neck. Then: "I have got to stop underestimating you."
"Please don't. I work hard for that. Just English from me, I'm afraid. But it's true."
Daniel pushed himself up off the mattress to prop himself up over Jack. He looked choked, like he was fighting words that he couldn't quite get out. Jack tried to pull him down for a kiss, but Daniel just locked his elbows.
So Jack jabbed him in the inside of the elbow, just enough to break the lock. Daniel collapsed on his chest with a startled "oof," and Jack wrapped him up tight in his arms before he could get away again. They kissed, long and slow and wet and open, and Jack moved their hips together in easy rolling surges.
"Hey, Daniel," he said, when they finally broke apart. "I think I've got my breath back now."
Oh my God, I feel SO MUCH better now. Except for the fact that my spn_nostalgia is now due in two days and I am still procrastinating it. *hangs head* But at least I think I am in a mental place for happy brotherly banter now. If I had tried to write it before these, it would have been Incest-induced Guilt Angst Of Doom.
Shopping for condo furnishings in DC (Season 8, PG)
"There is no way I need curtains."
"Yes, you do."
"The damn condo comes with perfectly good blinds. There is no way I'm buying curtains."
"Blinds make you paranoid."
"They do not. What?"
"Yes. You're always glancing at them, and checking to see if they're closed, and if you can close them any tighter. They make you paranoid."
"Well, that's because they're… they're…" Jack waved his hand in a gesture that was meant to sum up the ridiculousness of the concept, but probably only looked like flailing. "Full of holes! Little spaces between every slat!"
"Which is ridiculous, but I'm not here to talk you out of your blind paranoia, only to work around it. I have never once gotten you naked in front of a window with blinds, so you need curtains."
Jack blinked. "Wait, this is about us getting naked?"
"Well, for God's sake, what else would it be about?"
"Huh," Jack said. "Right, curtains it is."
The one where Jack goes all out and gets down on one knee (post-series, PG-13)
The restaurant was perfect; low music, great food, wine, privacy, lushly understated décor, attentive but unobtrusive waiter. The whole damn evening was perfect, and the only problem was that Daniel didn't seem to actually be enjoying it.
Oh, he obviously enjoyed the food and they never objected to each other's company. But Daniel kept shooting quick, paranoid glances around, and giving Jack looks of slightly suspicious befuddlement, until Jack finally reached across the table to take his hand and brush his thumb gently over Daniel's knuckles.
"Jack, what the hell is going on?"
"I'm not allowed to take you out?"
"Of course. But someplace like this-- it makes me nervous about what you're trying to apologize for."
"Nothing," and maybe this whole thing was just a mistake, maybe Daniel wasn't on the same page with him at all here. "It's not like that."
Daniel took a few more bites, then looked up suddenly. When he spoke, it was with the wondering tone that always came when he solved a puzzle. "This is a retirement thing. Taking me someplace overtly romantic, because you can now."
For someone so brilliant, he could be incredibly dense. "Well, yeah. And is that… a bad thing?"
"No. Not at all. No, it's a -- Good, it's a good thing." A blush was just starting to creep over Daniel's cheeks. Maybe this was okay. It was time. Now or never. Man up, sink or swim, do or die, ask or don't ask but make a fucking decision, O'Neill, and make it now.
He reached his other hand out to capture both of Daniel's and squeezed firmly until Daniel looked up to meet his eyes, until he was sure he had his attention.
"Daniel, I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
Daniel dropped his eyes too quickly, body language radiating avoidance and discomfort. "But?" he asked, his voice tinged with dread.
Fuck. How the hell do these things go so wrong? Why was it so damn difficult with Daniel?
"No but. What? I don't -- no but."
"Okay." Daniel spoke a little too fast, but at least lifted his eyes back to Jack's. "It's just that… well, I thought that we were already doing that."
"We are. It's." Daniel had always been able to do this to him, since the first time they met. Derail his conversational train, make the impossible seem natural and the simple seem unimaginably complex. Jack gave up, and instead slid the ring from his pocket and set it very carefully on the table beside their clasped hands.
Daniel went very still.
"I would get down on one knee," Jack started, and Daniel interrupted with a gentle laugh in his eyes.
"Oh, better not." Daniel's smile encompassed it all, somehow: The knee replacement, but also all the constraints they had lived under all these years, all their adjustments and compromises and the ways they had carved this thing between them out from the all the competing requirements of the most important jobs they would ever do. That entire metaphor, sketched in the slight twist at one corner of his mouth.
"I wanted to ask you before the big shindig tomorrow," Jack explained. "So you can wear it then and tell people, if you want. Or wait and give me an answer later, if you prefer."
Daniel freed one hand from Jack's grasp and laid it by the ring, not quite touching. "Do you want people at the retirement party to know?"
"Daniel, I want to take out a god-damned billboard."
Daniel ducked his head then, head jerking slightly with a silent laugh. He picked up the ring and looked up again to meet Jack's eyes as he slid it very deliberately on.
The one where they hold a tiny little hush-hush ceremony with just SG1 that gets out of hand (Season 7, PG)
Jack took a deep breath and looked across the group of people in his living room, Sam and Janet and Cassie on the couch, Teal'c in the chair beside them. He ran his mind back over what he wanted to say. He wanted it to sound rehearsed, or at least better rehearsed than it was (because even saying it once, to his mirror, had seemed like a temping-fate jinx of the very worst kind). Hell, he wanted to sound suave, but at least not stupid would work.
Beside him, Daniel set down his champagne flute. When he spoke he didn't sound rehearsed, of course. Just smoothly, calmly, confidently off-the-cuff in a way Jack couldn't imitate if he rehearsed a hundred years.
"Thank you for coming. Normally something like this would serve the purpose of-- well, of declaring ourselves to the community. Of telling the world. We can't do that, but nevertheless, the urge is still there. You are our closest friends, and we wanted you to hear this."
When Daniel turned to him, the smile on his face was so wide and warm and sincere and utterly happy that Jack nearly surged forward and kissed him right then. He didn't know how he was going to speak.
Just at that moment, the doorbell rang.
Jack just about jumped a mile, the shot of pure adrenaline mixing with his already heightened emotions and nearly putting him out of his skin. He looked around frantically, eyes scanning the champagne and flowers (one bouquet, understated, still enough to raise eyebrows). He didn't often freeze like this under stress.
Sam had already scooped up the four champagne flutes in one hand and the two Coke bottles in the other. "Go answer the door, sir," she said urgently. "We'll take care of it." Sure enough, Janet was already moving as well, whisking the flowers away to the spare bedroom.
His front step was occupied by Lieutenant Tyler and Sergeant Call, most recently of SG-14, in impeccable dress blues. They both came sharply to attention when he opened the door, and he managed to keep his cool enough to sketch them a brief salute back.
"Lieutenant. Sergeant." If military speak was good for nothing else, it at least excelled at completely meaningless filler verbiage.
Call handed him a stiff envelope that was obviously a card and said, "Congratulations, sir," and Jack figured he was obviously about three steps behind this conversation. Tyler was looking him up and down with a somewhat baffled expression on his face, eyes lingering on his slacks and shirt before saying, "Pardon the uniforms, sir. We weren't clear on the dress code," and this conversation just got more and more bizarre. Tyler stepped forward confidently, and Jack stood aside to let him in.
The afternoon only got more surreal, as Tyler and Call were quickly followed by Lieutenant Ortiz of SG-9, then Captain Vandenberg of SG-13, also with a card from his team, then Sergeant Siler and a gatetech Jack only dimly recognized, then two nurses bringing him a bottle of wine, then Lieutenant Phipps with the congratulations of SG-7 and regrets from SG-8, who were currently offworld.
Daniel had slipped smoothly into the role of diplomat, circulating and exchanging carefully calibrated quantities of small talk with everyone. Every few seconds he shot Jack a slightly panicked look, and Jack tried to convey a sense of baffled helplessness over the heads of the increasing crowd.
When Walter Harriman came up the walk, it all became clear.
"You!" Jack leveled an accusing finger. "This is your fault."
Walter looked excruciatingly nervous.
"Let me guess: your intentions were good?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know what they say about the road to hell, don't you?"
"Sir."
Ah. Another man who had learned the uses of military verbal filler.
"You're forgiven," Jack said, and let him in. Harriman visibly switched gears, then, and instead of joining the party he hustled Jack back toward his bedroom, asking him why he was opening his own door and how long it would take him to change and if there were any plans he should be aware of. Jack wasn't sure why Harriman should be aware of anything, given recent evidence, and pointing out that he wasn't planning on changing seemed about as much use as arguing with the tide, and he was altogether glad to be away from the door. So.
About twenty minutes of very slight hyperventilation later, Jack heard Daniel's voice at his door.
"What do you mean, he's not supposed to see me? When did I become the-- You know, just let me in."
Daniel came up behind him, and Jack concentrated on adjusting his tie for the seventeenth time.
"You look great. But you know, I really didn't care if you wore the uniform or not," Daniel said.
"Funny. You'd think what we wanted might have some relevance here."
"Oh God. No, that's really not the way this thing works, is it?"
"Not so much." Jack finally dropped his hands from the tie. "What's going on out there?"
"Lots of people. Nyan, Rothman, Davis, Ferretti. Walter set somebody to handle the door, somebody else to bring your folding chairs up from the basement, somebody else to put on music, and somebody else to handle the wine and champagne. He says we're ready."
"I'm a little scared of that man."
"Only a little?" Daniel asked, and Jack surprised himself with his sudden laughter. It felt good. Genuine. He clapped Daniel's arm as he laughed, and was almost startled by the way the tension physically drained out of him.
"Jack." Daniel's voice was urgent, important. "You don't have to go out there. This wasn't what you signed up for, at all. I can send everybody home right now and it doesn’t change a thing, I swear."
"No. God, Daniel, I want this. It isn't that."
Daniel just looked at him, the what is it, then? hanging unspoken between them. It didn't really need to be asked; Daniel could read that easily enough. "You know they all had figured it out by now."
"I know. That doesn’t mean this can happen."
"They want you happy. Maybe just don't examine the gift-horse too closely?"
Jack nodded, and reached out to kiss Daniel. Daniel stopped him smoothly, the very lightest touch of a finger to his lips. "Hold that thought. Save it for out there."
A few short minutes later, Jack stood in front of the crowd, and Daniel stepped up to join him, raising a hand for silence and then looking around in the same baffled awe that Jack knew was reflected in his own eyes.
"Thank you all for coming. You weren't invited, not because we didn't want you here, but because we thought it wouldn't be possible," Daniel started. As he spoke, his eyes moved over the crowd with the ease of a practiced public speaker, but his hand slipped sideways to find Jack's. Jack held on for dear life, and Daniel gave him three deep, slow squeezes.
"Sometimes, it's good to be proven wrong."
The one where don't ask, don't tell is repealed and they are married practically before the ink is dry (post-series, PG)
The memo was the second paper in the stack on his desk when he walked in that morning. By 8:05 he had read it, and by 8:06 he was being put through to Dr. Jackson's office.
Daniel's voice was slurred, likely at the tail-end of an ill-advised all nighter, but the sudden, melting pleasure in the way he said Jack's name made Jack's heart thump hard.
"When are you offworld next?"
"Uh…" The slight creak on the line would be Daniel spinning in his chair to find his calendar. "Three days, as far as I know."
"Daniel, will you fly to California today and marry me?"
"Yes," Daniel said, instantly and without hesitation, without even a second to process. It sounded like an answer he had known for a very long time. Then his brain caught up. "Jack, what-- how in the world--"
"Nice thing about being at the Pentagon, is I get my memos before you people." It wasn't an answer, only a statement that there was an answer, not random career suicide. Apparently that was good enough for Daniel.
"What should I tell Landry?"
"Tell him the truth. And if he goes nuts, make him check his email. Just get yourself on the next plane to, well, where do you want?"
"San Diego?" Daniel offered. "It's damned cold here right now."
"Okay. Get yourself on the next flight to San Diego, with a suit and an overnight bag. I'll handle everything else."
It sounded like Daniel was clicking away at his computer, already looking at flights. But he would probably be checking his email, too. Jack stayed on the line 'til he saw it.
"Oh," said Daniel. "Wow."
"Yeah," Jack agreed, around the lump in his throat that was, God, thirty-five years of his life and six years of his life with Daniel, and of the thousands of impossible things that had happened since he first stepped through that gate, this was the most impossible of all. "Wow."
The sex with lots of talking and lots of endearments and lots of "I love you"s. (Season 4, R)
Jack clenched his hands around the back of Daniel's head, too far gone to try and stop, and came with a stifled groan. It pulsed through him in intense waves, making every muscle in his body clench and spasm and leaving him wrung out and limp. Daniel eased him through it, lips and tongue moving gradually and ever more gently until he finally held completely still, letting Jack come down in a mouth turned soft and tender.
"Jesus," Jack whispered.
Daniel pulled off then, and crawled his way up Jack's body to settle against his side in a long, warm, familiar drape. He kissed Jack very slightly, closed-mouthed.
"No. Try again."
"Holy shit?"
"Uh-uh." Daniel turned his head slightly, letting his moist lips slide over the skin of Jack's jaw. "Still not what I'm looking for."
Jack wrapped one arm around Daniel to caress the back of his head and went for it. "I love you."
The sudden stillness was frightening. Then Daniel let out a long, shaky breath.
"What I was looking for was something like 'let me catch my breath and I'll repay the favor.' I wouldn't --" Jack felt the slight shudder run all the way through Daniel, felt the convulsive squeeze of his hand on Jack's side. "I wouldn't push, on the other thing. If you're not comfortable."
"But it's true," Jack whispered. "And it was damned well my turn."
"But I never--" Jack just looked at him, and Daniel gave a slight laugh. "At least, never that I thought you could understand. I mean, I avoided French, Spanish, Italian…"
"Ich lieben dich, right? Or something."
"Liebe," Daniel corrected automatically, lips sliding lightly over the skin of Jack's neck. Then: "I have got to stop underestimating you."
"Please don't. I work hard for that. Just English from me, I'm afraid. But it's true."
Daniel pushed himself up off the mattress to prop himself up over Jack. He looked choked, like he was fighting words that he couldn't quite get out. Jack tried to pull him down for a kiss, but Daniel just locked his elbows.
So Jack jabbed him in the inside of the elbow, just enough to break the lock. Daniel collapsed on his chest with a startled "oof," and Jack wrapped him up tight in his arms before he could get away again. They kissed, long and slow and wet and open, and Jack moved their hips together in easy rolling surges.
"Hey, Daniel," he said, when they finally broke apart. "I think I've got my breath back now."
Oh my God, I feel SO MUCH better now. Except for the fact that my spn_nostalgia is now due in two days and I am still procrastinating it. *hangs head* But at least I think I am in a mental place for happy brotherly banter now. If I had tried to write it before these, it would have been Incest-induced Guilt Angst Of Doom.