FIC: with all our sun-bleached history [SG-1, Cam/Daniel, Daniel/Vala, R]
Back to Part One.
They've talked about Cameron's childhood with his grandmother in the mountains of North Carolina, about the fact that Daniel would go back to Egypt in a split-second, without even thinking about the fact that he still thinks of Alexandria as home, if he could live anywhere in the world. Daniel knows Cam as well as he knows Sam or Teal'c, less well than he knows Jack, better than he ever knew Vala.
Cameron has never said that he loves Daniel; there have been no words of forever. Cameron's affection is as straightforward and honest as the fact that he's there, standing in Daniel's kitchen frying chicken, standing in the rain with Daniel while Daniel freaks out.
Here I am, I am here, I have not left, this means I care.
It's one of the things Daniel appreciates most about Cam -- one of the things he appreciated most about Jack. There isn't any need to say anything, or anything meaningful. The act of being there is enough for them. It says everything they want to say, and more.
Cam is quietly sturdy, quietly trustworthy, and he watches Daniel carefully with all that quiet.
The thing Daniel always forgets, though, is that Cam is sharply perceptive, underneath the easygoing, silent good ol' boy façade that he wears to keep people from looking too closely at him.
Coupled with the silent companionship that made Mitchell so easy to be with, Daniel knows that it's the perception that makes Mitchell interesting. Surprising.
"If you want to keep standing in the rain, Jackson, that's fine by me," Cam says. Daniel blinks out of his thoughts, and Cameron is standing less than a foot from Daniel. Water's dripping off his hat, and his collar, and the sunglasses perched on the end of his nose, but Cam's face is serious and he's looking straight at Daniel. "But did you notice that she's still wearing those leather pants?"
He leers at Daniel over his sunglasses, and then he takes them off and shoves them in his pocket and says, "You're the one who usually does the talking around here. This speechless act is kind of freaking me out, if it's appropriately grunt and scratch to say so."
It took four months of awkward phone conversations before he forgave Jack for leaving, before Daniel learned how to exist in his own life without Jack at his elbow nearly 24 hours a day. Some days he gets up and it's hard to even move because he still misses Sha're so desperately -- some days he gets up and he can't remember what his mother looked like.
Mitchell has never disappeared. Mitchell takes up a lot of space, in a normal way. He sprawls on the couch, he leaves his dirty clothes on the bathroom floor. He laughs loudly at stupid sitcoms on the television.
Daniel always knows he's there -- always knows where Mitchell is, when he isn't there.
Mitchell's surprising, and routine.
"People who leave stay gone," Daniel says.
Cam rolls his eyes and grabs Daniel's elbow. "You can be philosophical all you want as long as you do it somewhere dry."
Jack said that Daniel was a professional people-watcher. Drop Daniel anywhere and he'd be able to tell you fifty things about the people who passed him within ten minutes -- and Daniel had always thought that he could look at strangers and see their secrets, but he looked at the people he loved and he couldn't put them together into anything that made sense of the pieces.
He looks at Mitchell, dripping in the rain, and sees the whole picture for the first time: affection, worry, amused annoyance, written clear on Cameron's face as though Daniel had printed them there himself.
Vala isn't a stranger. Cameron, hand strong on Daniel's elbow, isn't a stranger, either. He walks through the front door of Vala's strange little house and thinks of Cam's hand on his elbow the day that Vala disappeared. Cameron's not a touchy-feely kind of guy and Daniel appreciates that, but Cameron's fingers feel like an anchor -- a port in a thunderstorm.
Sam and Keeley look up when they walk in. Vala's head stays down, her eyes trained on her tea cup. "Everything okay?" Sam says.
"Everything is wet," Mitchell says. "Jackson thought it was letting up, but then somebody dumped a swimming pool's worth of water down the back of my shirt, so either these people have really strange senses of humor and portable swimming pools, or it's still raining."
"Speaking of people," Sam says. "Vala, where is everyone else? There were quite a few people on what we got from the UAV. Did something happen?"
Vala smiles, genuinely pleased with herself, and says, "Me."
Daniel raises an eyebrow at her before he realizes what he's done, and she meets his eyes for the first time since they stumbled into a mud pit passing for a planet. She smirks, and he knows the expression, because it's a little sad and a lot cat-that-got-the-cream -- and it's sadder than the last time he saw her.
The questions he wants to ask are written strong in her sadness. I thought you were happy, were almost happy -- why weren't you? Why aren't you?
What could I have done to make you happy?
And he thinks, if she came back -- he would not be able to choose, between Vala's surprise and Cameron's steadiness, between Vala's excitement and Cam's reliability.
Or he would choose -- and he thinks, damp and cold and unsettled, that he would choose Mitchell. He would choose Cameron.
Mitchell hasn't left. He's taken up space in Daniel's life, noisy and messy, and he's stayed where he's moved in. Daniel couldn't move Mitchell out of his life if he wanted to, and watching Vala, missing Vala, wanting Vala, he realizes that he doesn't want to move Mitchell anywhere. Daniel's settled.
He's found someplace that he can stay -- someone who'll stay with him.
Daniel's found a million surprises on a hundred different planets, and a million more on Earth. He's found answers where he least expected them, and questions where he thought he'd find answers. When Vala left, and stayed gone, and it became clear that she wasn't coming back, he knew at the back of his mind that they'd stumble across her someday. If it wasn't SG-1 who found her, it would be another SG team.
The universe is a very small place for something so infinite, and Vala, Daniel thinks, is too lonely to stay lost forever.
He expected they'd find her holding court somewhere, crowned a princess or impersonating a goddess or stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Somewhere crowded, and noisy, and anonymous -- someplace that she could hide, if she wanted to, not that Vala ever wanted to hide. Someplace urban, metropolitan, highly developed.
All the photographs and video footage that they got on this planet can't explain why she's here, in a village Jack would have called a backwater dump. She has a house, and she has a teapot, and she's quieter, more still than Daniel's ever seen her.
He wants to ask her, why was I not the person -- why was I not home enough to make you stop moving?
"I happened," she says, straight to Daniel. "You can't imagine you sent a UAV over the town and I didn't know exactly where it had come from."
"You told the other people here to hide from us?" Mitchell says. "That's not how it's supposed to work."
"Cameron, I thought you'd be happy to see me," Vala says. "I just wanted you to myself for a little while," and she winks at Daniel. Vala is cheeky and irreverent to the end, even when her eyes are sad.
He can't stop watching her. He could never stop watching her. She'd been a train wreck, a hurricane, and she's so quiet in her little kitchen on this strange, faraway planet that if he blinked, he thinks he wouldn't recognize her.
"Everybody's happy to see you," Cameron says, and Daniel pulls his eyes from Vala to look at Cam, because Cam's voice is low and dangerous, poison underneath a layer of Mitchell's customary sweetness and light. "It's a real party. What on Earth are you doing here?"
Vala says, "I'm not doing anything on Earth."
"Clearly," Mitchell says.
The explanations -- the excuses -- are never as good as Daniel wants them to be. He casts a glance around the table, past Cam (angry, a little freaked out, a little curious) to Sam (very curious) to Keeley (blank in that way only Marines, and Teal'c, can pull off). Sam was still in Nevada when Vala left -- Daniel told her the story, in pieces, over several months, on the phone.
He missed Sam, and Jack, more in the weeks after Vala left than he had since they'd first been gone. He missed the comfort of friends who'd seen him lose everything he'd had -- Mitchell read the mission reports, and Mitchell listened to Daniel's stories, and Cameron wrapped his arms around Daniel and tried to hold the pieces together. Cam had held the pieces together, and Daniel had still wanted Sam and Jack and Teal'c quiet, long-standing comfort.
It seems -- seemed then, seems now -- a disservice to Cameron. He had done his best by Daniel, and his best had worked, and Daniel had wanted something else.
He wants nothing else now; he misses Sam, Jack, Teal'c, but Mitchell is enough, and Daniel recognizes that.
Mitchell is just as much at the center of anything with Vala as Daniel is, even if Mitchell doesn't seem to know it. Mitchell is the only one who could stand next to Daniel now and understand.
Daniel doesn't want any answers to questions he has, because they won't live up to the answers in his head -- or maybe they will, because it's entirely possible that the answers is I just didn't love you like you loved me, and he can't decide if hearing that truth would be better or worse than what he's been living with.
Before Vala, the truth of his losses has always been laid clear for him. This is a loss that has no truth. It only has a million strands of story that might be lies, and he cannot decide whether he prefers the stories to the facts.
"Sometimes a girl gets tired of being on the road," Vala says cheerfully, and if Cameron doesn't hear the false note in her voice, the tiny break after tired before she finishes the sentence, Daniel will eat his hat. "The others will come out now, if you want. There's a meeting hall at the end of this road, and if you walk down there, people will come and talk to you. I told them that. I told them that when you left my house, you would talk to them."
Daniel thinks, if you were tired of being on the road, why did you leave?
The silence that follows is awkward -- there's a conversation hanging in the air and it won't happen in front of Sam and Keeley, but the team is the important thing, here.
SG-1 has always been the most important thing, regardless of anything else, and Daniel tries to remember that, most days.
He can hear Jack in the back of his head (That's what you get for leaving a woman on every planet, Danny), and he wonders what Jack would have made of this. He wonders if Jack would have stayed steely calm and dangerously placid, like Cameron has, or if Jack would have exploded, ripped Vala for leaving Daniel a wreck, heartbroken, confused, and resigned.
Daniel can't compartmentalize his relationship with Jack into something that anyone else will understand -- Cam swerves between being awestruck and terrified of Jack -- but he doesn't think about Jack every day. He thinks about Jack when they have to eat something strange and potentially disgusting off-world, or when he stops and watches all of a hockey game just because it's there.
Jack permeated Daniel's every day life, and like brushing his teeth in the mornings and before bed, Jack is such a constant that he's become … habit.
Jack's the voice of conscience in the back of Daniel's head, and that thought is almost enough to make Daniel smile. Jack, the voice of conscience -- a thought that's so ridiculous but true that Daniel almost forgets where he is.
Relationships are hard: Daniel never has the words for them, because in some places love seems insufficient or hate is too strong and dislike is too weak. Vala was never constant; Cameron is slipping into tooth-brushing territory. Jack is still part of SG-1 even though he's been in Washington almost as long as Vala's been part of Daniel's life (but not a constant, never a constant -- Vala was never a fixed star that Daniel looked to for security).
Cam made him promise, when Daniel and Vala were still circling each other warily, that they would keep it from affecting the team. He made Daniel promise that it wouldn't affect the team, that things would be the same off-world as they'd been before. Daniel promised, and he and Vala tried.
And they managed to keep it out of the team, before things got complicated -- and after it was complicated, Cam was involved and everything was complicated, except for coffee in the mornings, the sports page in Daniel's newspaper that someone suddenly read, and Cam's quiet, charming affection. He didn't notice when things stopped being complicated, but they must have because until he saw Vala, he realizes that he had almost been happy, completely happy, for the first time in years.
He told Jack he was as happy as he could be, and Daniel thinks that he was happier than he'd knew it was possible for him to be.
He told Cam that he would keep it out of team business, and he hasn't managed. Cameron doesn't seem to care that Daniel failed on that promise. Cameron can't care -- or he cares too much. Daniel doesn't know which. Daniel doesn't want to know which.
They've kept the team together as well as they possibly could; when Sam decided to leave, Daniel thought that Cam might make noises about keeping the band together, and Cameron didn't. Cam's grown up in the last three years -- Daniel just feels like he's getting old.
There's a difference, and he needs Mitchell to remind him of it.
Sam and Keeley are looking awkward and Cam is still looking angry, and Vala is looking at Daniel and her face is too blank for him to read. "Okay," Cameron says, and his voice is startlingly loud in the silence. "Since otherwise we're all just going to sit here in silence until Jackson explodes, I'm going to pretend that I'm actually occasionally in charge of this team and give orders. Anybody got a problem with that?"
Sam hides a smile behind her hand. Keeley nods. Vala watches Daniel.
"Excellent," Cam says. "Carter, would you and Keeley take a little stroll down the street and talk to some of the nice people here? Jackson and I will catch up with you." He doesn't look at Daniel when he says it, because Daniel knows that Cam knows that Daniel would rather Cam not be there for this -- Daniel would rather have come home to an empty apartment and a note than for her to have slipped off on a mission. It's been years, and he is tired of desperately public losses. Daniel thinks that he has earned nothing if he has not earned privacy, by this point, but Daniel told Cameron, and not the other way around, that this was not just Daniel's problem.
"Sure," Sam says easily. "Keeley?"
Keeley stands up and says, cheerfully, "Vala."
Sam says, "Vala," and there's a threat encased in her voice, not hidden behind any sweetness at all.
It's no secret that everyone at SGC has long thought of SG-1 as a family -- they transcended team the first moment a Marine referred to them as heroes. Daniel never wanted to be a hero, to begin with. He wanted someone to listen to him, and then he wanted to get his wife back, and then he wanted to not be so alone.
Daniel knows that he has lead a life weighted more heavily by fate than many others -- moments of great grace and undeniable fortune tempered by loss, and grief, and far more new beginnings than one person should ever have to face. He isn't stupid and he never has been, and he knows how his life appears to someone who hasn't lived it -- he knows how his life appears to him. Too much -- always too much of anything that's given to him, or taken away. There's never been an inch of moderation in the way his life has played out.
There's never been an inch of moderation in the way he's lived.
He's tired of having to make all-or-nothing decisions. He's tired, and there's a grey area in everything; Daniel would like, for once, to choose that grey, instead of black or white.
He puts his head in his hands and feels the silence spreading around him, and Daniel knows when Vala opens her mouth, before she says anything. He looks up, and before she can say a word, he surprises himself and says, "No."
He thought he would choose Cameron, but there's a fine line between the things you think you'll do, and the things you'll do. He thought he would choose Cameron -- he didn't know he actually would.
Daniel's stomach twists again, but his heart feels wide open and unbruised when he thinks of Mitchell, barefoot and cheerful, drinking beer on Daniel's balcony. It's a flash of tiny moments, the normality of a life lived with Cameron Everett Mitchell, and the images make everything else seem small and pointless in the wake of the life Daniel's living now.
He doesn't guard himself with Mitchell.
His life is wide open with Mitchell, and Daniel's heart is still unshattered by that life.
Vala's eyes go wide and Cam -- standing at the back of the room, ostensibly examining one of the trinkets scattered around the shelves -- fixes his gaze so firmly on Daniel's back that Daniel can feel Cameron's concern burning against his neck. "No," Daniel says again. "I cannot play this game anymore." He thinks about the treasure hunt across the galaxy for every item they needed to get an answer about the bracelets from Arlos. He thinks about Vala's half-histories, and her stories that were only partially true.
"Daniel," Vala says. "Darling."
"I'm tired," Daniel says. "This is my life, Vala, this is not -- I am tired of the chaos. I would have stayed with you, but you didn't give me a choice. I am tired of not having a choice."
Daniel says choice and he finds that he means it. Vala had pushed him toward Cameron, but in the end, it was Daniel's choice to stay with Cameron, to care enough to see if it might work -- the first he's made in years. The first choice that wasn't playing out a set of consequences, and he hadn't even realized that he'd made it until he was faced with a different choice.
"Daniel," she says. He thinks again of the time they chased her path across the galaxy, trying to undo all the things she'd done -- no one had been happy to see her, but she'd cheerfully bullied them into doing what she'd wanted, eventually. Vala leaves a path of cheerful destruction everywhere she goes, and it's been almost 15 years that Daniel's been stepping through the stargate. He's seen too many cities razed to the ground to let it happen to him.
"You never said you'd stay," he says, because that's stuck with him most, of all the things she said to him. Amidst all the tremendous lies and the occasional sharp-eyed truths, that is the truest and the saddest thing she ever said to him.
"I didn't say I wouldn't come back," Vala says. Daniel glances over at Mitchell, whose back is still turned, but tense, and then back at Vala. She's defiant, her face gone hard, and he thinks of the woman who clocked him with a fire extinguisher on the Prometheus.
His heart turns, again, and the places it's been broken feel raw inside his chest, inside his mind. He loved her -- he loves her. He doesn't want to hurt her, but he cannot stand the what if of a life with Vala anymore. She might have come back, and he would have opened his home to her because there wouldn't have been anything else for him to do.
He loved her, and he owes her a dozen great debts -- for giving him Mitchell, for giving him herself -- and all he wants are answers, not open-ended questions.
Daniel says, "Vala."
"No," she says. "I understand," and her voice is gentle where her face is closed off and severe. She reaches out a hand and her fingers are soft when they close over Daniel's wrist. The silence in the room is broken only by the sound of rain on the roof, and Daniel twists his arms and closes his fingers over hers.
He doesn't let himself think about what a real future with Vala would have looked like. He listens to the rain, and breathes, and holds her hand. He thinks about the curves of her waist, and the way that Cameron hooks his chin over Daniel's shoulder, sliding broad hands across Daniel's stomach, when Daniel washes dishes at the kitchen sink.
Daniel doesn't compare the two of them to each other at all.
He doesn't know how many minutes tick past before Cameron shifts at the back of the room. "Daniel," he says, and when Daniel turns, Cameron is just behind him. Cam's face is as closed off as Vala's, and Daniel feels -- not for the first time in his life, in general, his life with Mitchell, in specific -- that everything he feels is written plain across his face.
"Cameron," Vala says. Cameron jerks, and looks up at her, startled. "Do take care of him."
"I have been," Cam says.
"I knew you would," Vala says.
Daniel almost says, I am sitting right here, but neither of them are looking at him and Vala's fingers have slid from his. Cam stares at Vala, Vala stares at Cam, and Daniel watches them both.
He's studied people long enough that he should be able to see what's transpired between them, whatever unspoken that's said, but he can't. He misses the moment, and he doesn't know there's been one until Cameron's hand comes down on the back of his neck. Cam's fingers are cold but Daniel leans into the touch anyway.
Vala smiles, and looks away.
Daniel's broken hearts before, but never so obviously, and it tears at his own heart to see it on her face. There's nothing left for him to say, but he wishes for words anyway. Cam rubs his thumb against Daniel's hairline, and Daniel wishes for easier choices.
There's no shooting star, no birthday candles, and he knows the wish won't come true -- knows that wishes are futile.
He wishes, all the same.
Sam and Keeley both look up, curious, when Vala follows Daniel and Cameron into the lodge hall, and Daniel misses the signal, the all-clear, if and when Cameron gives it -- but he knows that Cam gives it, because Sam relaxes visibly when Vala sits with them.
She takes the seat farthest from Daniel, at Keeley's left hand, and she's quiet for most of the meal they're served. Sam, on Daniel's left, chats amiably with the chieftain beside her, and Cameron flirts with the woman on his right. Daniel almost thinks that it passes for a normal mission, listening to the stories being told around him, Sam's cheerful laughter, Cameron's low voice next to him. It isn't until late in the evening, away from the tables and reclining in front of a fire, hearing local legends, that he remembers -- Vala's laughter soars over Keeley's rumbling voice, and Daniel freezes, mid-sentence of a Norse legend about Thor.
He wonders what he's done, what this is punishment or reward for, when Mitchell's fingers brush over Daniel's arm. He looks up, and Mitchell says, "Soup."
Daniel takes a deep breath, looks up at Cameron and sees (not for the first time) how clearly the affection is written across Cameron's face. Vala left Cam for Daniel, a consolation prize, but Daniel didn't have to keep Cameron around -- he chose to. He smiles at Cameron, and Cameron grins back and winks. Daniel scans the room and finds Vala watching him -- them.
He smiles at her, too, and she smiles back and tilts her head at Mitchell. Daniel searches her face for a long moment and sees no trace of sadness. Maybe it's there, and maybe she's a stranger to him now -- maybe it's hidden too well, and maybe it isn't there at all -- but more than anything she said or didn't say, that smile tells him she understands.
Daniel nods. Yes, we're okay -- he's okay, I'm okay. We're happy. As happy as we get in this life.
He doesn't see her go. Keeley says she slipped out the back late in the evening, but Daniel wasn't even watching for her.
Daniel supposes that nine months isn't enough time to move past a lifetime of heartbreak, a lifetime of accustoming himself to having his heart broken, but he wonders when it became long enough to break two years of the habit of Vala.
He doesn't have any answers, and she doesn't, either.
They sleep in the lodge hall and a host of friendly villagers escort them to the gate in the morning. It's still raining, and Mitchell complains loudly and extensively. Vala isn't in the group that hikes back with them and Daniel isn't surprised. They already knew that she wasn't any good at good-bye. Sam was right -- there had been no weapons, no naquadah, no trinium, and he knows they won't be back. He's glad it's raining, and he steps out of the village thinking of Orpheus, who looked back and lost it all, and of Jack, on Abydos, who didn't look back until the ghosts he'd left there caught up with him.
Daniel doesn't turn around. He hears no footsteps in his wake.
Sam falls into step with him beyond the village. She says, "It never stops, does it?"
He doesn't know if she's talking about the pain, or the weather, so Daniel shrugs, and her face is kind, and sad, and lonely, when he turns to look at her. "How's Nevada, Sam?" he says, because he doesn't talk to her as much as he should -- Sam has stood by him as long as anyone in the Mountain has, and he loves her.
He misses her. He's needed, wanted her company, more than once in the last year. She's been gone, but she's never left him, and he owes Sam better than he's given her.
"Lonely," she says. "Most excitement we've had all year was the last time McKay came through and he made six different people cry."
He says, "Lonely isn't the same as not exciting."
Daniel noticed years ago that all of them -- Jack under his sarcasm, Teal'c under his stoicism, Sam under her work ethic, and himself, out on his sleeve so everyone who looked could see it -- all of them were sad. There was plenty of depression in the Mountain, too much PTSD, but SG-1 was simply sad. He's looked for a better word for years, but it's deeper than world weary and more emotional than simply being realists. Sadness -- some grief, some fear, some heartbreak. A little of everything that, individually, makes anyone sad -- too much all at once.
But it's always been tempered by hope, and hope is what keeps them all afloat amongst the sadness.
"No," Sam says. "It's not. It's good to be home. I missed you."
"I missed you, too," he says, and he has a flash of everything he's taken for granted over the years in Sam's smile when he says it. Choices left unmade, lifetimes flooded with guilt. He thinks that he would see Vala behind him, standing beside Sha're, beside Sarah, beside his mother, if he turned, but he is not Orpheus and Cameron is waving his arms at Keeley ahead of Daniel and Sam. Daniel watches Cameron and does not turn around.
Cam still keeps his own place, but he spends more time at Daniel's than he does at his place, and Daniel is the one who has cable so that Cam can watch basketball games all winter on ESPN and Fox Sports South and a million other channels Daniel didn't even know existed. Cameron says home and means Daniel's apartment.
Daniel says home and means Cameron.
Even if he showers at the Mountain after a mission, the first thing Cam does when they get back to Daniel's place is always to climb in the shower, again, for at least 45 minutes. It gives Daniel time to boot up the laptop, order takeout, watching 20 minutes of news before Cam tunes the television to ESPN. It's a routine, and like every routine Daniel's ever had, he hadn't noticed it was a routine until something changes it.
He's looking for the Thai menu when his phone rings. No one calls his home phone except for Jack -- the SGC calls his cell, and Sam always called his office. Jack called on Sunday, as unexpectedly usual as always, and Daniel was actually home; he sat on the balcony and let Jack complain about the stupidity of building DC on a swamp for half an hour before Jack started in on baseball and Daniel passed the phone to Mitchell.
It's Wednesday, dinnertime, but Daniel knows before he picks up the phone that it's Jack. Jack always had a sixth sense when it came to SG-1, to Daniel, and no distance -- not a galaxy, not another plane of existence, and certainly not half a country -- could dim that.
"Jack," he says.
Jack says, "Hi, Daniel, is it still hot as fuck out there?"
Daniel has to think about it before he answers, because he can't remember. They'd debriefed, gotten checked out by Dr. Lam, and Daniel had gotten sucked into a translation before Cameron came and dragged him out of his office for dinner, and 24 hours downtime. He'd left the Mountain on auto-pilot, climbed into the passenger seat of Cameron's car without thinking about anything. "No," he says, because he realizes that the door to the balcony is propped open and the breeze is cool and sweet-smelling. "Must have broken while we were off-world."
"It's a million degrees out here and this place stinks like a sewer," Jack says, but it's rote. He's waiting for Daniel to tell him what's up, that anything's up. Jack knows Daniel like the backs of his own hands -- Jack would know that something had happened, even if Daniel never said a thing. Daniel's choices are spilling or listening to another half hour about the weather.
He spills. "I was thinking about you today," Daniel says. "About when you left Abydos, the first time."
"So that's why my nose was itchy," Jack says, lightly, and then, more serious, "That's ancient history, Daniel. Don't go dragging that up."
Daniel says, "Vala was on N7A."
"Ah," Jack says. "And how is everyone's favorite intergalactic thief?"
"Still on N7A."
"Ah," Jack says. "You okay?"
"I always am," Daniel says.
"Keep telling those lies if they make you happy," Jack says.
Daniel says, "That's not a lie."
"You always are," Jack says. "And you're okay now."
"I am," Daniel says.
"Don't have to tell me," Jack says. "I'd know if you weren't. I just thought you might want to talk about your feelings."
Daniel snorts, and Jack makes a phony I'm-so-put-out-by-this-conversation noise on the other end of the phone. "Jack," Daniel says.
"Daniel," Jack says.
"I'm fine," Daniel says. "I'm happy."
And he is.
"I know," Jack says. "Sometimes I just like to hear it for myself."
"You didn't look back on Abydos," Daniel says. Jack didn't -- because he knew that Daniel would be okay. He knew that Daniel had found a home. Jack understood then, and he understands now. He'd have stopped Daniel's thing with Cameron if Jack had thought it wasn't the right thing. He hasn't.
That's the best way Daniel knows to quantify the fact that he's made the right decision.
"Danny," Jack says, soft. Daniel hears the shower shut off, the bathroom door open and close, the bedroom door open and close. "Would you do it any differently?"
Daniel knows Jack means all of it -- any of it. His whole life. He closes his eyes and leans against the kitchen counter, listens to Jack breathing evenly on the other end of the phone, Cameron humming in the bedroom. A car alarm goes off in the street and filters in through the open door. "No," Daniel says. "No."
"Well, then."
"Thanks," Daniel says.
"My pleasure," Jack says, and hangs up. It is not, by far, the strangest conversation Daniel has ever had with Jack, and Daniel understands that all he wanted, today, was to be told that he'd made the right decision. Jack had always had a knack for knowing when Daniel needed to hear that.
Cameron has that knack, too, and Daniel isn't surprised at all to realize that.
"Who was on the phone?" Cam says, padding out of the bedroom. He's got a towel draped over his head and he's wearing jeans and a threadbare N.C. State football t-shirt. There are a thousand things that Cameron does, says, is, all of which should drive Daniel crazy, and none of them do.
He doesn't know when that happened, either.
"Jack," Daniel says.
"Didn't the General call on Sunday? Didn't I have to talk to him about baseball for twenty minutes?"
"It is not my fault that Jack has developed a fondness for the Washington Nationals," Daniel says.
Cam makes a cranky noise underneath the towel and pulls it off his head. His hair stands up all over his head as he tosses the towel over the back of a chair. "It's your fault I have to talk to him about it," Cameron says. "The Nationals aren't even a real team. Chinese?"
"Thai," Daniel says.
"Okay," Cam says. He ambles past Daniel and into the living room, and the TV goes on, the noise of a football game murmuring low. Daniel holds the phone and thinks that he knows what Cam orders from the Thai restaurant down the street without having to ask, and Cam knows that the conversation they'll have about this is best had in the dark, late at night.
It's a routine, and it's a comfort. He didn't think that he got those, anymore.
Outside, it starts to rain. Daniel leaves the doors open.
*
author's notes: for triskellita, my otp, as always with the daniel i write -- even when i'm making her cry. title and summary from thea gilmore, "you tell me".
eleveninches and synecdochic did above and beyond the call of beta duty on this one; syn, in particular, talked me through figuring out what this story was supposed to be about in extensive detail and read multiple drafts while i figured it out.
this is, according to my brain, the last chronological story in this universe (though i said that about valentine, too, so take my word as you will), and i owe everybody who's read, who's recced, who's loved these stories and told me so as i worked on them a debt of gratitude. i had no idea when i wrote you can buy her things now that i'd get nearly 35,000 words out of this 'verse, and it has been nothing but a pleasure to work on these stories. thank you so much for every kind word you said about them; it means the world.
They've talked about Cameron's childhood with his grandmother in the mountains of North Carolina, about the fact that Daniel would go back to Egypt in a split-second, without even thinking about the fact that he still thinks of Alexandria as home, if he could live anywhere in the world. Daniel knows Cam as well as he knows Sam or Teal'c, less well than he knows Jack, better than he ever knew Vala.
Cameron has never said that he loves Daniel; there have been no words of forever. Cameron's affection is as straightforward and honest as the fact that he's there, standing in Daniel's kitchen frying chicken, standing in the rain with Daniel while Daniel freaks out.
Here I am, I am here, I have not left, this means I care.
It's one of the things Daniel appreciates most about Cam -- one of the things he appreciated most about Jack. There isn't any need to say anything, or anything meaningful. The act of being there is enough for them. It says everything they want to say, and more.
Cam is quietly sturdy, quietly trustworthy, and he watches Daniel carefully with all that quiet.
The thing Daniel always forgets, though, is that Cam is sharply perceptive, underneath the easygoing, silent good ol' boy façade that he wears to keep people from looking too closely at him.
Coupled with the silent companionship that made Mitchell so easy to be with, Daniel knows that it's the perception that makes Mitchell interesting. Surprising.
"If you want to keep standing in the rain, Jackson, that's fine by me," Cam says. Daniel blinks out of his thoughts, and Cameron is standing less than a foot from Daniel. Water's dripping off his hat, and his collar, and the sunglasses perched on the end of his nose, but Cam's face is serious and he's looking straight at Daniel. "But did you notice that she's still wearing those leather pants?"
He leers at Daniel over his sunglasses, and then he takes them off and shoves them in his pocket and says, "You're the one who usually does the talking around here. This speechless act is kind of freaking me out, if it's appropriately grunt and scratch to say so."
It took four months of awkward phone conversations before he forgave Jack for leaving, before Daniel learned how to exist in his own life without Jack at his elbow nearly 24 hours a day. Some days he gets up and it's hard to even move because he still misses Sha're so desperately -- some days he gets up and he can't remember what his mother looked like.
Mitchell has never disappeared. Mitchell takes up a lot of space, in a normal way. He sprawls on the couch, he leaves his dirty clothes on the bathroom floor. He laughs loudly at stupid sitcoms on the television.
Daniel always knows he's there -- always knows where Mitchell is, when he isn't there.
Mitchell's surprising, and routine.
"People who leave stay gone," Daniel says.
Cam rolls his eyes and grabs Daniel's elbow. "You can be philosophical all you want as long as you do it somewhere dry."
Jack said that Daniel was a professional people-watcher. Drop Daniel anywhere and he'd be able to tell you fifty things about the people who passed him within ten minutes -- and Daniel had always thought that he could look at strangers and see their secrets, but he looked at the people he loved and he couldn't put them together into anything that made sense of the pieces.
He looks at Mitchell, dripping in the rain, and sees the whole picture for the first time: affection, worry, amused annoyance, written clear on Cameron's face as though Daniel had printed them there himself.
Vala isn't a stranger. Cameron, hand strong on Daniel's elbow, isn't a stranger, either. He walks through the front door of Vala's strange little house and thinks of Cam's hand on his elbow the day that Vala disappeared. Cameron's not a touchy-feely kind of guy and Daniel appreciates that, but Cameron's fingers feel like an anchor -- a port in a thunderstorm.
Sam and Keeley look up when they walk in. Vala's head stays down, her eyes trained on her tea cup. "Everything okay?" Sam says.
"Everything is wet," Mitchell says. "Jackson thought it was letting up, but then somebody dumped a swimming pool's worth of water down the back of my shirt, so either these people have really strange senses of humor and portable swimming pools, or it's still raining."
"Speaking of people," Sam says. "Vala, where is everyone else? There were quite a few people on what we got from the UAV. Did something happen?"
Vala smiles, genuinely pleased with herself, and says, "Me."
Daniel raises an eyebrow at her before he realizes what he's done, and she meets his eyes for the first time since they stumbled into a mud pit passing for a planet. She smirks, and he knows the expression, because it's a little sad and a lot cat-that-got-the-cream -- and it's sadder than the last time he saw her.
The questions he wants to ask are written strong in her sadness. I thought you were happy, were almost happy -- why weren't you? Why aren't you?
What could I have done to make you happy?
And he thinks, if she came back -- he would not be able to choose, between Vala's surprise and Cameron's steadiness, between Vala's excitement and Cam's reliability.
Or he would choose -- and he thinks, damp and cold and unsettled, that he would choose Mitchell. He would choose Cameron.
Mitchell hasn't left. He's taken up space in Daniel's life, noisy and messy, and he's stayed where he's moved in. Daniel couldn't move Mitchell out of his life if he wanted to, and watching Vala, missing Vala, wanting Vala, he realizes that he doesn't want to move Mitchell anywhere. Daniel's settled.
He's found someplace that he can stay -- someone who'll stay with him.
Daniel's found a million surprises on a hundred different planets, and a million more on Earth. He's found answers where he least expected them, and questions where he thought he'd find answers. When Vala left, and stayed gone, and it became clear that she wasn't coming back, he knew at the back of his mind that they'd stumble across her someday. If it wasn't SG-1 who found her, it would be another SG team.
The universe is a very small place for something so infinite, and Vala, Daniel thinks, is too lonely to stay lost forever.
He expected they'd find her holding court somewhere, crowned a princess or impersonating a goddess or stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Somewhere crowded, and noisy, and anonymous -- someplace that she could hide, if she wanted to, not that Vala ever wanted to hide. Someplace urban, metropolitan, highly developed.
All the photographs and video footage that they got on this planet can't explain why she's here, in a village Jack would have called a backwater dump. She has a house, and she has a teapot, and she's quieter, more still than Daniel's ever seen her.
He wants to ask her, why was I not the person -- why was I not home enough to make you stop moving?
"I happened," she says, straight to Daniel. "You can't imagine you sent a UAV over the town and I didn't know exactly where it had come from."
"You told the other people here to hide from us?" Mitchell says. "That's not how it's supposed to work."
"Cameron, I thought you'd be happy to see me," Vala says. "I just wanted you to myself for a little while," and she winks at Daniel. Vala is cheeky and irreverent to the end, even when her eyes are sad.
He can't stop watching her. He could never stop watching her. She'd been a train wreck, a hurricane, and she's so quiet in her little kitchen on this strange, faraway planet that if he blinked, he thinks he wouldn't recognize her.
"Everybody's happy to see you," Cameron says, and Daniel pulls his eyes from Vala to look at Cam, because Cam's voice is low and dangerous, poison underneath a layer of Mitchell's customary sweetness and light. "It's a real party. What on Earth are you doing here?"
Vala says, "I'm not doing anything on Earth."
"Clearly," Mitchell says.
The explanations -- the excuses -- are never as good as Daniel wants them to be. He casts a glance around the table, past Cam (angry, a little freaked out, a little curious) to Sam (very curious) to Keeley (blank in that way only Marines, and Teal'c, can pull off). Sam was still in Nevada when Vala left -- Daniel told her the story, in pieces, over several months, on the phone.
He missed Sam, and Jack, more in the weeks after Vala left than he had since they'd first been gone. He missed the comfort of friends who'd seen him lose everything he'd had -- Mitchell read the mission reports, and Mitchell listened to Daniel's stories, and Cameron wrapped his arms around Daniel and tried to hold the pieces together. Cam had held the pieces together, and Daniel had still wanted Sam and Jack and Teal'c quiet, long-standing comfort.
It seems -- seemed then, seems now -- a disservice to Cameron. He had done his best by Daniel, and his best had worked, and Daniel had wanted something else.
He wants nothing else now; he misses Sam, Jack, Teal'c, but Mitchell is enough, and Daniel recognizes that.
Mitchell is just as much at the center of anything with Vala as Daniel is, even if Mitchell doesn't seem to know it. Mitchell is the only one who could stand next to Daniel now and understand.
Daniel doesn't want any answers to questions he has, because they won't live up to the answers in his head -- or maybe they will, because it's entirely possible that the answers is I just didn't love you like you loved me, and he can't decide if hearing that truth would be better or worse than what he's been living with.
Before Vala, the truth of his losses has always been laid clear for him. This is a loss that has no truth. It only has a million strands of story that might be lies, and he cannot decide whether he prefers the stories to the facts.
"Sometimes a girl gets tired of being on the road," Vala says cheerfully, and if Cameron doesn't hear the false note in her voice, the tiny break after tired before she finishes the sentence, Daniel will eat his hat. "The others will come out now, if you want. There's a meeting hall at the end of this road, and if you walk down there, people will come and talk to you. I told them that. I told them that when you left my house, you would talk to them."
Daniel thinks, if you were tired of being on the road, why did you leave?
The silence that follows is awkward -- there's a conversation hanging in the air and it won't happen in front of Sam and Keeley, but the team is the important thing, here.
SG-1 has always been the most important thing, regardless of anything else, and Daniel tries to remember that, most days.
He can hear Jack in the back of his head (That's what you get for leaving a woman on every planet, Danny), and he wonders what Jack would have made of this. He wonders if Jack would have stayed steely calm and dangerously placid, like Cameron has, or if Jack would have exploded, ripped Vala for leaving Daniel a wreck, heartbroken, confused, and resigned.
Daniel can't compartmentalize his relationship with Jack into something that anyone else will understand -- Cam swerves between being awestruck and terrified of Jack -- but he doesn't think about Jack every day. He thinks about Jack when they have to eat something strange and potentially disgusting off-world, or when he stops and watches all of a hockey game just because it's there.
Jack permeated Daniel's every day life, and like brushing his teeth in the mornings and before bed, Jack is such a constant that he's become … habit.
Jack's the voice of conscience in the back of Daniel's head, and that thought is almost enough to make Daniel smile. Jack, the voice of conscience -- a thought that's so ridiculous but true that Daniel almost forgets where he is.
Relationships are hard: Daniel never has the words for them, because in some places love seems insufficient or hate is too strong and dislike is too weak. Vala was never constant; Cameron is slipping into tooth-brushing territory. Jack is still part of SG-1 even though he's been in Washington almost as long as Vala's been part of Daniel's life (but not a constant, never a constant -- Vala was never a fixed star that Daniel looked to for security).
Cam made him promise, when Daniel and Vala were still circling each other warily, that they would keep it from affecting the team. He made Daniel promise that it wouldn't affect the team, that things would be the same off-world as they'd been before. Daniel promised, and he and Vala tried.
And they managed to keep it out of the team, before things got complicated -- and after it was complicated, Cam was involved and everything was complicated, except for coffee in the mornings, the sports page in Daniel's newspaper that someone suddenly read, and Cam's quiet, charming affection. He didn't notice when things stopped being complicated, but they must have because until he saw Vala, he realizes that he had almost been happy, completely happy, for the first time in years.
He told Jack he was as happy as he could be, and Daniel thinks that he was happier than he'd knew it was possible for him to be.
He told Cam that he would keep it out of team business, and he hasn't managed. Cameron doesn't seem to care that Daniel failed on that promise. Cameron can't care -- or he cares too much. Daniel doesn't know which. Daniel doesn't want to know which.
They've kept the team together as well as they possibly could; when Sam decided to leave, Daniel thought that Cam might make noises about keeping the band together, and Cameron didn't. Cam's grown up in the last three years -- Daniel just feels like he's getting old.
There's a difference, and he needs Mitchell to remind him of it.
Sam and Keeley are looking awkward and Cam is still looking angry, and Vala is looking at Daniel and her face is too blank for him to read. "Okay," Cameron says, and his voice is startlingly loud in the silence. "Since otherwise we're all just going to sit here in silence until Jackson explodes, I'm going to pretend that I'm actually occasionally in charge of this team and give orders. Anybody got a problem with that?"
Sam hides a smile behind her hand. Keeley nods. Vala watches Daniel.
"Excellent," Cam says. "Carter, would you and Keeley take a little stroll down the street and talk to some of the nice people here? Jackson and I will catch up with you." He doesn't look at Daniel when he says it, because Daniel knows that Cam knows that Daniel would rather Cam not be there for this -- Daniel would rather have come home to an empty apartment and a note than for her to have slipped off on a mission. It's been years, and he is tired of desperately public losses. Daniel thinks that he has earned nothing if he has not earned privacy, by this point, but Daniel told Cameron, and not the other way around, that this was not just Daniel's problem.
"Sure," Sam says easily. "Keeley?"
Keeley stands up and says, cheerfully, "Vala."
Sam says, "Vala," and there's a threat encased in her voice, not hidden behind any sweetness at all.
It's no secret that everyone at SGC has long thought of SG-1 as a family -- they transcended team the first moment a Marine referred to them as heroes. Daniel never wanted to be a hero, to begin with. He wanted someone to listen to him, and then he wanted to get his wife back, and then he wanted to not be so alone.
Daniel knows that he has lead a life weighted more heavily by fate than many others -- moments of great grace and undeniable fortune tempered by loss, and grief, and far more new beginnings than one person should ever have to face. He isn't stupid and he never has been, and he knows how his life appears to someone who hasn't lived it -- he knows how his life appears to him. Too much -- always too much of anything that's given to him, or taken away. There's never been an inch of moderation in the way his life has played out.
There's never been an inch of moderation in the way he's lived.
He's tired of having to make all-or-nothing decisions. He's tired, and there's a grey area in everything; Daniel would like, for once, to choose that grey, instead of black or white.
He puts his head in his hands and feels the silence spreading around him, and Daniel knows when Vala opens her mouth, before she says anything. He looks up, and before she can say a word, he surprises himself and says, "No."
He thought he would choose Cameron, but there's a fine line between the things you think you'll do, and the things you'll do. He thought he would choose Cameron -- he didn't know he actually would.
Daniel's stomach twists again, but his heart feels wide open and unbruised when he thinks of Mitchell, barefoot and cheerful, drinking beer on Daniel's balcony. It's a flash of tiny moments, the normality of a life lived with Cameron Everett Mitchell, and the images make everything else seem small and pointless in the wake of the life Daniel's living now.
He doesn't guard himself with Mitchell.
His life is wide open with Mitchell, and Daniel's heart is still unshattered by that life.
Vala's eyes go wide and Cam -- standing at the back of the room, ostensibly examining one of the trinkets scattered around the shelves -- fixes his gaze so firmly on Daniel's back that Daniel can feel Cameron's concern burning against his neck. "No," Daniel says again. "I cannot play this game anymore." He thinks about the treasure hunt across the galaxy for every item they needed to get an answer about the bracelets from Arlos. He thinks about Vala's half-histories, and her stories that were only partially true.
"Daniel," Vala says. "Darling."
"I'm tired," Daniel says. "This is my life, Vala, this is not -- I am tired of the chaos. I would have stayed with you, but you didn't give me a choice. I am tired of not having a choice."
Daniel says choice and he finds that he means it. Vala had pushed him toward Cameron, but in the end, it was Daniel's choice to stay with Cameron, to care enough to see if it might work -- the first he's made in years. The first choice that wasn't playing out a set of consequences, and he hadn't even realized that he'd made it until he was faced with a different choice.
"Daniel," she says. He thinks again of the time they chased her path across the galaxy, trying to undo all the things she'd done -- no one had been happy to see her, but she'd cheerfully bullied them into doing what she'd wanted, eventually. Vala leaves a path of cheerful destruction everywhere she goes, and it's been almost 15 years that Daniel's been stepping through the stargate. He's seen too many cities razed to the ground to let it happen to him.
"You never said you'd stay," he says, because that's stuck with him most, of all the things she said to him. Amidst all the tremendous lies and the occasional sharp-eyed truths, that is the truest and the saddest thing she ever said to him.
"I didn't say I wouldn't come back," Vala says. Daniel glances over at Mitchell, whose back is still turned, but tense, and then back at Vala. She's defiant, her face gone hard, and he thinks of the woman who clocked him with a fire extinguisher on the Prometheus.
His heart turns, again, and the places it's been broken feel raw inside his chest, inside his mind. He loved her -- he loves her. He doesn't want to hurt her, but he cannot stand the what if of a life with Vala anymore. She might have come back, and he would have opened his home to her because there wouldn't have been anything else for him to do.
He loved her, and he owes her a dozen great debts -- for giving him Mitchell, for giving him herself -- and all he wants are answers, not open-ended questions.
Daniel says, "Vala."
"No," she says. "I understand," and her voice is gentle where her face is closed off and severe. She reaches out a hand and her fingers are soft when they close over Daniel's wrist. The silence in the room is broken only by the sound of rain on the roof, and Daniel twists his arms and closes his fingers over hers.
He doesn't let himself think about what a real future with Vala would have looked like. He listens to the rain, and breathes, and holds her hand. He thinks about the curves of her waist, and the way that Cameron hooks his chin over Daniel's shoulder, sliding broad hands across Daniel's stomach, when Daniel washes dishes at the kitchen sink.
Daniel doesn't compare the two of them to each other at all.
He doesn't know how many minutes tick past before Cameron shifts at the back of the room. "Daniel," he says, and when Daniel turns, Cameron is just behind him. Cam's face is as closed off as Vala's, and Daniel feels -- not for the first time in his life, in general, his life with Mitchell, in specific -- that everything he feels is written plain across his face.
"Cameron," Vala says. Cameron jerks, and looks up at her, startled. "Do take care of him."
"I have been," Cam says.
"I knew you would," Vala says.
Daniel almost says, I am sitting right here, but neither of them are looking at him and Vala's fingers have slid from his. Cam stares at Vala, Vala stares at Cam, and Daniel watches them both.
He's studied people long enough that he should be able to see what's transpired between them, whatever unspoken that's said, but he can't. He misses the moment, and he doesn't know there's been one until Cameron's hand comes down on the back of his neck. Cam's fingers are cold but Daniel leans into the touch anyway.
Vala smiles, and looks away.
Daniel's broken hearts before, but never so obviously, and it tears at his own heart to see it on her face. There's nothing left for him to say, but he wishes for words anyway. Cam rubs his thumb against Daniel's hairline, and Daniel wishes for easier choices.
There's no shooting star, no birthday candles, and he knows the wish won't come true -- knows that wishes are futile.
He wishes, all the same.
Sam and Keeley both look up, curious, when Vala follows Daniel and Cameron into the lodge hall, and Daniel misses the signal, the all-clear, if and when Cameron gives it -- but he knows that Cam gives it, because Sam relaxes visibly when Vala sits with them.
She takes the seat farthest from Daniel, at Keeley's left hand, and she's quiet for most of the meal they're served. Sam, on Daniel's left, chats amiably with the chieftain beside her, and Cameron flirts with the woman on his right. Daniel almost thinks that it passes for a normal mission, listening to the stories being told around him, Sam's cheerful laughter, Cameron's low voice next to him. It isn't until late in the evening, away from the tables and reclining in front of a fire, hearing local legends, that he remembers -- Vala's laughter soars over Keeley's rumbling voice, and Daniel freezes, mid-sentence of a Norse legend about Thor.
He wonders what he's done, what this is punishment or reward for, when Mitchell's fingers brush over Daniel's arm. He looks up, and Mitchell says, "Soup."
Daniel takes a deep breath, looks up at Cameron and sees (not for the first time) how clearly the affection is written across Cameron's face. Vala left Cam for Daniel, a consolation prize, but Daniel didn't have to keep Cameron around -- he chose to. He smiles at Cameron, and Cameron grins back and winks. Daniel scans the room and finds Vala watching him -- them.
He smiles at her, too, and she smiles back and tilts her head at Mitchell. Daniel searches her face for a long moment and sees no trace of sadness. Maybe it's there, and maybe she's a stranger to him now -- maybe it's hidden too well, and maybe it isn't there at all -- but more than anything she said or didn't say, that smile tells him she understands.
Daniel nods. Yes, we're okay -- he's okay, I'm okay. We're happy. As happy as we get in this life.
He doesn't see her go. Keeley says she slipped out the back late in the evening, but Daniel wasn't even watching for her.
Daniel supposes that nine months isn't enough time to move past a lifetime of heartbreak, a lifetime of accustoming himself to having his heart broken, but he wonders when it became long enough to break two years of the habit of Vala.
He doesn't have any answers, and she doesn't, either.
They sleep in the lodge hall and a host of friendly villagers escort them to the gate in the morning. It's still raining, and Mitchell complains loudly and extensively. Vala isn't in the group that hikes back with them and Daniel isn't surprised. They already knew that she wasn't any good at good-bye. Sam was right -- there had been no weapons, no naquadah, no trinium, and he knows they won't be back. He's glad it's raining, and he steps out of the village thinking of Orpheus, who looked back and lost it all, and of Jack, on Abydos, who didn't look back until the ghosts he'd left there caught up with him.
Daniel doesn't turn around. He hears no footsteps in his wake.
Sam falls into step with him beyond the village. She says, "It never stops, does it?"
He doesn't know if she's talking about the pain, or the weather, so Daniel shrugs, and her face is kind, and sad, and lonely, when he turns to look at her. "How's Nevada, Sam?" he says, because he doesn't talk to her as much as he should -- Sam has stood by him as long as anyone in the Mountain has, and he loves her.
He misses her. He's needed, wanted her company, more than once in the last year. She's been gone, but she's never left him, and he owes Sam better than he's given her.
"Lonely," she says. "Most excitement we've had all year was the last time McKay came through and he made six different people cry."
He says, "Lonely isn't the same as not exciting."
Daniel noticed years ago that all of them -- Jack under his sarcasm, Teal'c under his stoicism, Sam under her work ethic, and himself, out on his sleeve so everyone who looked could see it -- all of them were sad. There was plenty of depression in the Mountain, too much PTSD, but SG-1 was simply sad. He's looked for a better word for years, but it's deeper than world weary and more emotional than simply being realists. Sadness -- some grief, some fear, some heartbreak. A little of everything that, individually, makes anyone sad -- too much all at once.
But it's always been tempered by hope, and hope is what keeps them all afloat amongst the sadness.
"No," Sam says. "It's not. It's good to be home. I missed you."
"I missed you, too," he says, and he has a flash of everything he's taken for granted over the years in Sam's smile when he says it. Choices left unmade, lifetimes flooded with guilt. He thinks that he would see Vala behind him, standing beside Sha're, beside Sarah, beside his mother, if he turned, but he is not Orpheus and Cameron is waving his arms at Keeley ahead of Daniel and Sam. Daniel watches Cameron and does not turn around.
Cam still keeps his own place, but he spends more time at Daniel's than he does at his place, and Daniel is the one who has cable so that Cam can watch basketball games all winter on ESPN and Fox Sports South and a million other channels Daniel didn't even know existed. Cameron says home and means Daniel's apartment.
Daniel says home and means Cameron.
Even if he showers at the Mountain after a mission, the first thing Cam does when they get back to Daniel's place is always to climb in the shower, again, for at least 45 minutes. It gives Daniel time to boot up the laptop, order takeout, watching 20 minutes of news before Cam tunes the television to ESPN. It's a routine, and like every routine Daniel's ever had, he hadn't noticed it was a routine until something changes it.
He's looking for the Thai menu when his phone rings. No one calls his home phone except for Jack -- the SGC calls his cell, and Sam always called his office. Jack called on Sunday, as unexpectedly usual as always, and Daniel was actually home; he sat on the balcony and let Jack complain about the stupidity of building DC on a swamp for half an hour before Jack started in on baseball and Daniel passed the phone to Mitchell.
It's Wednesday, dinnertime, but Daniel knows before he picks up the phone that it's Jack. Jack always had a sixth sense when it came to SG-1, to Daniel, and no distance -- not a galaxy, not another plane of existence, and certainly not half a country -- could dim that.
"Jack," he says.
Jack says, "Hi, Daniel, is it still hot as fuck out there?"
Daniel has to think about it before he answers, because he can't remember. They'd debriefed, gotten checked out by Dr. Lam, and Daniel had gotten sucked into a translation before Cameron came and dragged him out of his office for dinner, and 24 hours downtime. He'd left the Mountain on auto-pilot, climbed into the passenger seat of Cameron's car without thinking about anything. "No," he says, because he realizes that the door to the balcony is propped open and the breeze is cool and sweet-smelling. "Must have broken while we were off-world."
"It's a million degrees out here and this place stinks like a sewer," Jack says, but it's rote. He's waiting for Daniel to tell him what's up, that anything's up. Jack knows Daniel like the backs of his own hands -- Jack would know that something had happened, even if Daniel never said a thing. Daniel's choices are spilling or listening to another half hour about the weather.
He spills. "I was thinking about you today," Daniel says. "About when you left Abydos, the first time."
"So that's why my nose was itchy," Jack says, lightly, and then, more serious, "That's ancient history, Daniel. Don't go dragging that up."
Daniel says, "Vala was on N7A."
"Ah," Jack says. "And how is everyone's favorite intergalactic thief?"
"Still on N7A."
"Ah," Jack says. "You okay?"
"I always am," Daniel says.
"Keep telling those lies if they make you happy," Jack says.
Daniel says, "That's not a lie."
"You always are," Jack says. "And you're okay now."
"I am," Daniel says.
"Don't have to tell me," Jack says. "I'd know if you weren't. I just thought you might want to talk about your feelings."
Daniel snorts, and Jack makes a phony I'm-so-put-out-by-this-conversation noise on the other end of the phone. "Jack," Daniel says.
"Daniel," Jack says.
"I'm fine," Daniel says. "I'm happy."
And he is.
"I know," Jack says. "Sometimes I just like to hear it for myself."
"You didn't look back on Abydos," Daniel says. Jack didn't -- because he knew that Daniel would be okay. He knew that Daniel had found a home. Jack understood then, and he understands now. He'd have stopped Daniel's thing with Cameron if Jack had thought it wasn't the right thing. He hasn't.
That's the best way Daniel knows to quantify the fact that he's made the right decision.
"Danny," Jack says, soft. Daniel hears the shower shut off, the bathroom door open and close, the bedroom door open and close. "Would you do it any differently?"
Daniel knows Jack means all of it -- any of it. His whole life. He closes his eyes and leans against the kitchen counter, listens to Jack breathing evenly on the other end of the phone, Cameron humming in the bedroom. A car alarm goes off in the street and filters in through the open door. "No," Daniel says. "No."
"Well, then."
"Thanks," Daniel says.
"My pleasure," Jack says, and hangs up. It is not, by far, the strangest conversation Daniel has ever had with Jack, and Daniel understands that all he wanted, today, was to be told that he'd made the right decision. Jack had always had a knack for knowing when Daniel needed to hear that.
Cameron has that knack, too, and Daniel isn't surprised at all to realize that.
"Who was on the phone?" Cam says, padding out of the bedroom. He's got a towel draped over his head and he's wearing jeans and a threadbare N.C. State football t-shirt. There are a thousand things that Cameron does, says, is, all of which should drive Daniel crazy, and none of them do.
He doesn't know when that happened, either.
"Jack," Daniel says.
"Didn't the General call on Sunday? Didn't I have to talk to him about baseball for twenty minutes?"
"It is not my fault that Jack has developed a fondness for the Washington Nationals," Daniel says.
Cam makes a cranky noise underneath the towel and pulls it off his head. His hair stands up all over his head as he tosses the towel over the back of a chair. "It's your fault I have to talk to him about it," Cameron says. "The Nationals aren't even a real team. Chinese?"
"Thai," Daniel says.
"Okay," Cam says. He ambles past Daniel and into the living room, and the TV goes on, the noise of a football game murmuring low. Daniel holds the phone and thinks that he knows what Cam orders from the Thai restaurant down the street without having to ask, and Cam knows that the conversation they'll have about this is best had in the dark, late at night.
It's a routine, and it's a comfort. He didn't think that he got those, anymore.
Outside, it starts to rain. Daniel leaves the doors open.
*
author's notes: for triskellita, my otp, as always with the daniel i write -- even when i'm making her cry. title and summary from thea gilmore, "you tell me".
eleveninches and synecdochic did above and beyond the call of beta duty on this one; syn, in particular, talked me through figuring out what this story was supposed to be about in extensive detail and read multiple drafts while i figured it out.
this is, according to my brain, the last chronological story in this universe (though i said that about valentine, too, so take my word as you will), and i owe everybody who's read, who's recced, who's loved these stories and told me so as i worked on them a debt of gratitude. i had no idea when i wrote you can buy her things now that i'd get nearly 35,000 words out of this 'verse, and it has been nothing but a pleasure to work on these stories. thank you so much for every kind word you said about them; it means the world.