Scenes From An Accidental Courtship 2/3
Title: Scenes From An Accidental Courtship
Author: Sorrel
Fandom: SG-1
Pairing: Sam/Daniel, Jack/Daniel and Jack/Sam UST
Spoilers: Fallen through New Order Part Two
Rating: R
Summary: "No, not that way. We were really, really good friends." And maybe just a little bit more.
From here.
~*~
“I can’t believe you, Daniel,” Sam scolded. “I leave for one lousy little mission and you get shot.”
“And tortured,” Daniel pointed out helpfully. “Can’t forget the torture.”
“Oh of course, how silly of me,” she said, her voice flat. “And tortured, of course. How do you manage to get yourself into this kind of trouble, anyway?”
“Blind luck?” Daniel offered. He winced as the nurse patched up yet another burn wound on his bare chest. Seconds later she echoed it as her nurse carefully moved her arm into position for a less makeshift sling. “Obviously my fairy godmother hasn’t been paying much attention lately.”
“Are you talking about Oma Desala, or someone else?”
He shot her a dirty look. “I’m talking about my entirely hypothetical fairy godmother, thank you.”
“Well, sorry, but you are the one guy I know who does have a woman with extra-special powers who glows looking out for him. You could have been talking about her.” Her nurse finished securing the sling and left her with a pat on the shoulder and a prescription for painkillers in her good hand.
“Well, I didn’t, and I bet she wouldn’t exactly like the comparison.”
“Yeah, she’s not really the Tinkerbell type, I guess. More like an Angel of Death.”
“Who, Doc Fraser?” Jack said from the doorway. “I could have sworn I gave her a good talking-to about slipping the patients arsenic, but I guess she didn’t listen.”
“We were actually talking about Oma Desala, sir,” Sam said. Jack nodded and looked thoughtful.
“You’re right, not much of a Tinkerbell at all. For one thing, Tinkerbell didn’t look even a little bit like a squid.”
“Oh, yeah,” Daniel said. “I’ve been meaning to ask. You said I appeared a couple times when I was a higher being. Did I ever look a bit…”
“Squid-like?” Sam offered.
“Yes, that.”
“Nah,” Jack said. “You had a really stupid haircut and you kept wearing this white sweater that made you look chunky, but there were no glowing tentacles in sight.”
“Well, that’s a… relief,” Daniel said dubiously. “Thanks, Jack. I can always count on you to make me feel better.”
“Don’t worry, Daniel,” Sam told him, keeping her face innocent and her voice incredibly earnest. “You don’t look even a little chunky in uniform.”
“Gee, thanks,” Daniel said, looking not even a little thankful. “Well, Jack, I know why Sam’s sitting here tormenting me; she had to get her arm wrapped. What’s your excuse?”
“Just stoppin’ by to see if you maybe wanted to crash at my place for a few days, get a few square meals you don’t have to cook while you get used to those crutches of yours.”
“Well, thanks for the offer, but I’m actually staying at Sam’s,” Daniel said. Jack’s sharp-edged gaze switched immediately to her face, which she kept bland by dint of sheer force of will. After a moment, Jack looked back at Daniel, sitting there looking oddly comfortable despite the cuts and burns all over his chest and the bruises all over his handsome face.
“Gonna be quite a slapstick routine over there, with your busted leg and her busted wing,” Jack said finally.
“Yes, well, we figure that between the two of us we equal out to one whole person, so we should be able to get along fine,” Daniel said. “Besides, I don’t have to move around much to cook us some dinner, and I’m pretty sure Sam can handle the remote left-handed, so we’re pretty much set for a weekend of recuperation.”
“Well, as long as you’re sure,” Jack said. “Got a few steaks I can burn, if you change your mind. You too, Carter,” he added, glancing at her. She just smiled, blandly.
“As tempting as that sounds, sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline,” she said. She hesitated for a second, weighing the risqué nature of her comment with the potential comedy value of the look on Jack’s face, then just went for it. “I like my meat rare.”
She wasn’t disappointed. Jack’s eyes widened to comical proportions, and his mouth even fell open a little bit in surprise. So there, she thought, oddly smug. I’m not just Carter the Geek after all, remember?
Beside her, Daniel was choking on laughter. “How rare?” he asked, once his giggle fit wore down a little. “Do you even like to slap it on the pan a few times, or do you want it running around the plate mooing?”
“Cows, Daniel, are not exactly my kink.”
He snorted. “Tell that to Lieutenant Ferrell. He gets completely calf-eyed every time you walk into the room.”
“Respect for my intellectual superiority,” she informed him.
“Cru-ush,” he sing-songed.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m the diplomatic contact expert, remember? I pay attention to these things.”
“Yeah, I’m sure knowing who’s casting hypothetical longing glances at who is really going to help the next time we’ve got people pointing guns or spears at us.”
“Hey, you never know,” he protested. “All information is good information, remember?”
“Unless, of course, it’s incorrect,” she retorted. His eyes narrowed, and then it was really on.
Five minutes later, they both looked up to see the doorway empty. Jack was gone, and they’d both been so wrapped up in their argument that they hadn’t even noticed him leaving.
~*~
“Huh,” Jack said, peering out of the cave at the whirling wall of white. “I’m pretty sure the meteorologist didn’t predict this one on the TV this morning.”
“I’m pretty sure your local TV weatherman doesn’t predict offworld weather, Jack,” Daniel said. “I think someone would have noticed if he’d started doing that sort of thing.”
“You never know,” Jack said darkly. Sam exchanged an amused glance with Daniel, then cleared her throat and waited for Jack to turn around and stop his internalized paranoid anti-weatherman thoughts.
“It looks like we’re not going to be going anywhere for a while, sir,” she said. “Should we go to Plan B?”
“Batten down the hatches and wait out the storm,” Jack agreed. “We’ve got a ton of firewood in here and blankets in our packs, so we should be set for a while.”
“Who’s turn is it to make the fire?” Daniel asked.
“I think it’s Teal’c’s,” Jack said quickly.
“It is in fact your turn, O’Neill,” Teal’c said reprovingly.
“Daniel?” Jack tried.
“No,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a tone that invited debate.
“Don’t even look at me, sir,” Sam said. “I had it on our last mission.”
“Oh, fine,” Jack muttered, and bent to start building the fire.
Minutes later, they had their packs unpacked into a cozy little camp with Jack’s fire at the center. There was nothing they could do about the gusts of freezing air coming through the narrow entrance of the cave, though, and Sam and Daniel took one look at their relatively thin camp blankets and decided to combine forces.
“Body heat,” Daniel announced, as Sam settled in next to him. “Any takers?”
“I am well,” Teal’c said composedly. He managed to look utterly dignified, even sitting cross-legged next to a fire with a blanket wrapped around his broad shoulders like a boy at summer camp. Sam sometimes wondered if Teal’c could look dignified anywhere.
“Sir?” Sam offered.
“I’m good, thanks,” Jack said. He was sitting close enough to the fire to practically be in it, shoulders hunched and the blanket wrapped tightly around him. His teeth chattered slightly as he said, “You two have fun, though.”
“Macho,” Daniel whispered into her ear, and she giggled. He took both their blankets and wound them around them, until he’d created a cozy cocoon, quickly warmed by the heat of his body.
“It’s not fair how much more body heat guys have than girls,” she told him. “I’m always cold, and you never are.”
“I didn’t used to be this much of a furnace, I don’t think,” he said. “It seems to me that my metabolism has been way higher since I Descended, but I could just be remembering it wrong.”
“Well, whatever the cause, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’d be freezing my tail off otherwise.”
“Or your nose,” he said, and buried his own cold nose behind her ear to prove his point. She gave a smothered shriek of outrage and wriggled around furiously, attempting to get a hand free of the tangle of blankets to smack him away.
She was aware of Jack’s eyes on them the whole time, while Daniel caught her hands just before she could get him and held her still, laughingly apologizing and pulling her closer, into a more comfortable position. They ended up with her sitting between his splayed knees with her back against his chest, one forearm wrapped around her midriff to hold her close against him. She sighed and let her head fall back against his shoulder, lulled by his heat and utterly familiar scent, and did her best to ignore her commander’s searching gaze. There wasn’t anything here for him to figure out, and even if there was, it wasn’t any of his business.
The cave fell quiet after that; Teal’c was meditating, Jack was apparently successfully muffling his chattering teeth, and Daniel seemed to be lost in thought. Sam decided to follow his example and closed her eyes, letting her mind drift comfortably as she settled into a light half-doze.
Gradually, though, she became aware of something else- a blunt pressure against the small of her back. She was pretty sure that it wasn’t Daniel’s belt buckle, and it sure as hell wasn’t his gun, since that was sitting next to them, in easy reach and plain view. Daniel was aroused, from sitting here with her.
He wasn’t the only one. Noticing his arousal made her aware of the low-level heat in her own belly, brought on not by some idle fantasy but from the press of Daniel’s utterly familiar and startlingly attractive body against hers. It wasn’t like she hadn’t ever noticed how handsome he was, but she’d never allowed her mind to go there.
Well, almost never. It had happened once before, on another alien world, when Daniel had held her close like this- but she’d put it out of her mind just as quickly as it had entered, and she’d kept it away from her conscious thoughts ever since. She’d had more than enough problems without adding this to the mix.
But now- well, it felt like some of her problems were maybe putting themselves into perspective, and this didn’t feel much like a problem at all, anymore. It felt right. Sam had never been much of one for sexual frustration- if she had an itch, she scratched it, one way or another, or she suppressed it until it was effectively nullified. But she felt oddly comfortable, just sitting here enjoying the feel of her best friend’s hard-on, and judging from the relaxed, sleepy cast of his body, he was pretty comfortable with it too. It was just… easy.
For the first time in months, she allowed herself to think about Janet’s advise. Just go for it, huh? It couldn’t possibly be as simple as all that. There were a million reasons why doing something with Daniel wasn’t a good idea- a million good, sensible reasons. But Sam was pretty damn tired of being sensible, and if she trusted anyone in this world or anyone else, it was Daniel.
Logic told her that she shouldn’t do anything about this. But still, she sat there, watching the snow through half-closed eyes, and wondered.
~*~
“You were really annoying.”
Daniel stopped in the middle of her kitchen, a bag of Chinese takeout in one hand, looking perplexed. “Uh, Sam? I wasn’t even there.”
“No, not in reality, no,” Sam said. “But you kind of were. Apparently you were an image from my subconscious, dredged up as a hallucination to tell me things.”
“Interesting,” Daniel said. “And what did I say?”
“Well,” Sam said, “first you tried to get me to study the cloud instead of try to get out of it, and then you wanted me to talk to it.”
Daniel blinked. “Was there… anyone else, you were seeing?”
“Well, Teal’c tried to keep me awake because of my concussion and was worried about me divulging stuff to the enemy, and Dad wants me to be happy, and apparently I’m not because I’ve never fallen in love like he did with Mom.” She shrugged, aiming for casual and failing miserably. “Oh, and there was this little girl- I still don’t know what that was about.”
Daniel shrugged back, and set the food down on the table. “So it’s just me that was talking crazy. Thanks a lot.”
“Hey,” she said. “No blaming me for my subconscious.”
“Then no blaming me for being annoying,” he pointed out, and they both settled down to dinner.
A few minutes later, Daniel said, “Speaking of annoying, Jack was a real pain in the ass while you were gone.”
She looked up at him, trying to act like her heart wasn’t suddenly beating harder. “Yeah?”
“Teal’c said he was a lot like you, when Jack was missing with Maybourne,” Daniel said. “I wouldn’t know, since I was sitting that one out, but I’d bet that you were never that rude.”
“Don’t count on it,” Sam said. “I can be a real bitch when I want to be.” Pause. “He was really worried?”
“Yes,” Daniel said gently. “You know he was.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just…” She trailed off.
“I know,” he said, and he did, and it made her smile at him, even though she used to think that nothing could ever make her smile about this.
They finished up dinner in relative silence and cleaned up the table together- Sam throwing away the trash and Daniel doing the dishes. She went over to stand by him, picking up a dishtowel and drying the dishes as he handed them to her, one by one.
“He was there, too,” she said finally.
“I thought he might be,” Daniel said. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me to go save the day, that I’d think of something.” Another dish, and another. Daniel just waited. “He called me Samantha,” she admitted. “He had me call him Jack.”
“I know,” he said. She glanced over at him. “Infirmary,” he explained. “Did you really think I wouldn’t be there?”
“No, I guess not.” She sighed, dried another dish. Jack always held the bedside vigil, no matter who was in the hospital bed. But no matter what imaginary promises Jack had made to her on that ship, she knew perfectly well that it was Daniel who was really there for her.
“What else did he say?”
She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Daniel knew she’d been keeping something back. He really did know her that well. “He told me that it’s not really about him,” she said. “That the regs aren’t really the problem, it’s me. That I only want him because I know I can’t have him.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said, and they finished the dishes in silence.
In the living room, Daniel puts the movie in while she grabs two beers. He takes his when she hands it to him, but he frowns. “Are you sure you should be drinking that? I mean, your concussion…”
She shakes her head. Janet had given her a clean bill of health before letting her off base. “I’m fine, Daniel,” she says, and sits down next to him. “I drank at Jack’s earlier, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “Though I figured it was just to get the taste of Jack’s cake out of your mouth.”
“Yes, well,” she said, and smiled a little. “He really can’t bake, can he.”
“He can grill things,” Daniel said. “Sometimes. That’s about the limit of his skill in the kitchen.”
“Something we have in common, then,” she said, and it reminded her of what they were talking about, and she fell silent. Daniel didn’t do anything, just glanced over at her briefly, nodded once at whatever he saw, and started the movie.
They both got a little drunk, enough that they were giggling at the ending. She slid downwards till her head was pillowed on his shoulder, and just stared up at the ceiling, listening to the cheesy music as the credits rolled.
Daniel hit the mute button with his thumb and set the remote down, his hand going to her hair. He gently smoothed it off her forehead, careful to avoid the healing bump, and just watched her, an unreadable look on his face. She thought that his small, upside-down smile was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen.
“He was wrong, you know,” Daniel said a minute later.
“Who was?” Sam mumbled, half-asleep from the soothing stroke of Daniel’s careful fingers.
“Your dad,” Daniel said. “Or your subconscious image of your dad. He was wrong.”
“About what?” she asked absently. If she concentrated, she could feel the individual calluses on Daniel’s fingers, pens and archaeological tools and the one, right there on his index finger, that can’t be from anything but the trigger of his gun. She has one just like it, in the same place.
“You’ve been in love,” Daniel said. “Maybe it wasn’t the same thing your parents shared, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”
She was abruptly wide-awake. “Daniel…” she started, and then stopped. She didn’t have anything to say.
“And maybe Jack was right,” Daniel continued inexorably. “Or you were. Maybe you want him because you can’t have him. That doesn’t make the wanting any easier.”
She half-wanted him to take it back, because they didn’t talk about this. They might talk around it sometimes, but they never, ever talked about it. Only now, they were talking about it. And she had no idea what to do with that.
“How do you know?” she asked, a bit resentfully. He just smiled, tiredly.
“I know the signs,” he said. “I know you, and I know what it feels like.”
“Sha’re,” she said, a little hesitantly. She was another thing they never talked about.
“Yes,” he said. “She was my wife, and I loved her very much.” He looked at her then, very direct. “But she wasn’t the only one.”
“I know,” Sam said. And since Daniel had all but said it, there suddenly didn’t seem any reason to pretend after all. “I’m in love with Jack.”
“Yes, you are,” Daniel said, sounding so calm, and it surprised her how calm he could sound, when she felt like she was in free-fall without a parachute in sight. “And so am I.”
That was it, she thought, oddly dizzy. There it was, all out in the open, a secret told, only it had never really been a secret after all.
“This really sucks,” she said, startling a laugh out of him. “No, really,” she insisted, though she was smiling too. “Here we are, both moping over the same guy. We’re really pathetic.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, still chuckling, but then he ducked his head to look her in the eye, oddly serious despite the smile that lingered on his face. “It doesn’t mean that things just stop, though,” he said. “We don’t have to put our lives on hold for him. We don’t have to be alone just because we can’t have what we want.”
“No,” she said quietly. “We don’t.” And since she knew that he was about to kiss her, she reached up and pulled his head down, just a little, so that she could kiss him first.
It was probably a bad idea. She’d been over all the reasons why it was a bad idea, actually, and right now, she honestly didn’t care. They were both a little drunk, and both a little lonely, and what did it really matter, after all? He was her best friend and she loved him, in a way, and she was certainly attracted to him, and from the way he was kissing her back, so gentle but so intense, she wasn’t exactly leaving him cold, either.
Eventually he pulled back, both of them breathing a little hard. “This isn’t really… a good idea,” he said. The corner of his mouth quirked a little in a smile, and she wanted to kiss that, too. “I should probably go.”
“No,” she said, sitting up till she was looking at him, eye-to-eye. He titled his head- questioningly, she thought.
“No?”
“No,” she said, and let her hand, still cupped loosely around the back up his neck, slide up to his face. The curve of his jaw fit perfectly into her palm. “Stay.”
He looked at her for a minute, holding her gaze with his- searching for something. She just sat there and waited, letting him look till he found what he was going to find. She knew what his answer would be.
“Alright,” he said finally, and smiled, the smile that broke hearts all over the mountain, all over the galaxy. She wasn’t as immune as she’d thought she’d be, not with him sitting close like this, staring at her like she was something he wanted. “I’ll stay.”
“Good,” she said, and kissed him again.
~*~
The next morning was surprisingly un-awkward. Or maybe not so surprisingly. She knew this man, inside and out, and she wasn’t seeing anything she hadn’t seen a million times in tents and alien rooms offworld. It was a little different seeing it in her bed, though. She thought that fact alone increased the cuteness factor of the way his hair stuck up in the back by at least ten.
He stumbled blindly off to her shower and came back marginally more awake- plus he’d apparently found his glasses where she’d left them on the dresser after discovering them under the night table, which meant he wasn’t squinting at her anymore, which, ask anyone, was a vast improvement. Then she gave him a cup of coffee and a kiss on the cheek and went off to take her shower, and when she got back he was dressed and even mostly conscious.
He drove them back to the mountain, since she’d had one too many beers at her welcome-home party at Jack’s place, and he’d driven her home. She’d have to remember to get him to drop her off at Jack’s house that night so she could pick up her bike. Otherwise she’d have to get a ride from Jack himself, and that would just be awkward in so many, many ways.
They split up once they got to the mountain and went off to work on their own projects. Around noon Daniel showed up in her doorway, looking for lunch, and they wandered down to the commissary together, engaged in a friendly argument about what that ritual the aliens had tried to get them to do on their last mission was really about.
Daniel took the position that it was probably just a dance for the gods, a thankfully-absent Goa’uld, but Sam stood by her initial guess, which was that the natives were trying to get them all to have sex. With each other or with them, she didn’t know, and she didn’t care, but it was definitely sex-related. The argument lasted halfway through lunch, which was when Teal’c joined them and explained that it would have been nothing but a feast to welcome the visitors, if only O’Neill hadn’t gotten antsy and taken off before Daniel could get the translation nailed down. They all thought wistfully about the kind of things they could have eaten at a welcoming offworld feast, and then looked down with matching expressions of distaste at the unappetizing meals in front of them.
All in all, it was a regular day. Daniel even remembered to grab her on his way out at quittin’ time so he could give her a ride to her bike. (Which, incidentally, she shouldn’t have been riding yet, and she’d gotten a good earful about it from Janet, too, who’d either spotted her leaving the parking lot, or gotten Jack to spill the beans. Either option was equally likely, with Janet.) They both talked shop the entire way to Jack’s house, and when they pulled up, Daniel didn’t get out of the car, just sat there with the same mild expression he always had.
“So,” she said, and felt awkwardness set in. She wasn’t sure what to say to him, exactly. See you tomorrow? she thought, half-hysterically. Thanks for all the sex?
“So,” he said, and smiled, a real smile, not just his greeting-the-natives smile that was standard Daniel Jackson issue. This was the smile she saw when it was just them. “I’ve got this movie sitting on my coffee table. Something about snake-head amphibians. Sound any good?”
“Little close to home,” she pointed out.
“Yes, well,” he said, and shrugged. “I’m pretty sure even the Goa’uld aren’t this bad.”
“I don’t know,” she teased. “Some of the dress sense on those guys…”
“Don’t remind me,” he groaned. “So, you up for it?”
“Always,” she said, and pulled on her helmet. “Last one there buys the beer.”
She won, of course. He had a head start, but he was driving an SUV, for crying out loud, and didn’t have a chance. Luckily for him, his fridge was well-stocked, and he cooked dinner while she watched with her usual blend of fascination and incomprehension, and afterwards he carried the food into the living room while she grabbed the beer.
They were fucking on the couch before the credits were rolling, empty dishes sitting on the coffee table and two different empty beer bottles lying like drunken mismatched shoes on the soft carpet next to it. Afterwards he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and she stood behind him waiting her turn and making faces at him in the mirror, making him laugh and almost choke on his toothpaste.
She woke up once in the middle of the night, freezing from her broken air unit, and automatically burrowed closer to the blast furnace that was lying next to her. Daniel mumbled something into the pillow and shifted till he had one arm wrapped around her waist. She fell back asleep instantly.
The sun was up when she woke a second time, and so, Sam realized once she was awake enough to focus, was Daniel. He was lying next to her, half-propped up on one elbow, absently playing with the hair at the nape of her neck.
“So,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Late,” he said, his hand not pausing. “But it’s a Sunday, and we’re off. Relax.”
Oh, yeah, she’d forgotten about that. She obeyed and relaxed against him, enjoying the sensation of all that warm skin over muscle, pressed naked against her. It had been a while, and it was Daniel. She was allowed to bask a little.
Basking could only last so long, however, before reality inevitably set in. This was… really a bad idea, but they knew that already. More importantly, she loved Daniel, he was her best friend, but she didn’t want this to be an affair, or anything. She didn’t want to date him; she just wanted what they had right now. And she had no idea how to tell him that.
“Don’t worry, we’re not having a thing,” he said from above her, sounding amused. “Not that kind of thing. It’s a friendship thing, and a sex thing if you want.”
“How did you-“ she started, before looking up and realizing that no, he hadn’t read her mind, and yeah, he did know her just that well. “Okay, yeah. That, um, sounds good.” Pause. “Not just the friendship thing, I meant, but-“
“Yeah,” he said when she couldn’t finish the sentence, and leaned down to kiss her. She kissed him back happily, ignoring the morning breath. Yeah. She could get used to this.
“So,” he said, when they broke apart for air and she’d settled back down into using him as her pillow again. “It’s a weekend, and we have time for a real breakfast. What’s your pleasure?”
“Pancakes?” she suggested hopefully.
“Pancakes I can do,” he said with a grin and yeah, they could totally do this. It didn’t have to be a thing, a relationship thing. They were friends, the best of friends. They had their own kind of love, and it didn’t include romance. But apparently, it had room for this.
She didn’t mind a bit.
~*~
“So that was, hard as this might be to believe, actually worse than any lecture I have ever given.”
“Even the one right before you entered the project?” Sam asked, morbidly curious. She hadn’t been there for the negotiations, thank God. She infinitely preferred near-death experiences to politics.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “Then, all I had to lose was my reputation, credibility, income, and respect. This time, I was in danger of losing my sanity.”
“I heard it was bad,” she said. “I know Jonas wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them again.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t blame him. They didn’t seem to care overmuch about actually solving any problems- they just wanted to blame each other for there being problems in the first place.”
“So how’d you solve things, then?” she asked around a bite of shrimp.
“I didn’t,” Daniel said, looking chagrined. “It was all Jack. He did his thing-“
“What thing?”
“You know, the Jack O’Neill thing,” Daniel said. “Part charm, part threat, almost never fails? I’ve been working my ass off and getting nowhere, and he steps in and pretty soon everything’s gravy.” Daniel scowled and stabbed a bite-sized piece of his tenderloin with his fork. “I hate it when he does that.”
“I think he does it on purpose,” she agreed. “But everything worked out in the end, mostly, and since that almost never happens, I say we call it a win.”
“Okay, point,” he conceded. “So what about you? I think I got the bare bones of it from Teal’c, but how was it down there, really?”
“I felt like I was stuck in A Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Sam said.
“Seriously.”
“I am being serious!” she said. He gave her the Look, and she relented. “It was bad, okay? It was dangerous, and the only reason we survived was because our enemy insisted she go along, and she could take the conditions in a way we couldn’t.” She sighed and set down her fork. “That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is that Jonas had fallen for her, and the whole time she had a Go-“
She broke off as their waiter came by to fill their drinks, inwardly cursing her carelessness. “Was possessed,” she corrected once he was gone again. She sounded like an idiot, but at least she wasn’t accidentally leaking classified information. “We got the girl back, but-“
“But she’s still not the one he fell in love with,” Daniel said, and for a moment he looked so sad, staring blankly down at his plate, that she reached out to touch his arm. He looked back up and smiled at her, silently telling her that he was fine.
“Anyway,” she said, after an awkward second, “Even if I knew what was going to happen, I still don’t think I would have traded places with you.”
“What, you’d prefer almost dying to dealing with bickering bureaucrats?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Okay, yes, I can see that,” Daniel admitted. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they put me through-“
The conversation turned to other things, mundane, non-shop-talk things, and by dessert they were bickering over who’d pay the check. It was the best evening out she’d had in ages, Sam realized with surprise, and it put her in a good enough mood that she relinquished the check to Daniel’s insistent fingers.
Neither of them mentioned Jack again.
~*~
“So Colonel Edwards had his check-in today,” Sam said.
Daniel looked up from the report he was reading, midway through taking a bit of pancake. “Mmh?”
“Colonel Edwards,” Sam said again. “Mining on the Unas planet? You told me to tell you when they had their next check-in. It was this morning.”
Daniel swallowed, then said, “It’s barely morning now, Sam.”
“No, you just like to sleep in,” she said. And getting him awake in the morning required two alarms and copious amounts of coffee as a bribe, she’d discovered. “Anyway, I knew you wanted to hear how things were going, so I made sure that I was there for his report.”
“And?” Daniel asked around another bite of pancake.
“Everything’s great,” she said. “We’re getting all the naquadah we need, the Unas are getting addicted to chocolate, and Iron Shirt hasn’t maimed Colonel Edwards even a little bit.”
“Generally a good thing,” Daniel agreed. Having cleaned his own plate, he peered inquisitively over at hers and even went so far as to poke at it with his fork. “You gonna eat all of that?”
Since it was actually her second breakfast- she’d had cereal this morning while he was taking his shower- she grabbed one last piece of bacon and pushed her plate towards his side of the table. He rewarded her with a smile and settled in, eating the way he always did when he was planning on working through lunch.
A tray thunked to the table by her elbow as someone settled into the seat next to her. “Hello, kids,” Jack said cheerfully, while across the table Teal’c sat next to Daniel. “Doing anything interesting on this fine, sunny day?”
Daniel looked up from the report he’d gone back to. “It’s raining outside, Jack.”
“Yes, well,” Jack said. “We’re twenty floors below, anyway.”
“So why does it matter what the weather is like outside, O’Neill?” Teal’c asked. Jack cleared his throat.
“Not the point! The point is, what exciting things do the three of you have planned for today?”
“I am leading several classes in basic staff fighting techniques,” Teal’c informed them.
“Great, great!” He turned to an oblivious Daniel. “And what about you, Dr. Jackson?”
“Analyzing the footage SG-7 brought back,” Daniel said absently. “It’s actually quite fascinating, Jack. It seems to be a combination of traditional hieroglyphics and modern-“
“Uh huh, that’s… great,” Jack said quickly. “Carter?”
“We’re completing the last round of tests on the object SG-11 brought back a week ago, sir,” she said. “And I think Hammond wanted me to set up a class for all the new recruits- proper transportation protocols for unknown alien technology, manual dialing, that sort of thing.”
“So nothing important that will keep anyone here too late,” Jack said, and looked positively gleeful. “Well, that’s great news! I was planning on taking Teal’c to a karaoke bar, and this way everyone can come along. It’ll be a team thing.”
Sam exchanged glances across the table with Daniel. They’d been planning on going to see that new action movie, which looked like a complete dick flick but it turned out that, like bad sci-fi, they also shared a love of terrible action movies with no redeeming value other than the number of car chases and explosions. After the movie they’d probably end up at her house, where they’d have fairly spectacular sex.
Or they could take Jack up on his invitation, and go out to a karaoke bar, listen to horrible non-music, get drunk on shitty and too-expensive drinks, and try to explain to Teal’c why people thought this was entertaining.
“Got plans,” they said in unison.
Jack looked at both of them suspiciously. “You do, huh? I thought the two of you had no lives.”
“I believe that that remark was uncalled-for, O’Neill,” Teal’c said reprovingly.
“Well, they complain about it often enough,” Jack muttered to himself, but he didn’t press the issue. Teal’c twinkled at her from across the table, with that particular Teal’c look that said he knew exactly what was going on. She knew that he knew, because a week ago he’d asked her, out of nowhere in the middle of their training session, if she was involved with DanielJackson. Because he was Teal’c, she’d told him the truth. He’d been pleased, which was why he was apparently helping them out by Jack-wrangling in his own Teal’c-ish way.
“You two sure you don’t want to come along?” Jack checked. “I mean, come on. Teal’c, karaoke- what could be better?”
Sam caught Daniel’s eye again, and they shared a smile. “We’re sure,” they said, and they were so busy grinning at each other, they didn’t even notice the frown on Jack’s face.
~*~
“You’re acting weird.”
Sam dragged her gaze up from her plate of spaghetti and forced herself to meet Daniel’s patient gaze. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You’re acting weird, and it’s something to do with me, and I’d like- Oh.”
Her reluctant look sharpened into a glare when he didn’t finish. “’Oh?’” Nothing. “Daniel. ‘Oh?’”
“You’re seeing someone,” he said.
“Damn it,” she said, and let her fork drop back onto her plate with a clatter. “I hate it when you do that.”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
If he’d looked even the slightest bit smug she would have been tempted to hit him, but he didn’t. “Yeah, you’re right.” She sighed and sat back in her chair. “You’re not mad?”
“Of course not,” he said. “We’re not a thing, remember? You should be out there looking for your happily ever after.”
“Well, I don’t know if this guy is happily ever after, but…” She shrugged. “He’s nice. Charming. Friend of my brother’s. A cop but not macho about it.”
“Well there’s some definite Mr. Right potential there,” Daniel said, gently teasing, and somehow, it surprised her, just a little bit, how well he was taking this. She’d thought he might have gotten at least a little pissed, or something, but maybe she just wasn’t giving him enough credit. He’d never been one for macho displays, or for pretending ownership over something that wasn’t his.
So instead of letting herself get weird about it, she just laughed and flicked a bit of spaghetti in his direction. “Who says I’m not just enjoying Mr. Right Now?”
“No one,” he said, and then abruptly his open, laughing expression turned serious. “Just as long as he’s not Mr. White Picket Fence.”
She frowned at him. “What?”
“I just want to make sure,” Daniel said, “that you’re not just doing this because you think you should.”
Oh, she thought. Now she knew what Daniel meant. He thought she was reacting to the end of her self-denial about Jack and her unorthodox bed-buddy thing with him by latching onto the first guy that seemed likely to give her the stable, normal relationship that her father would want for her.
“No, Daniel,” she said, and she didn’t let herself sound impatient because this was Daniel, and he was just worried about her, and if anyone had the right to worry, it was him. “It’s not about that.”
“All right,” he said, accepting her at her word, and just like that, he went back to his pasta.
She must have sounded confident, if Daniel believed her that easily, not even an extra look to verify. But inwardly, she wasn’t so sure.
~*~
When they got there, Daniel had his head on the table, buried in his folded arms. His glasses were cast aside in front of him, and for a minute she thought that he was actually taking a nap, but when she sat down next to him and rubbed his back, he moaned “This makes no sense,” sounding sleepy and congested and despairing.
“Maybe you should eat something,” she suggested, bringing her hand back to herself when she realized that yes, they were sitting in the middle of the commissary, a little discretion might be a good idea, even if they weren’t actually sleeping together anymore.
He lifted his head up and gave her an unhappy look, his eyes red and bloodshot, his hair messed up the same way it was when he’d slept on it all night and hadn’t bothered to run a comb through it yet. Jack liked to joke that Daniel didn’t know what a comb was, but he’d never shared a bed with Daniel. If he had, he’d know the difference between Daniel’s daily hairstyle, and bedhead.
“Did I mention that in the dream, the tablet was written in Ancient, and that I could read Ancient?”
He looked so incredibly frustrated and frazzled, and Sam did feel sorry for him, but he also looked kind of adorable, too, so it was hard to work up some really sympathetic sympathy at the moment. “Well that’s no so odd, considering you can also do that when you’re awake.”
He narrowed his eyes to slits in a glare that was probably meant to be threatening, but was actually kind of hilarious. It was also his “I want coffee” look, so it was a little hard to take it all that seriously. Also, he’d buffed up a lot and actually knew how to throw a punch, but she was pretty sure she could break him with her little finger, and she knew all his ticklish spots. Daniel Jackson was pretty much never scary.
“Perhaps,” Teal’c suggested diplomatically, “you are attempting to reveal something to yourself.”
“Like?” Daniel demanded.
“Like something from when you were Ascended,” she put in.
“Like your prior vision of Bra’tac and Ry’ac in danger,” Teal’c said. Daniel yawned.
“The tablet sounds a lot like the one you found when you were on Abydos,” she said, ignoring Daniel’s jaw-twisting yawn.
“That was to lead to the Lost City of the Ancients,” Teal’c finished.
“But didn’t,” Daniel pointed out. “You think that somehow I know the location of the Lost City of the Ancients and just don’t remember?”
“If you have the dream again,” Teal’c said, “perhaps you should translate the tablet.”
Daniel gave Teal’c his skeptical face, and looked over at her. She arched her eyebrow right back at him, and nodded.
He rolled his eyes and buried his head back in his arms with a grunt.
She shared an amused look with Teal’c across the table, and went back to her pancakes in an effort to keep herself from laughing.
~*~
Daniel caught her in her lab just as she was about to head on up to the waiting surveillance van. “So how are you feeling about the stakeout later?” he asked. She gave him a look.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” she asked. “You’re the one who’s getting staked out, here.” She grinned. “Like a sacrificial goat,” she added with relish.
He gave her an irritated sideways look. “You’re spending too much time with Jack.”
“Uh, yeah.” She glanced away.
Daniel, with his usual perceptiveness, said, “And how is Jack, about Officer Pete?”
Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to stop him from calling Pete that. After a day or two, she’d given it up as a lost cause. “He’s… weird.”
“This is Jack we’re talking about,” Daniel said wryly. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
“He’s just… He’s acting like he’s fine with it. He’s being… understanding.”
Daniel knew Jack just as well as- well, better than- she did. “Okay, yeah, that’s a bad sign. What were the two of you talking about?”
“I was humming, apparently,” she said. He gave her a look. “We were stuck in an elevator, okay? It was your fault, you’re the one who went off in search of coffee.”
“I had a Goa’uld in my dreams, I’m allowed to need caffeine,” he replied amiably. “And what else?”
She sighed. “He came in about an hour ago while I was checking over the tranq kit. I was just telling him… well, Pete’s a cop, you know? And he’s got cop instincts, so he knows I’m not working on Deep Space Telemetry down here.” She looked at him miserably. “You can imagine where this is going.”
“Yeah, I’ve had that conversation before,” Daniel said. “Of course, I didn’t realize till later that I was having it with Osiris, not Sarah, but…” He shrugged. “So what’d Pete do?”
“Grabbed his stuff and left,” Sam said. “I haven’t been able to get ahold of him all day.”
“Ah,” Daniel said. “Was last night his first night over?”
If it had been anyone else asking that question (except Janet, or possibly Teal’c) she would have frozen them out completely, but this was Daniel, and the normal rules didn’t really apply to him. He was, technically, an ex-lover, but there wasn’t that residual awkwardness you always had around an ex, just an occasional shared glance, when both of them seemed to remember at the same time that they used to sleep together. Like this morning, when she’d made a crack about male fantasies and he’d given her a Look and nudged her in the arm. It had been… intimate, yes, but a comfortable sort of intimacy, and that comfort was why she answered his question now.
“Yeah,” she admitted.
“Oh, poor Sam,” Daniel said, and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close in for a hug. She let herself lean against him, burying her nose in the crook of his neck. He was just the right height for this, just the right person.
“Forget about it for a little while, okay?” he asked. His voice was low and said right into her ear. “Forget about Jack and whatever’s brewing in that witch’s cauldron he calls a brain, forget about Officer Pete, just let it go.” She felt his mouth curve upwards in a smile where his cheek was pressed against the side of her head. “We’ve about to capture Osiris, get Sarah back, maybe even find the location of the Lost City. What’s not to like about that?”
“You’re right,” she said, laughing into his shoulder. “You’re absolutely right,” she said, and leaned back till she could give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” he said back, and then he picked up the tranq kit before she could get to it.
“Give me that,” she said, but he just shook his head and grinned.
“No way, Sam.” She made a grab for it, but he took a couple dancing steps backwards till he was standing in the doorway. The twinkle in his eyes was the only warning she got before he turned on his heel and ran.
Swearing to herself, she took off after him.
~*~
Sam wasn’t even a little surprised when her doorbell rang and she opened it to reveal Daniel standing there, movie rental case in one hand and beer in the other. She’d recognized the sound of his car as it pulled up in front of her house, which was odd, since he was hardly the only person she knew who drove an SUV. But Daniel’s had that extra little purr that basic shop maintenance couldn’t give it, that only came from a little up-close-and-personal TLC.
(She’d changed his oil a month or so ago when she’d found out he was actually going to pay someone to do it for him, and she’d maybe tinkered a little while she was under there. Call it a compulsion.)
It wasn’t just the sound of the car, though. On some level, she’d been expecting him. The whole time she’d been dating Pete, it had been Pete that she’d been thinking about, but the moment it was over, she’s switched right back over to Daniel. It was like Pete was just a blip on the regular soundtrack of her life, and Daniel was written into every track. They hadn’t spent that much less time together than before when she’d been otherwise occupied, and now that she wasn’t, well, of course he’d be by. Why wouldn’t he?
Sometimes, she thought to herself as she grabbed the beer and headed for the kitchen, she could be really kind of clueless.
“So,” Daniel said, as he followed her in. “How’d things turn out with Officer Pete?”
“You do know he’s a detective, right?” she asked, trying to delay answering. He gave her patient eyes, and she gave in. “Alright, so maybe they didn’t turn out so well.”
“I saw him after we got Osiris,” Daniel said. “He didn’t look so good. Did he just decide that our world was too dangerous for him?”
“Not even close,” Sam said. “He didn’t get clearance.”
Daniel blinked. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” she said. “I’d promised him that if he made it through, I’d tell him everything, only he made it through and I still had to recite the party line. I’m pretty sure he’s back in Denver already.”
“Ouch,” he said, and reached out with one long arm, snagging her wrist and hauling her in close for a hug. She surrendered, thinking that he seemed to be making a habit of this kind of thing. Not that she minded, or anything, but even Daniel was enough of a guy to generally avoid spontaneous hugs. She must look as crappy as she felt, she thought distantly. Great.
This close, if she tilted her head back she could still see the faint red mark Osiris has left with his ribbon device. At least this time they caught him, she thought. They caught him, and they took him out of Sarah, and Daniel’s friend was safe. A happy ending all around, for a change.
Well, except for the part where her boyfriend broke up with her. And maybe he’d said some stuff that was pretty hurtful, but here, hugging Daniel, being hugged by Daniel, it didn’t seem so bad. So what if he thought she was cold and unfeeling and all of those other things? She knew different. And she wasn’t as broken up about losing him as she’d thought she’d be, because in the end, Daniel had been right, just like Daniel always was. Pete had been the chance for a white picket fence life, and now that he was gone, she realized that she didn’t live a white picket fence, and she was never going to.
And she was okay with that.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Daniel whispered into her ear. “I know you wanted things to work out.”
Daniel had known what she was doing with Pete. He’d understood way before she did. But then again, Daniel was usually light-years ahead of everyone else when it came to understanding people. He couldn’t balance an equation to save his life, and he couldn’t plan an attack or shoot a staff weapon in a straight line, but he could talk to people. He knew people, not just their language but them, and he understood them. He took them as they came and respected them for who they were, not what they could do, or even who they could be. It was a gift that both awed and humbled her. He awed and humbled her, when she stopped to think about it, think about this fucking extraordinary man she’d known for the last seven years.
And he called her “sweetheart.” Pete had called her babe, or baby, to be charming, to charm her. And it had worked, but Pete hadn’t, and here she was, quite literally back in Daniel’s arms, and it occurred to her to wonder why she’d bothered to leave. Because he called her sweetheart, even when she wasn’t with him, and it never occurred to him that it was unusual for a man to call a woman that when he wasn’t (currently) sleeping with her. But Daniel did. He was a linguist, words were his life, and he always said precisely what he meant to say, and so he called her sweetheart, because that’s what he meant. That’s what she was to him, whether she was sleeping with him or not.
“Thanks,” she said, idly winding her fingers in the tail of his shirt. “I’m okay, though.”
He huffed a laugh. “I know you are.” Then he pulled back, his expression abruptly serious. “He wasn’t good enough,” he said. “He couldn’t hack it. But I can. I’m still right here, Sam. Whatever you need.”
Yes, she thought distantly. He was. “I know you are, Daniel,” she said, and reached up to pull away his glasses, wanting to see the intensity of his expression without the shielding filter of his lenses. Yeah, there he was, gorgeous, intense blue, focused all the way on her. “I know.”
And then she kissed him.
He kissed her back, and she had just enough presence of mind to toss his glasses gently onto the kitchen table, where they wouldn’t get crunched. They stood there for a long time, just kissing, while her hands fisted in the back of his shirt, and one of his hands crept up to wind itself in the ends of her short hair.
And then Daniel stopped, pulling back just enough to look her in the eye. “I have to ask, Sam. What are we doing here? Not that I’m going to object any way, but I kind of need to know where we stand.”
The dreaded question, she thought. Only, maybe not so dreaded. She knew exactly how to answer, after all.
“We’re in a relationship, Daniel,” she told him. “You’re my best friend, and I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, very seriously. She smiled at him.
“And I’m never going to have the white picket fence. That’s what I was looking for with Pete, you were right about that. And it turns out that’s not really what I need. I need to be happy, and I’m happy with you. We work, together. Right?”
“Right,” he said, and he had that smile he got, when he was trying to explain something, and the person finally understood what he was saying. Sam had a feeling he’d been explaining this one to her for a while now.
“So this is us,” Sam said. “I don’t need to go looking for anything else. I don’t want to go looking for anything else. There’s nothing but heartbreak down that road, and I don’t want any more heartbreak. I just want to be happy.” She kind of felt like she was repeating herself, but she couldn’t explain it any better than that.
Daniel got it, though. He knew how to translate Sam-ese better than anyone. “Me, too, Sam,” he told her, and his smile was beautiful, just… beautiful. “I don’t want to go looking for something that’s just going to end up badly, and I don’t want to pine after someone I’m never going to have. I want you. And we’re happy.”
“Exactly,” she said, and grinned. “We’re happy. And we work.”
“Exactly,” he agreed.
“But,” she said.
He blinked at her. “There’s a but?”
“Kind of,” she said. “If we’re doing this, for real doing this, and I think we are, then I’m putting in a rider.”
He cocked his head to the side. It was his “listening” pose. “Go on.”
“The colonel,” she said. “If either one of us, at any point in the future, gets the chance with Jack, we take it. No hard feelings on either side. That’s the rider. Jack.”
He thought about it for a moment, considering all the possible angles, then nodded. “That’s fair,” he said. “So. Deal?”
“Deal,” she said, and kissed him again.
Continued here.
Author: Sorrel
Fandom: SG-1
Pairing: Sam/Daniel, Jack/Daniel and Jack/Sam UST
Spoilers: Fallen through New Order Part Two
Rating: R
Summary: "No, not that way. We were really, really good friends." And maybe just a little bit more.
From here.
~*~
“I can’t believe you, Daniel,” Sam scolded. “I leave for one lousy little mission and you get shot.”
“And tortured,” Daniel pointed out helpfully. “Can’t forget the torture.”
“Oh of course, how silly of me,” she said, her voice flat. “And tortured, of course. How do you manage to get yourself into this kind of trouble, anyway?”
“Blind luck?” Daniel offered. He winced as the nurse patched up yet another burn wound on his bare chest. Seconds later she echoed it as her nurse carefully moved her arm into position for a less makeshift sling. “Obviously my fairy godmother hasn’t been paying much attention lately.”
“Are you talking about Oma Desala, or someone else?”
He shot her a dirty look. “I’m talking about my entirely hypothetical fairy godmother, thank you.”
“Well, sorry, but you are the one guy I know who does have a woman with extra-special powers who glows looking out for him. You could have been talking about her.” Her nurse finished securing the sling and left her with a pat on the shoulder and a prescription for painkillers in her good hand.
“Well, I didn’t, and I bet she wouldn’t exactly like the comparison.”
“Yeah, she’s not really the Tinkerbell type, I guess. More like an Angel of Death.”
“Who, Doc Fraser?” Jack said from the doorway. “I could have sworn I gave her a good talking-to about slipping the patients arsenic, but I guess she didn’t listen.”
“We were actually talking about Oma Desala, sir,” Sam said. Jack nodded and looked thoughtful.
“You’re right, not much of a Tinkerbell at all. For one thing, Tinkerbell didn’t look even a little bit like a squid.”
“Oh, yeah,” Daniel said. “I’ve been meaning to ask. You said I appeared a couple times when I was a higher being. Did I ever look a bit…”
“Squid-like?” Sam offered.
“Yes, that.”
“Nah,” Jack said. “You had a really stupid haircut and you kept wearing this white sweater that made you look chunky, but there were no glowing tentacles in sight.”
“Well, that’s a… relief,” Daniel said dubiously. “Thanks, Jack. I can always count on you to make me feel better.”
“Don’t worry, Daniel,” Sam told him, keeping her face innocent and her voice incredibly earnest. “You don’t look even a little chunky in uniform.”
“Gee, thanks,” Daniel said, looking not even a little thankful. “Well, Jack, I know why Sam’s sitting here tormenting me; she had to get her arm wrapped. What’s your excuse?”
“Just stoppin’ by to see if you maybe wanted to crash at my place for a few days, get a few square meals you don’t have to cook while you get used to those crutches of yours.”
“Well, thanks for the offer, but I’m actually staying at Sam’s,” Daniel said. Jack’s sharp-edged gaze switched immediately to her face, which she kept bland by dint of sheer force of will. After a moment, Jack looked back at Daniel, sitting there looking oddly comfortable despite the cuts and burns all over his chest and the bruises all over his handsome face.
“Gonna be quite a slapstick routine over there, with your busted leg and her busted wing,” Jack said finally.
“Yes, well, we figure that between the two of us we equal out to one whole person, so we should be able to get along fine,” Daniel said. “Besides, I don’t have to move around much to cook us some dinner, and I’m pretty sure Sam can handle the remote left-handed, so we’re pretty much set for a weekend of recuperation.”
“Well, as long as you’re sure,” Jack said. “Got a few steaks I can burn, if you change your mind. You too, Carter,” he added, glancing at her. She just smiled, blandly.
“As tempting as that sounds, sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline,” she said. She hesitated for a second, weighing the risqué nature of her comment with the potential comedy value of the look on Jack’s face, then just went for it. “I like my meat rare.”
She wasn’t disappointed. Jack’s eyes widened to comical proportions, and his mouth even fell open a little bit in surprise. So there, she thought, oddly smug. I’m not just Carter the Geek after all, remember?
Beside her, Daniel was choking on laughter. “How rare?” he asked, once his giggle fit wore down a little. “Do you even like to slap it on the pan a few times, or do you want it running around the plate mooing?”
“Cows, Daniel, are not exactly my kink.”
He snorted. “Tell that to Lieutenant Ferrell. He gets completely calf-eyed every time you walk into the room.”
“Respect for my intellectual superiority,” she informed him.
“Cru-ush,” he sing-songed.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m the diplomatic contact expert, remember? I pay attention to these things.”
“Yeah, I’m sure knowing who’s casting hypothetical longing glances at who is really going to help the next time we’ve got people pointing guns or spears at us.”
“Hey, you never know,” he protested. “All information is good information, remember?”
“Unless, of course, it’s incorrect,” she retorted. His eyes narrowed, and then it was really on.
Five minutes later, they both looked up to see the doorway empty. Jack was gone, and they’d both been so wrapped up in their argument that they hadn’t even noticed him leaving.
~*~
“Huh,” Jack said, peering out of the cave at the whirling wall of white. “I’m pretty sure the meteorologist didn’t predict this one on the TV this morning.”
“I’m pretty sure your local TV weatherman doesn’t predict offworld weather, Jack,” Daniel said. “I think someone would have noticed if he’d started doing that sort of thing.”
“You never know,” Jack said darkly. Sam exchanged an amused glance with Daniel, then cleared her throat and waited for Jack to turn around and stop his internalized paranoid anti-weatherman thoughts.
“It looks like we’re not going to be going anywhere for a while, sir,” she said. “Should we go to Plan B?”
“Batten down the hatches and wait out the storm,” Jack agreed. “We’ve got a ton of firewood in here and blankets in our packs, so we should be set for a while.”
“Who’s turn is it to make the fire?” Daniel asked.
“I think it’s Teal’c’s,” Jack said quickly.
“It is in fact your turn, O’Neill,” Teal’c said reprovingly.
“Daniel?” Jack tried.
“No,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a tone that invited debate.
“Don’t even look at me, sir,” Sam said. “I had it on our last mission.”
“Oh, fine,” Jack muttered, and bent to start building the fire.
Minutes later, they had their packs unpacked into a cozy little camp with Jack’s fire at the center. There was nothing they could do about the gusts of freezing air coming through the narrow entrance of the cave, though, and Sam and Daniel took one look at their relatively thin camp blankets and decided to combine forces.
“Body heat,” Daniel announced, as Sam settled in next to him. “Any takers?”
“I am well,” Teal’c said composedly. He managed to look utterly dignified, even sitting cross-legged next to a fire with a blanket wrapped around his broad shoulders like a boy at summer camp. Sam sometimes wondered if Teal’c could look dignified anywhere.
“Sir?” Sam offered.
“I’m good, thanks,” Jack said. He was sitting close enough to the fire to practically be in it, shoulders hunched and the blanket wrapped tightly around him. His teeth chattered slightly as he said, “You two have fun, though.”
“Macho,” Daniel whispered into her ear, and she giggled. He took both their blankets and wound them around them, until he’d created a cozy cocoon, quickly warmed by the heat of his body.
“It’s not fair how much more body heat guys have than girls,” she told him. “I’m always cold, and you never are.”
“I didn’t used to be this much of a furnace, I don’t think,” he said. “It seems to me that my metabolism has been way higher since I Descended, but I could just be remembering it wrong.”
“Well, whatever the cause, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’d be freezing my tail off otherwise.”
“Or your nose,” he said, and buried his own cold nose behind her ear to prove his point. She gave a smothered shriek of outrage and wriggled around furiously, attempting to get a hand free of the tangle of blankets to smack him away.
She was aware of Jack’s eyes on them the whole time, while Daniel caught her hands just before she could get him and held her still, laughingly apologizing and pulling her closer, into a more comfortable position. They ended up with her sitting between his splayed knees with her back against his chest, one forearm wrapped around her midriff to hold her close against him. She sighed and let her head fall back against his shoulder, lulled by his heat and utterly familiar scent, and did her best to ignore her commander’s searching gaze. There wasn’t anything here for him to figure out, and even if there was, it wasn’t any of his business.
The cave fell quiet after that; Teal’c was meditating, Jack was apparently successfully muffling his chattering teeth, and Daniel seemed to be lost in thought. Sam decided to follow his example and closed her eyes, letting her mind drift comfortably as she settled into a light half-doze.
Gradually, though, she became aware of something else- a blunt pressure against the small of her back. She was pretty sure that it wasn’t Daniel’s belt buckle, and it sure as hell wasn’t his gun, since that was sitting next to them, in easy reach and plain view. Daniel was aroused, from sitting here with her.
He wasn’t the only one. Noticing his arousal made her aware of the low-level heat in her own belly, brought on not by some idle fantasy but from the press of Daniel’s utterly familiar and startlingly attractive body against hers. It wasn’t like she hadn’t ever noticed how handsome he was, but she’d never allowed her mind to go there.
Well, almost never. It had happened once before, on another alien world, when Daniel had held her close like this- but she’d put it out of her mind just as quickly as it had entered, and she’d kept it away from her conscious thoughts ever since. She’d had more than enough problems without adding this to the mix.
But now- well, it felt like some of her problems were maybe putting themselves into perspective, and this didn’t feel much like a problem at all, anymore. It felt right. Sam had never been much of one for sexual frustration- if she had an itch, she scratched it, one way or another, or she suppressed it until it was effectively nullified. But she felt oddly comfortable, just sitting here enjoying the feel of her best friend’s hard-on, and judging from the relaxed, sleepy cast of his body, he was pretty comfortable with it too. It was just… easy.
For the first time in months, she allowed herself to think about Janet’s advise. Just go for it, huh? It couldn’t possibly be as simple as all that. There were a million reasons why doing something with Daniel wasn’t a good idea- a million good, sensible reasons. But Sam was pretty damn tired of being sensible, and if she trusted anyone in this world or anyone else, it was Daniel.
Logic told her that she shouldn’t do anything about this. But still, she sat there, watching the snow through half-closed eyes, and wondered.
~*~
“You were really annoying.”
Daniel stopped in the middle of her kitchen, a bag of Chinese takeout in one hand, looking perplexed. “Uh, Sam? I wasn’t even there.”
“No, not in reality, no,” Sam said. “But you kind of were. Apparently you were an image from my subconscious, dredged up as a hallucination to tell me things.”
“Interesting,” Daniel said. “And what did I say?”
“Well,” Sam said, “first you tried to get me to study the cloud instead of try to get out of it, and then you wanted me to talk to it.”
Daniel blinked. “Was there… anyone else, you were seeing?”
“Well, Teal’c tried to keep me awake because of my concussion and was worried about me divulging stuff to the enemy, and Dad wants me to be happy, and apparently I’m not because I’ve never fallen in love like he did with Mom.” She shrugged, aiming for casual and failing miserably. “Oh, and there was this little girl- I still don’t know what that was about.”
Daniel shrugged back, and set the food down on the table. “So it’s just me that was talking crazy. Thanks a lot.”
“Hey,” she said. “No blaming me for my subconscious.”
“Then no blaming me for being annoying,” he pointed out, and they both settled down to dinner.
A few minutes later, Daniel said, “Speaking of annoying, Jack was a real pain in the ass while you were gone.”
She looked up at him, trying to act like her heart wasn’t suddenly beating harder. “Yeah?”
“Teal’c said he was a lot like you, when Jack was missing with Maybourne,” Daniel said. “I wouldn’t know, since I was sitting that one out, but I’d bet that you were never that rude.”
“Don’t count on it,” Sam said. “I can be a real bitch when I want to be.” Pause. “He was really worried?”
“Yes,” Daniel said gently. “You know he was.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just…” She trailed off.
“I know,” he said, and he did, and it made her smile at him, even though she used to think that nothing could ever make her smile about this.
They finished up dinner in relative silence and cleaned up the table together- Sam throwing away the trash and Daniel doing the dishes. She went over to stand by him, picking up a dishtowel and drying the dishes as he handed them to her, one by one.
“He was there, too,” she said finally.
“I thought he might be,” Daniel said. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me to go save the day, that I’d think of something.” Another dish, and another. Daniel just waited. “He called me Samantha,” she admitted. “He had me call him Jack.”
“I know,” he said. She glanced over at him. “Infirmary,” he explained. “Did you really think I wouldn’t be there?”
“No, I guess not.” She sighed, dried another dish. Jack always held the bedside vigil, no matter who was in the hospital bed. But no matter what imaginary promises Jack had made to her on that ship, she knew perfectly well that it was Daniel who was really there for her.
“What else did he say?”
She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Daniel knew she’d been keeping something back. He really did know her that well. “He told me that it’s not really about him,” she said. “That the regs aren’t really the problem, it’s me. That I only want him because I know I can’t have him.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said, and they finished the dishes in silence.
In the living room, Daniel puts the movie in while she grabs two beers. He takes his when she hands it to him, but he frowns. “Are you sure you should be drinking that? I mean, your concussion…”
She shakes her head. Janet had given her a clean bill of health before letting her off base. “I’m fine, Daniel,” she says, and sits down next to him. “I drank at Jack’s earlier, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “Though I figured it was just to get the taste of Jack’s cake out of your mouth.”
“Yes, well,” she said, and smiled a little. “He really can’t bake, can he.”
“He can grill things,” Daniel said. “Sometimes. That’s about the limit of his skill in the kitchen.”
“Something we have in common, then,” she said, and it reminded her of what they were talking about, and she fell silent. Daniel didn’t do anything, just glanced over at her briefly, nodded once at whatever he saw, and started the movie.
They both got a little drunk, enough that they were giggling at the ending. She slid downwards till her head was pillowed on his shoulder, and just stared up at the ceiling, listening to the cheesy music as the credits rolled.
Daniel hit the mute button with his thumb and set the remote down, his hand going to her hair. He gently smoothed it off her forehead, careful to avoid the healing bump, and just watched her, an unreadable look on his face. She thought that his small, upside-down smile was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen.
“He was wrong, you know,” Daniel said a minute later.
“Who was?” Sam mumbled, half-asleep from the soothing stroke of Daniel’s careful fingers.
“Your dad,” Daniel said. “Or your subconscious image of your dad. He was wrong.”
“About what?” she asked absently. If she concentrated, she could feel the individual calluses on Daniel’s fingers, pens and archaeological tools and the one, right there on his index finger, that can’t be from anything but the trigger of his gun. She has one just like it, in the same place.
“You’ve been in love,” Daniel said. “Maybe it wasn’t the same thing your parents shared, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”
She was abruptly wide-awake. “Daniel…” she started, and then stopped. She didn’t have anything to say.
“And maybe Jack was right,” Daniel continued inexorably. “Or you were. Maybe you want him because you can’t have him. That doesn’t make the wanting any easier.”
She half-wanted him to take it back, because they didn’t talk about this. They might talk around it sometimes, but they never, ever talked about it. Only now, they were talking about it. And she had no idea what to do with that.
“How do you know?” she asked, a bit resentfully. He just smiled, tiredly.
“I know the signs,” he said. “I know you, and I know what it feels like.”
“Sha’re,” she said, a little hesitantly. She was another thing they never talked about.
“Yes,” he said. “She was my wife, and I loved her very much.” He looked at her then, very direct. “But she wasn’t the only one.”
“I know,” Sam said. And since Daniel had all but said it, there suddenly didn’t seem any reason to pretend after all. “I’m in love with Jack.”
“Yes, you are,” Daniel said, sounding so calm, and it surprised her how calm he could sound, when she felt like she was in free-fall without a parachute in sight. “And so am I.”
That was it, she thought, oddly dizzy. There it was, all out in the open, a secret told, only it had never really been a secret after all.
“This really sucks,” she said, startling a laugh out of him. “No, really,” she insisted, though she was smiling too. “Here we are, both moping over the same guy. We’re really pathetic.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, still chuckling, but then he ducked his head to look her in the eye, oddly serious despite the smile that lingered on his face. “It doesn’t mean that things just stop, though,” he said. “We don’t have to put our lives on hold for him. We don’t have to be alone just because we can’t have what we want.”
“No,” she said quietly. “We don’t.” And since she knew that he was about to kiss her, she reached up and pulled his head down, just a little, so that she could kiss him first.
It was probably a bad idea. She’d been over all the reasons why it was a bad idea, actually, and right now, she honestly didn’t care. They were both a little drunk, and both a little lonely, and what did it really matter, after all? He was her best friend and she loved him, in a way, and she was certainly attracted to him, and from the way he was kissing her back, so gentle but so intense, she wasn’t exactly leaving him cold, either.
Eventually he pulled back, both of them breathing a little hard. “This isn’t really… a good idea,” he said. The corner of his mouth quirked a little in a smile, and she wanted to kiss that, too. “I should probably go.”
“No,” she said, sitting up till she was looking at him, eye-to-eye. He titled his head- questioningly, she thought.
“No?”
“No,” she said, and let her hand, still cupped loosely around the back up his neck, slide up to his face. The curve of his jaw fit perfectly into her palm. “Stay.”
He looked at her for a minute, holding her gaze with his- searching for something. She just sat there and waited, letting him look till he found what he was going to find. She knew what his answer would be.
“Alright,” he said finally, and smiled, the smile that broke hearts all over the mountain, all over the galaxy. She wasn’t as immune as she’d thought she’d be, not with him sitting close like this, staring at her like she was something he wanted. “I’ll stay.”
“Good,” she said, and kissed him again.
~*~
The next morning was surprisingly un-awkward. Or maybe not so surprisingly. She knew this man, inside and out, and she wasn’t seeing anything she hadn’t seen a million times in tents and alien rooms offworld. It was a little different seeing it in her bed, though. She thought that fact alone increased the cuteness factor of the way his hair stuck up in the back by at least ten.
He stumbled blindly off to her shower and came back marginally more awake- plus he’d apparently found his glasses where she’d left them on the dresser after discovering them under the night table, which meant he wasn’t squinting at her anymore, which, ask anyone, was a vast improvement. Then she gave him a cup of coffee and a kiss on the cheek and went off to take her shower, and when she got back he was dressed and even mostly conscious.
He drove them back to the mountain, since she’d had one too many beers at her welcome-home party at Jack’s place, and he’d driven her home. She’d have to remember to get him to drop her off at Jack’s house that night so she could pick up her bike. Otherwise she’d have to get a ride from Jack himself, and that would just be awkward in so many, many ways.
They split up once they got to the mountain and went off to work on their own projects. Around noon Daniel showed up in her doorway, looking for lunch, and they wandered down to the commissary together, engaged in a friendly argument about what that ritual the aliens had tried to get them to do on their last mission was really about.
Daniel took the position that it was probably just a dance for the gods, a thankfully-absent Goa’uld, but Sam stood by her initial guess, which was that the natives were trying to get them all to have sex. With each other or with them, she didn’t know, and she didn’t care, but it was definitely sex-related. The argument lasted halfway through lunch, which was when Teal’c joined them and explained that it would have been nothing but a feast to welcome the visitors, if only O’Neill hadn’t gotten antsy and taken off before Daniel could get the translation nailed down. They all thought wistfully about the kind of things they could have eaten at a welcoming offworld feast, and then looked down with matching expressions of distaste at the unappetizing meals in front of them.
All in all, it was a regular day. Daniel even remembered to grab her on his way out at quittin’ time so he could give her a ride to her bike. (Which, incidentally, she shouldn’t have been riding yet, and she’d gotten a good earful about it from Janet, too, who’d either spotted her leaving the parking lot, or gotten Jack to spill the beans. Either option was equally likely, with Janet.) They both talked shop the entire way to Jack’s house, and when they pulled up, Daniel didn’t get out of the car, just sat there with the same mild expression he always had.
“So,” she said, and felt awkwardness set in. She wasn’t sure what to say to him, exactly. See you tomorrow? she thought, half-hysterically. Thanks for all the sex?
“So,” he said, and smiled, a real smile, not just his greeting-the-natives smile that was standard Daniel Jackson issue. This was the smile she saw when it was just them. “I’ve got this movie sitting on my coffee table. Something about snake-head amphibians. Sound any good?”
“Little close to home,” she pointed out.
“Yes, well,” he said, and shrugged. “I’m pretty sure even the Goa’uld aren’t this bad.”
“I don’t know,” she teased. “Some of the dress sense on those guys…”
“Don’t remind me,” he groaned. “So, you up for it?”
“Always,” she said, and pulled on her helmet. “Last one there buys the beer.”
She won, of course. He had a head start, but he was driving an SUV, for crying out loud, and didn’t have a chance. Luckily for him, his fridge was well-stocked, and he cooked dinner while she watched with her usual blend of fascination and incomprehension, and afterwards he carried the food into the living room while she grabbed the beer.
They were fucking on the couch before the credits were rolling, empty dishes sitting on the coffee table and two different empty beer bottles lying like drunken mismatched shoes on the soft carpet next to it. Afterwards he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and she stood behind him waiting her turn and making faces at him in the mirror, making him laugh and almost choke on his toothpaste.
She woke up once in the middle of the night, freezing from her broken air unit, and automatically burrowed closer to the blast furnace that was lying next to her. Daniel mumbled something into the pillow and shifted till he had one arm wrapped around her waist. She fell back asleep instantly.
The sun was up when she woke a second time, and so, Sam realized once she was awake enough to focus, was Daniel. He was lying next to her, half-propped up on one elbow, absently playing with the hair at the nape of her neck.
“So,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Late,” he said, his hand not pausing. “But it’s a Sunday, and we’re off. Relax.”
Oh, yeah, she’d forgotten about that. She obeyed and relaxed against him, enjoying the sensation of all that warm skin over muscle, pressed naked against her. It had been a while, and it was Daniel. She was allowed to bask a little.
Basking could only last so long, however, before reality inevitably set in. This was… really a bad idea, but they knew that already. More importantly, she loved Daniel, he was her best friend, but she didn’t want this to be an affair, or anything. She didn’t want to date him; she just wanted what they had right now. And she had no idea how to tell him that.
“Don’t worry, we’re not having a thing,” he said from above her, sounding amused. “Not that kind of thing. It’s a friendship thing, and a sex thing if you want.”
“How did you-“ she started, before looking up and realizing that no, he hadn’t read her mind, and yeah, he did know her just that well. “Okay, yeah. That, um, sounds good.” Pause. “Not just the friendship thing, I meant, but-“
“Yeah,” he said when she couldn’t finish the sentence, and leaned down to kiss her. She kissed him back happily, ignoring the morning breath. Yeah. She could get used to this.
“So,” he said, when they broke apart for air and she’d settled back down into using him as her pillow again. “It’s a weekend, and we have time for a real breakfast. What’s your pleasure?”
“Pancakes?” she suggested hopefully.
“Pancakes I can do,” he said with a grin and yeah, they could totally do this. It didn’t have to be a thing, a relationship thing. They were friends, the best of friends. They had their own kind of love, and it didn’t include romance. But apparently, it had room for this.
She didn’t mind a bit.
~*~
“So that was, hard as this might be to believe, actually worse than any lecture I have ever given.”
“Even the one right before you entered the project?” Sam asked, morbidly curious. She hadn’t been there for the negotiations, thank God. She infinitely preferred near-death experiences to politics.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “Then, all I had to lose was my reputation, credibility, income, and respect. This time, I was in danger of losing my sanity.”
“I heard it was bad,” she said. “I know Jonas wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them again.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t blame him. They didn’t seem to care overmuch about actually solving any problems- they just wanted to blame each other for there being problems in the first place.”
“So how’d you solve things, then?” she asked around a bite of shrimp.
“I didn’t,” Daniel said, looking chagrined. “It was all Jack. He did his thing-“
“What thing?”
“You know, the Jack O’Neill thing,” Daniel said. “Part charm, part threat, almost never fails? I’ve been working my ass off and getting nowhere, and he steps in and pretty soon everything’s gravy.” Daniel scowled and stabbed a bite-sized piece of his tenderloin with his fork. “I hate it when he does that.”
“I think he does it on purpose,” she agreed. “But everything worked out in the end, mostly, and since that almost never happens, I say we call it a win.”
“Okay, point,” he conceded. “So what about you? I think I got the bare bones of it from Teal’c, but how was it down there, really?”
“I felt like I was stuck in A Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Sam said.
“Seriously.”
“I am being serious!” she said. He gave her the Look, and she relented. “It was bad, okay? It was dangerous, and the only reason we survived was because our enemy insisted she go along, and she could take the conditions in a way we couldn’t.” She sighed and set down her fork. “That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is that Jonas had fallen for her, and the whole time she had a Go-“
She broke off as their waiter came by to fill their drinks, inwardly cursing her carelessness. “Was possessed,” she corrected once he was gone again. She sounded like an idiot, but at least she wasn’t accidentally leaking classified information. “We got the girl back, but-“
“But she’s still not the one he fell in love with,” Daniel said, and for a moment he looked so sad, staring blankly down at his plate, that she reached out to touch his arm. He looked back up and smiled at her, silently telling her that he was fine.
“Anyway,” she said, after an awkward second, “Even if I knew what was going to happen, I still don’t think I would have traded places with you.”
“What, you’d prefer almost dying to dealing with bickering bureaucrats?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Okay, yes, I can see that,” Daniel admitted. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they put me through-“
The conversation turned to other things, mundane, non-shop-talk things, and by dessert they were bickering over who’d pay the check. It was the best evening out she’d had in ages, Sam realized with surprise, and it put her in a good enough mood that she relinquished the check to Daniel’s insistent fingers.
Neither of them mentioned Jack again.
~*~
“So Colonel Edwards had his check-in today,” Sam said.
Daniel looked up from the report he was reading, midway through taking a bit of pancake. “Mmh?”
“Colonel Edwards,” Sam said again. “Mining on the Unas planet? You told me to tell you when they had their next check-in. It was this morning.”
Daniel swallowed, then said, “It’s barely morning now, Sam.”
“No, you just like to sleep in,” she said. And getting him awake in the morning required two alarms and copious amounts of coffee as a bribe, she’d discovered. “Anyway, I knew you wanted to hear how things were going, so I made sure that I was there for his report.”
“And?” Daniel asked around another bite of pancake.
“Everything’s great,” she said. “We’re getting all the naquadah we need, the Unas are getting addicted to chocolate, and Iron Shirt hasn’t maimed Colonel Edwards even a little bit.”
“Generally a good thing,” Daniel agreed. Having cleaned his own plate, he peered inquisitively over at hers and even went so far as to poke at it with his fork. “You gonna eat all of that?”
Since it was actually her second breakfast- she’d had cereal this morning while he was taking his shower- she grabbed one last piece of bacon and pushed her plate towards his side of the table. He rewarded her with a smile and settled in, eating the way he always did when he was planning on working through lunch.
A tray thunked to the table by her elbow as someone settled into the seat next to her. “Hello, kids,” Jack said cheerfully, while across the table Teal’c sat next to Daniel. “Doing anything interesting on this fine, sunny day?”
Daniel looked up from the report he’d gone back to. “It’s raining outside, Jack.”
“Yes, well,” Jack said. “We’re twenty floors below, anyway.”
“So why does it matter what the weather is like outside, O’Neill?” Teal’c asked. Jack cleared his throat.
“Not the point! The point is, what exciting things do the three of you have planned for today?”
“I am leading several classes in basic staff fighting techniques,” Teal’c informed them.
“Great, great!” He turned to an oblivious Daniel. “And what about you, Dr. Jackson?”
“Analyzing the footage SG-7 brought back,” Daniel said absently. “It’s actually quite fascinating, Jack. It seems to be a combination of traditional hieroglyphics and modern-“
“Uh huh, that’s… great,” Jack said quickly. “Carter?”
“We’re completing the last round of tests on the object SG-11 brought back a week ago, sir,” she said. “And I think Hammond wanted me to set up a class for all the new recruits- proper transportation protocols for unknown alien technology, manual dialing, that sort of thing.”
“So nothing important that will keep anyone here too late,” Jack said, and looked positively gleeful. “Well, that’s great news! I was planning on taking Teal’c to a karaoke bar, and this way everyone can come along. It’ll be a team thing.”
Sam exchanged glances across the table with Daniel. They’d been planning on going to see that new action movie, which looked like a complete dick flick but it turned out that, like bad sci-fi, they also shared a love of terrible action movies with no redeeming value other than the number of car chases and explosions. After the movie they’d probably end up at her house, where they’d have fairly spectacular sex.
Or they could take Jack up on his invitation, and go out to a karaoke bar, listen to horrible non-music, get drunk on shitty and too-expensive drinks, and try to explain to Teal’c why people thought this was entertaining.
“Got plans,” they said in unison.
Jack looked at both of them suspiciously. “You do, huh? I thought the two of you had no lives.”
“I believe that that remark was uncalled-for, O’Neill,” Teal’c said reprovingly.
“Well, they complain about it often enough,” Jack muttered to himself, but he didn’t press the issue. Teal’c twinkled at her from across the table, with that particular Teal’c look that said he knew exactly what was going on. She knew that he knew, because a week ago he’d asked her, out of nowhere in the middle of their training session, if she was involved with DanielJackson. Because he was Teal’c, she’d told him the truth. He’d been pleased, which was why he was apparently helping them out by Jack-wrangling in his own Teal’c-ish way.
“You two sure you don’t want to come along?” Jack checked. “I mean, come on. Teal’c, karaoke- what could be better?”
Sam caught Daniel’s eye again, and they shared a smile. “We’re sure,” they said, and they were so busy grinning at each other, they didn’t even notice the frown on Jack’s face.
~*~
“You’re acting weird.”
Sam dragged her gaze up from her plate of spaghetti and forced herself to meet Daniel’s patient gaze. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You’re acting weird, and it’s something to do with me, and I’d like- Oh.”
Her reluctant look sharpened into a glare when he didn’t finish. “’Oh?’” Nothing. “Daniel. ‘Oh?’”
“You’re seeing someone,” he said.
“Damn it,” she said, and let her fork drop back onto her plate with a clatter. “I hate it when you do that.”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
If he’d looked even the slightest bit smug she would have been tempted to hit him, but he didn’t. “Yeah, you’re right.” She sighed and sat back in her chair. “You’re not mad?”
“Of course not,” he said. “We’re not a thing, remember? You should be out there looking for your happily ever after.”
“Well, I don’t know if this guy is happily ever after, but…” She shrugged. “He’s nice. Charming. Friend of my brother’s. A cop but not macho about it.”
“Well there’s some definite Mr. Right potential there,” Daniel said, gently teasing, and somehow, it surprised her, just a little bit, how well he was taking this. She’d thought he might have gotten at least a little pissed, or something, but maybe she just wasn’t giving him enough credit. He’d never been one for macho displays, or for pretending ownership over something that wasn’t his.
So instead of letting herself get weird about it, she just laughed and flicked a bit of spaghetti in his direction. “Who says I’m not just enjoying Mr. Right Now?”
“No one,” he said, and then abruptly his open, laughing expression turned serious. “Just as long as he’s not Mr. White Picket Fence.”
She frowned at him. “What?”
“I just want to make sure,” Daniel said, “that you’re not just doing this because you think you should.”
Oh, she thought. Now she knew what Daniel meant. He thought she was reacting to the end of her self-denial about Jack and her unorthodox bed-buddy thing with him by latching onto the first guy that seemed likely to give her the stable, normal relationship that her father would want for her.
“No, Daniel,” she said, and she didn’t let herself sound impatient because this was Daniel, and he was just worried about her, and if anyone had the right to worry, it was him. “It’s not about that.”
“All right,” he said, accepting her at her word, and just like that, he went back to his pasta.
She must have sounded confident, if Daniel believed her that easily, not even an extra look to verify. But inwardly, she wasn’t so sure.
~*~
When they got there, Daniel had his head on the table, buried in his folded arms. His glasses were cast aside in front of him, and for a minute she thought that he was actually taking a nap, but when she sat down next to him and rubbed his back, he moaned “This makes no sense,” sounding sleepy and congested and despairing.
“Maybe you should eat something,” she suggested, bringing her hand back to herself when she realized that yes, they were sitting in the middle of the commissary, a little discretion might be a good idea, even if they weren’t actually sleeping together anymore.
He lifted his head up and gave her an unhappy look, his eyes red and bloodshot, his hair messed up the same way it was when he’d slept on it all night and hadn’t bothered to run a comb through it yet. Jack liked to joke that Daniel didn’t know what a comb was, but he’d never shared a bed with Daniel. If he had, he’d know the difference between Daniel’s daily hairstyle, and bedhead.
“Did I mention that in the dream, the tablet was written in Ancient, and that I could read Ancient?”
He looked so incredibly frustrated and frazzled, and Sam did feel sorry for him, but he also looked kind of adorable, too, so it was hard to work up some really sympathetic sympathy at the moment. “Well that’s no so odd, considering you can also do that when you’re awake.”
He narrowed his eyes to slits in a glare that was probably meant to be threatening, but was actually kind of hilarious. It was also his “I want coffee” look, so it was a little hard to take it all that seriously. Also, he’d buffed up a lot and actually knew how to throw a punch, but she was pretty sure she could break him with her little finger, and she knew all his ticklish spots. Daniel Jackson was pretty much never scary.
“Perhaps,” Teal’c suggested diplomatically, “you are attempting to reveal something to yourself.”
“Like?” Daniel demanded.
“Like something from when you were Ascended,” she put in.
“Like your prior vision of Bra’tac and Ry’ac in danger,” Teal’c said. Daniel yawned.
“The tablet sounds a lot like the one you found when you were on Abydos,” she said, ignoring Daniel’s jaw-twisting yawn.
“That was to lead to the Lost City of the Ancients,” Teal’c finished.
“But didn’t,” Daniel pointed out. “You think that somehow I know the location of the Lost City of the Ancients and just don’t remember?”
“If you have the dream again,” Teal’c said, “perhaps you should translate the tablet.”
Daniel gave Teal’c his skeptical face, and looked over at her. She arched her eyebrow right back at him, and nodded.
He rolled his eyes and buried his head back in his arms with a grunt.
She shared an amused look with Teal’c across the table, and went back to her pancakes in an effort to keep herself from laughing.
~*~
Daniel caught her in her lab just as she was about to head on up to the waiting surveillance van. “So how are you feeling about the stakeout later?” he asked. She gave him a look.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” she asked. “You’re the one who’s getting staked out, here.” She grinned. “Like a sacrificial goat,” she added with relish.
He gave her an irritated sideways look. “You’re spending too much time with Jack.”
“Uh, yeah.” She glanced away.
Daniel, with his usual perceptiveness, said, “And how is Jack, about Officer Pete?”
Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to stop him from calling Pete that. After a day or two, she’d given it up as a lost cause. “He’s… weird.”
“This is Jack we’re talking about,” Daniel said wryly. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
“He’s just… He’s acting like he’s fine with it. He’s being… understanding.”
Daniel knew Jack just as well as- well, better than- she did. “Okay, yeah, that’s a bad sign. What were the two of you talking about?”
“I was humming, apparently,” she said. He gave her a look. “We were stuck in an elevator, okay? It was your fault, you’re the one who went off in search of coffee.”
“I had a Goa’uld in my dreams, I’m allowed to need caffeine,” he replied amiably. “And what else?”
She sighed. “He came in about an hour ago while I was checking over the tranq kit. I was just telling him… well, Pete’s a cop, you know? And he’s got cop instincts, so he knows I’m not working on Deep Space Telemetry down here.” She looked at him miserably. “You can imagine where this is going.”
“Yeah, I’ve had that conversation before,” Daniel said. “Of course, I didn’t realize till later that I was having it with Osiris, not Sarah, but…” He shrugged. “So what’d Pete do?”
“Grabbed his stuff and left,” Sam said. “I haven’t been able to get ahold of him all day.”
“Ah,” Daniel said. “Was last night his first night over?”
If it had been anyone else asking that question (except Janet, or possibly Teal’c) she would have frozen them out completely, but this was Daniel, and the normal rules didn’t really apply to him. He was, technically, an ex-lover, but there wasn’t that residual awkwardness you always had around an ex, just an occasional shared glance, when both of them seemed to remember at the same time that they used to sleep together. Like this morning, when she’d made a crack about male fantasies and he’d given her a Look and nudged her in the arm. It had been… intimate, yes, but a comfortable sort of intimacy, and that comfort was why she answered his question now.
“Yeah,” she admitted.
“Oh, poor Sam,” Daniel said, and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close in for a hug. She let herself lean against him, burying her nose in the crook of his neck. He was just the right height for this, just the right person.
“Forget about it for a little while, okay?” he asked. His voice was low and said right into her ear. “Forget about Jack and whatever’s brewing in that witch’s cauldron he calls a brain, forget about Officer Pete, just let it go.” She felt his mouth curve upwards in a smile where his cheek was pressed against the side of her head. “We’ve about to capture Osiris, get Sarah back, maybe even find the location of the Lost City. What’s not to like about that?”
“You’re right,” she said, laughing into his shoulder. “You’re absolutely right,” she said, and leaned back till she could give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” he said back, and then he picked up the tranq kit before she could get to it.
“Give me that,” she said, but he just shook his head and grinned.
“No way, Sam.” She made a grab for it, but he took a couple dancing steps backwards till he was standing in the doorway. The twinkle in his eyes was the only warning she got before he turned on his heel and ran.
Swearing to herself, she took off after him.
~*~
Sam wasn’t even a little surprised when her doorbell rang and she opened it to reveal Daniel standing there, movie rental case in one hand and beer in the other. She’d recognized the sound of his car as it pulled up in front of her house, which was odd, since he was hardly the only person she knew who drove an SUV. But Daniel’s had that extra little purr that basic shop maintenance couldn’t give it, that only came from a little up-close-and-personal TLC.
(She’d changed his oil a month or so ago when she’d found out he was actually going to pay someone to do it for him, and she’d maybe tinkered a little while she was under there. Call it a compulsion.)
It wasn’t just the sound of the car, though. On some level, she’d been expecting him. The whole time she’d been dating Pete, it had been Pete that she’d been thinking about, but the moment it was over, she’s switched right back over to Daniel. It was like Pete was just a blip on the regular soundtrack of her life, and Daniel was written into every track. They hadn’t spent that much less time together than before when she’d been otherwise occupied, and now that she wasn’t, well, of course he’d be by. Why wouldn’t he?
Sometimes, she thought to herself as she grabbed the beer and headed for the kitchen, she could be really kind of clueless.
“So,” Daniel said, as he followed her in. “How’d things turn out with Officer Pete?”
“You do know he’s a detective, right?” she asked, trying to delay answering. He gave her patient eyes, and she gave in. “Alright, so maybe they didn’t turn out so well.”
“I saw him after we got Osiris,” Daniel said. “He didn’t look so good. Did he just decide that our world was too dangerous for him?”
“Not even close,” Sam said. “He didn’t get clearance.”
Daniel blinked. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” she said. “I’d promised him that if he made it through, I’d tell him everything, only he made it through and I still had to recite the party line. I’m pretty sure he’s back in Denver already.”
“Ouch,” he said, and reached out with one long arm, snagging her wrist and hauling her in close for a hug. She surrendered, thinking that he seemed to be making a habit of this kind of thing. Not that she minded, or anything, but even Daniel was enough of a guy to generally avoid spontaneous hugs. She must look as crappy as she felt, she thought distantly. Great.
This close, if she tilted her head back she could still see the faint red mark Osiris has left with his ribbon device. At least this time they caught him, she thought. They caught him, and they took him out of Sarah, and Daniel’s friend was safe. A happy ending all around, for a change.
Well, except for the part where her boyfriend broke up with her. And maybe he’d said some stuff that was pretty hurtful, but here, hugging Daniel, being hugged by Daniel, it didn’t seem so bad. So what if he thought she was cold and unfeeling and all of those other things? She knew different. And she wasn’t as broken up about losing him as she’d thought she’d be, because in the end, Daniel had been right, just like Daniel always was. Pete had been the chance for a white picket fence life, and now that he was gone, she realized that she didn’t live a white picket fence, and she was never going to.
And she was okay with that.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Daniel whispered into her ear. “I know you wanted things to work out.”
Daniel had known what she was doing with Pete. He’d understood way before she did. But then again, Daniel was usually light-years ahead of everyone else when it came to understanding people. He couldn’t balance an equation to save his life, and he couldn’t plan an attack or shoot a staff weapon in a straight line, but he could talk to people. He knew people, not just their language but them, and he understood them. He took them as they came and respected them for who they were, not what they could do, or even who they could be. It was a gift that both awed and humbled her. He awed and humbled her, when she stopped to think about it, think about this fucking extraordinary man she’d known for the last seven years.
And he called her “sweetheart.” Pete had called her babe, or baby, to be charming, to charm her. And it had worked, but Pete hadn’t, and here she was, quite literally back in Daniel’s arms, and it occurred to her to wonder why she’d bothered to leave. Because he called her sweetheart, even when she wasn’t with him, and it never occurred to him that it was unusual for a man to call a woman that when he wasn’t (currently) sleeping with her. But Daniel did. He was a linguist, words were his life, and he always said precisely what he meant to say, and so he called her sweetheart, because that’s what he meant. That’s what she was to him, whether she was sleeping with him or not.
“Thanks,” she said, idly winding her fingers in the tail of his shirt. “I’m okay, though.”
He huffed a laugh. “I know you are.” Then he pulled back, his expression abruptly serious. “He wasn’t good enough,” he said. “He couldn’t hack it. But I can. I’m still right here, Sam. Whatever you need.”
Yes, she thought distantly. He was. “I know you are, Daniel,” she said, and reached up to pull away his glasses, wanting to see the intensity of his expression without the shielding filter of his lenses. Yeah, there he was, gorgeous, intense blue, focused all the way on her. “I know.”
And then she kissed him.
He kissed her back, and she had just enough presence of mind to toss his glasses gently onto the kitchen table, where they wouldn’t get crunched. They stood there for a long time, just kissing, while her hands fisted in the back of his shirt, and one of his hands crept up to wind itself in the ends of her short hair.
And then Daniel stopped, pulling back just enough to look her in the eye. “I have to ask, Sam. What are we doing here? Not that I’m going to object any way, but I kind of need to know where we stand.”
The dreaded question, she thought. Only, maybe not so dreaded. She knew exactly how to answer, after all.
“We’re in a relationship, Daniel,” she told him. “You’re my best friend, and I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, very seriously. She smiled at him.
“And I’m never going to have the white picket fence. That’s what I was looking for with Pete, you were right about that. And it turns out that’s not really what I need. I need to be happy, and I’m happy with you. We work, together. Right?”
“Right,” he said, and he had that smile he got, when he was trying to explain something, and the person finally understood what he was saying. Sam had a feeling he’d been explaining this one to her for a while now.
“So this is us,” Sam said. “I don’t need to go looking for anything else. I don’t want to go looking for anything else. There’s nothing but heartbreak down that road, and I don’t want any more heartbreak. I just want to be happy.” She kind of felt like she was repeating herself, but she couldn’t explain it any better than that.
Daniel got it, though. He knew how to translate Sam-ese better than anyone. “Me, too, Sam,” he told her, and his smile was beautiful, just… beautiful. “I don’t want to go looking for something that’s just going to end up badly, and I don’t want to pine after someone I’m never going to have. I want you. And we’re happy.”
“Exactly,” she said, and grinned. “We’re happy. And we work.”
“Exactly,” he agreed.
“But,” she said.
He blinked at her. “There’s a but?”
“Kind of,” she said. “If we’re doing this, for real doing this, and I think we are, then I’m putting in a rider.”
He cocked his head to the side. It was his “listening” pose. “Go on.”
“The colonel,” she said. “If either one of us, at any point in the future, gets the chance with Jack, we take it. No hard feelings on either side. That’s the rider. Jack.”
He thought about it for a moment, considering all the possible angles, then nodded. “That’s fair,” he said. “So. Deal?”
“Deal,” she said, and kissed him again.
Continued here.