Five things Daniel does when he can't sleep.
Word Count: 1700
1) He tries to remember being Ascended.
Nothing comes through clearly, of course, even when he concentrates. He gets flashes, though, of memories. They’re really confusing, usually, since his perspective as an Ascended being (big glowy octopus, whatever, Jack) is…well… hard to describe.
What stands out the strongest - what he can still recognize in human form, anyway - are faces. He apparently spent a lot of time visiting SG-1. Daniel wonders if his friends could see or hear him, or if he was just an invisible stalker of sorts.
Some of these memory fragments seem pretty mundane. One consists solely of Sam, sitting in her kitchen, drinking coffee, and reading a trade journal. Daniel doesn’t know why he was there, if he was trying to communicate with her, or if she even knew he was with her. As random memories go, it’s not a bad one. Her kitchen was warm and quiet, and it smelled like gourmet coffee. Daniel has no way of confirming it, but he’s pretty damn sure she stole some from his secret coffee stash from his office drawer, because he’d know that scent anywhere.
Sometimes, the flashes are darker. There are a couple of Jack that are absolutely horrific. Jack’s bleeding, not just bloody, but actively bleeding out, and sometimes he’s gasping for air, and sometimes he’s flat out screaming. Daniel knows these are from Ba’al. The first time they came into his mind, he sat straight up and vomited over the side of the bed.
He doesn’t try to remember those moments. He really doesn’t. But at the same time, he’s pretty sure that if he can get by those, he could access more memories. Watching Jack dying - over and over and over again - it’s supposed to deter him from thinking about his time among the Ascended.
But whenever he tries, whenever he tries to endure watching Jack’s deaths, he can’t get any further. Daniel’s eyelids become heavy and exhaustion overcomes him, and the fleeting visions of this time in his life fade away, almost like one of Oma’s kind has swept into his bedroom to put an end to his efforts.
And for this, it’s an unfailing way to get to sleep.
2. He thinks about his mother.
Most therapists would have a field day with a man over thirty using his long dead mother as a sleep aid, but Daniel doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it. He doesn’t do it all the time and if anything, it’s a healthy emotional exercise.
She used to say goodnight to him in every language she knew. It took a while, and it worked like that book “Goodnight Moon”, as he got sleepier and sleepier until she finally slipped into English. So, Daniel lies there and does it, silently in his head, the way she used to do it softly by his bedside. He can’t really remember her voice anymore, or the way it modulated as she changed languages, and he supposes it’s just the sentiment that gives him comfort and the effort of remembering the exact order and some of the linguistic complexities that gradually tires him out.
Anyway, it works, and it’s gentle and peaceful, it gives him the chance to spare a thought to her, and it’s been the only way she’s mothered him for a very long time.
3. And then, in incidents that have had absolutely nothing to do with his mother, he’s visited Vala.
He should probably feel guilty for using her, except that he knows that she’s using him, too, maybe not in the same way, but in some way that’s probably worse, more devious, and not as emotionally complicated. He hopes, anyway, since it’s hard to tell the expression on her face under the teeth-filled grins and squeals of excitement when she finds him at her door in the middle of the night or early morning.
And then he has to tell her to be quiet, because for God’s sake, someone’s going to hear - or worse, see - and then it won’t just be Vala telling the entire base like she does anyway but actual witnesses, and… well Daniel’s not sure what would happen then, but it would probably involve a painful call from Washington, and the overwhelming urge to murder someone or a bunch of someones, or maybe the whole SGC.
Vala thinks he’s being ridiculous, that nothing bad will happen if people find out, or if they do it more often, and that’s the point where he uses his own mouth to shut her up, because if he doesn’t she will just keep talking.
And of course, the stereotype holds true, because he falls asleep immediately after. He’s not selfish, or anything, it’s not like he rolls over and falls unconscious as soon as he gets his. She seems pretty happy, too, and rarely wants to stay awake much longer, either. Not that this is a frequent event, but he’d probably be made loudly and angrily aware if she were dissatisfied in any way. Vala is warm and long, and unsurprisingly in her sleep she manages to both hog the sheets and curl around him like some kind of crushing curvy, silken parasite.
It’s neurochemistry, that’s all. There are a couple of scholarly article on the changes in brain hormones in males following intercourse, and it all makes perfect clinical sense. And that’s why he falls asleep so easily, with Vala’s arm draped across his chest and her face settled in the hollow of his shoulder, breathing a hot rhythm against his ear.
4. He used to take long walks in the dark. Off-world, he has been forbidden explicitly by Jack - and then by Mitchell, who looked confused and offered it as a grandfather clause-type order among the list of instructions Jack had left him - to do anything but lie there and try to sleep.
“What did you do, Jackson?” Mitchell asked, after awkwardly giving Daniel the very first order of his command.
Daniel had already begun mentally composing the very indignant speech he was going to make to Jack - as soon as he got hold of a phone - about singling him out as a problem child in the ‘care and feeding of SG-1’ titled paper Mitchell was reading from.
To Mitchell, he gave his best blank face. “It’s just standard protocol. Sleep while you can, ‘til it’s your watch.”
Mitchell looked at him steadily, saying nothing.
Daniel tried to get a look at Mitchell’s list. “Does that say…anything?”
Deliberately, Mitchell held it against his chest, away from Daniel’s eyes.
“Something about protecting my ass by keeping you in bed where you belong?”
“What?” The content of the angry speech Jack was getting suddenly changed. “He said what?”
Cameron ignored him, although he had the good grace to note how Daniel’s jaw was clenching and not say anything else in that vein.
“You know, I can always ask Carter or Teal’c.” Mitchell threatened.
“Fine,” Daniel said, since Carter loved the story, and when she told it there were a number of untrue embellishments that he would just have to correct later.
“P3X-463,” he said, wondering how well Mitchell had those mission reports memorized. No reaction fluttered across the man’s face, but that just meant if Daniel didn’t tell him, he’d go look it up, anyway.
“It was just a survey,” he said, “nothing interesting. No Goau’ld.”
“So how’d you manage to get into trouble?”
“I,” Daniel said, pointedly, “didn’t do anything stupid. I could read the native language and I knew exactly what I was doing. My allergies were acting up, I couldn’t sleep, so I went to check out the temple with a flashlight.”
“Uh-oh,” Mitchell said.
Daniel smiled sourly. “I was perfectly safe. Jack, however, decided to follow me without telling me. And he couldn’t read the native language, so he stepped on a sacred stone and the temple guard shot him in the ass with an arrow.”
Mitchell choked. It sounded like an aborted snort and his hand flew to his mouth. Under Daniel’s glare, he forced down any other reaction.
“Oh,” he said, coughing lightly. “I see. Well, General O’Neill’s right. For the safety of my ass, I concur with that standing order.”
So, Daniel doesn’t take walks anymore.
5. Off-world, it’s hard to solve insomnia without waking the rest of the team. A couple of times, Jack threatened to shoot him if he didn’t stop conjugating Mandarin verb tables out loud. Daniel was being quiet about it, far quieter than any sound Jack produced while actually asleep. He would point that out in the morning, quite frequently, and Jack would throw a case of earplugs at him so it bounced off his forehead.
He doesn’t use earplugs. Daniel thinks it’s a dumb idea, particularly if some Goaul’d and his Jaffa or, more recently, a army of Ori faithful, is sneaking up on the campsite. Hell, even pissed off natives could make an appearance.
Besides, some nights, the noises surrounding him help Daniel get to sleep. It’s been a decade after all, and Daniel is used to the sound of Jack rumbling away a few feet over. He can differentiate the sound of his teammates’ breathing; Sam always whistles softly through her nose as she inhales. Sometimes, Teal’c will say random phrases in Jaffa in his sleep. The others don’t understand, of course, but Daniel finds the non-sequiturs hilarious, particularly because he would kill to know why Teal’c shouted “God of Diapers!” that one time.
Anyways, he’s used to those nocturnal sounds. He’s getting used to the gruff way Mitchell breathes while sleeping. Vala is a surprisingly silent but restless solitary sleeper. She wakes frequently and announces her confusion at returning to consciousness with an alarmed “What?” as she sits up. If he’s in range, Mitchell will throw something at her, like his pillow, and she’ll just flop back over. It hasn’t even been that long, and it’s become a predictable pattern. It’s comforting to hear them, in their usual rhythm, surrounding him on whatever planet, wherever he is in the galaxy.
And, he never thought he’d say it, but these days he has trouble sleeping because he can’t hear Jack snoring.
1) He tries to remember being Ascended.
Nothing comes through clearly, of course, even when he concentrates. He gets flashes, though, of memories. They’re really confusing, usually, since his perspective as an Ascended being (big glowy octopus, whatever, Jack) is…well… hard to describe.
What stands out the strongest - what he can still recognize in human form, anyway - are faces. He apparently spent a lot of time visiting SG-1. Daniel wonders if his friends could see or hear him, or if he was just an invisible stalker of sorts.
Some of these memory fragments seem pretty mundane. One consists solely of Sam, sitting in her kitchen, drinking coffee, and reading a trade journal. Daniel doesn’t know why he was there, if he was trying to communicate with her, or if she even knew he was with her. As random memories go, it’s not a bad one. Her kitchen was warm and quiet, and it smelled like gourmet coffee. Daniel has no way of confirming it, but he’s pretty damn sure she stole some from his secret coffee stash from his office drawer, because he’d know that scent anywhere.
Sometimes, the flashes are darker. There are a couple of Jack that are absolutely horrific. Jack’s bleeding, not just bloody, but actively bleeding out, and sometimes he’s gasping for air, and sometimes he’s flat out screaming. Daniel knows these are from Ba’al. The first time they came into his mind, he sat straight up and vomited over the side of the bed.
He doesn’t try to remember those moments. He really doesn’t. But at the same time, he’s pretty sure that if he can get by those, he could access more memories. Watching Jack dying - over and over and over again - it’s supposed to deter him from thinking about his time among the Ascended.
But whenever he tries, whenever he tries to endure watching Jack’s deaths, he can’t get any further. Daniel’s eyelids become heavy and exhaustion overcomes him, and the fleeting visions of this time in his life fade away, almost like one of Oma’s kind has swept into his bedroom to put an end to his efforts.
And for this, it’s an unfailing way to get to sleep.
2. He thinks about his mother.
Most therapists would have a field day with a man over thirty using his long dead mother as a sleep aid, but Daniel doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it. He doesn’t do it all the time and if anything, it’s a healthy emotional exercise.
She used to say goodnight to him in every language she knew. It took a while, and it worked like that book “Goodnight Moon”, as he got sleepier and sleepier until she finally slipped into English. So, Daniel lies there and does it, silently in his head, the way she used to do it softly by his bedside. He can’t really remember her voice anymore, or the way it modulated as she changed languages, and he supposes it’s just the sentiment that gives him comfort and the effort of remembering the exact order and some of the linguistic complexities that gradually tires him out.
Anyway, it works, and it’s gentle and peaceful, it gives him the chance to spare a thought to her, and it’s been the only way she’s mothered him for a very long time.
3. And then, in incidents that have had absolutely nothing to do with his mother, he’s visited Vala.
He should probably feel guilty for using her, except that he knows that she’s using him, too, maybe not in the same way, but in some way that’s probably worse, more devious, and not as emotionally complicated. He hopes, anyway, since it’s hard to tell the expression on her face under the teeth-filled grins and squeals of excitement when she finds him at her door in the middle of the night or early morning.
And then he has to tell her to be quiet, because for God’s sake, someone’s going to hear - or worse, see - and then it won’t just be Vala telling the entire base like she does anyway but actual witnesses, and… well Daniel’s not sure what would happen then, but it would probably involve a painful call from Washington, and the overwhelming urge to murder someone or a bunch of someones, or maybe the whole SGC.
Vala thinks he’s being ridiculous, that nothing bad will happen if people find out, or if they do it more often, and that’s the point where he uses his own mouth to shut her up, because if he doesn’t she will just keep talking.
And of course, the stereotype holds true, because he falls asleep immediately after. He’s not selfish, or anything, it’s not like he rolls over and falls unconscious as soon as he gets his. She seems pretty happy, too, and rarely wants to stay awake much longer, either. Not that this is a frequent event, but he’d probably be made loudly and angrily aware if she were dissatisfied in any way. Vala is warm and long, and unsurprisingly in her sleep she manages to both hog the sheets and curl around him like some kind of crushing curvy, silken parasite.
It’s neurochemistry, that’s all. There are a couple of scholarly article on the changes in brain hormones in males following intercourse, and it all makes perfect clinical sense. And that’s why he falls asleep so easily, with Vala’s arm draped across his chest and her face settled in the hollow of his shoulder, breathing a hot rhythm against his ear.
4. He used to take long walks in the dark. Off-world, he has been forbidden explicitly by Jack - and then by Mitchell, who looked confused and offered it as a grandfather clause-type order among the list of instructions Jack had left him - to do anything but lie there and try to sleep.
“What did you do, Jackson?” Mitchell asked, after awkwardly giving Daniel the very first order of his command.
Daniel had already begun mentally composing the very indignant speech he was going to make to Jack - as soon as he got hold of a phone - about singling him out as a problem child in the ‘care and feeding of SG-1’ titled paper Mitchell was reading from.
To Mitchell, he gave his best blank face. “It’s just standard protocol. Sleep while you can, ‘til it’s your watch.”
Mitchell looked at him steadily, saying nothing.
Daniel tried to get a look at Mitchell’s list. “Does that say…anything?”
Deliberately, Mitchell held it against his chest, away from Daniel’s eyes.
“Something about protecting my ass by keeping you in bed where you belong?”
“What?” The content of the angry speech Jack was getting suddenly changed. “He said what?”
Cameron ignored him, although he had the good grace to note how Daniel’s jaw was clenching and not say anything else in that vein.
“You know, I can always ask Carter or Teal’c.” Mitchell threatened.
“Fine,” Daniel said, since Carter loved the story, and when she told it there were a number of untrue embellishments that he would just have to correct later.
“P3X-463,” he said, wondering how well Mitchell had those mission reports memorized. No reaction fluttered across the man’s face, but that just meant if Daniel didn’t tell him, he’d go look it up, anyway.
“It was just a survey,” he said, “nothing interesting. No Goau’ld.”
“So how’d you manage to get into trouble?”
“I,” Daniel said, pointedly, “didn’t do anything stupid. I could read the native language and I knew exactly what I was doing. My allergies were acting up, I couldn’t sleep, so I went to check out the temple with a flashlight.”
“Uh-oh,” Mitchell said.
Daniel smiled sourly. “I was perfectly safe. Jack, however, decided to follow me without telling me. And he couldn’t read the native language, so he stepped on a sacred stone and the temple guard shot him in the ass with an arrow.”
Mitchell choked. It sounded like an aborted snort and his hand flew to his mouth. Under Daniel’s glare, he forced down any other reaction.
“Oh,” he said, coughing lightly. “I see. Well, General O’Neill’s right. For the safety of my ass, I concur with that standing order.”
So, Daniel doesn’t take walks anymore.
5. Off-world, it’s hard to solve insomnia without waking the rest of the team. A couple of times, Jack threatened to shoot him if he didn’t stop conjugating Mandarin verb tables out loud. Daniel was being quiet about it, far quieter than any sound Jack produced while actually asleep. He would point that out in the morning, quite frequently, and Jack would throw a case of earplugs at him so it bounced off his forehead.
He doesn’t use earplugs. Daniel thinks it’s a dumb idea, particularly if some Goaul’d and his Jaffa or, more recently, a army of Ori faithful, is sneaking up on the campsite. Hell, even pissed off natives could make an appearance.
Besides, some nights, the noises surrounding him help Daniel get to sleep. It’s been a decade after all, and Daniel is used to the sound of Jack rumbling away a few feet over. He can differentiate the sound of his teammates’ breathing; Sam always whistles softly through her nose as she inhales. Sometimes, Teal’c will say random phrases in Jaffa in his sleep. The others don’t understand, of course, but Daniel finds the non-sequiturs hilarious, particularly because he would kill to know why Teal’c shouted “God of Diapers!” that one time.
Anyways, he’s used to those nocturnal sounds. He’s getting used to the gruff way Mitchell breathes while sleeping. Vala is a surprisingly silent but restless solitary sleeper. She wakes frequently and announces her confusion at returning to consciousness with an alarmed “What?” as she sits up. If he’s in range, Mitchell will throw something at her, like his pillow, and she’ll just flop back over. It hasn’t even been that long, and it’s become a predictable pattern. It’s comforting to hear them, in their usual rhythm, surrounding him on whatever planet, wherever he is in the galaxy.
And, he never thought he’d say it, but these days he has trouble sleeping because he can’t hear Jack snoring.