At the Hour When We Are Trembling by frostfire_17, commentary by erda_3
Title: At the Hour When We Are Trembling
Author: frostfire_17
Fandom: SGA/SG1
Commentator: keefaq
At the next planning session, McConnell bites his tongue while Daniel’s fingers trace twisting paths through New York City, and John watches him until the meeting breaks up and everyone drifts out of the briefing room slash cafeteria.
He’s leaning against the wall outside when he hears, “Look, Dr. Jackson, I know you’ve spent a lot of time in the field, and you’ve served under some good Air Force people, but this is a war you’re trying to run, here. And Colonel Sheppard might have decided to turn a large part of the command over to you, but have you given any thought to letting an experienced military officer take your place?”
John translates. Look, Dr. Jackson, you’re a pansy, Sheppard’s an idiot, and I get off on telling people what to do. Put me in command or I’ll take over when you aren’t looking. Maybe he should have been paying a little more attention to McConnell.
Papers shuffle for a second, and then Daniel says, “Are you done?”
“That was all I had to say, yes.”
“Great. You’re going to Hartford, where you’ll go to this address-” papers rustling “-and get the crate of raw naquadah that should be in the sub-basement, and then to this address, which you will blow to hell. Pick someone to go with you, visit Dr. Granville to get your explosives, and you leave at 0900 tomorrow.”
“I-” says McConnell, and stops.
“I’d advise Xu, for this sort of mission,” says Daniel. “But I’m leaving it to your discretion.”
There’s a very long pause. “Yes, sir.” Another pause. “Finding Dr. Granville in Boston-was that part of some long-term strategy?”
“What?” Daniel sounds distracted already, and John makes a private bet with himself that he’s doing it on purpose. He also sounds like that’s the dumbest question anyone’s asked him since the invasion, but that isn’t anything new. “That’s classified, Major.”
Haha. Nothing better than sneaky smart Daniel.
“Right,” says McConnell softly, and a second later, he comes out the door.
“Have fun, Major,” says John, and grins as McConnell spins around.
“Uh-yes, sir,” he says, and makes his escape.
John wanders into the briefing room slash cafeteria. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” says Daniel. “What do you think?”
“That was good,” says John. “You almost sounded like we have a secret plan. And next time you stop a mutiny like that, can we get it on tape?”
Daniel heaves a sigh. “Good.”
John finds them some food, and sits down, and thinks that if McConnell took this long to figure out that Absent-Minded Professor Daniel is a mild-mannered alter ego for Utterly Single-Minded Daniel, then maybe McConnell will be spending a lot of time on solo missions from now on. “So. Plan time.”
Halfway through the-they like to call them command meetings, if only because it’s funny-the overhead light flickers, goes out. They’re out of fluorescent bulbs; it’s on their shopping list for New York. John gets a candle.
A little reminder of just how bad their situation is, and what a huge effort of will it is for them to pretend differently.
“So if we can find Granville’s buddy where he says he’ll be,” also known as somewhere in Maryland, “-what?”
Daniel’s staring at the candle. “Just thinking about something.”
By now, John knows Daniel well enough to know when distracting him will take more effort than John’s willing to give. He waits.
After a second, Daniel looks up, and John says, “Any closer to enlightenment?”
That gets him a smile that’s sort of halfway there. “Depends on how you look at it,” says Daniel.
“Cryptic,” says John.
Daniel grins. “Oh, you don’t know cryptic.”
“Hey,” says John. “Veteran of the Pegasus galaxy, here. I’ve met some people. Mysterious people. Enigmatic, even.”
“I was remembering something,” says Daniel. He reaches out, plays with the candle flame. “If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.”
“Okay,” says John after a second, “you win.”
John never spent much time at the SGC, but he does know what it looks like, and their little bunker under the Vermont hill is basically the same. Concrete tunnels, harsh lights. Steel doors. Bunker.
He dreams about long silvery hallways, colored lights and crystals, laptops interfaced with blinking displays, ocean stretching out blue in all directions. Transporters. The chairs that were never really comfortable, the weird alien food. The gateroom. Elizabeth serene and confident, Rodney deciding that John was the single stupidest vertebrate in two galaxies, Teyla kicking his ass and then drawing his forehead down to hers.
Masterful summing up of John’s ideas about his relationship with Atlantis.
He’s been furious and frightened and disgusted and ashamed and halfway to murder, he spent months and months waiting, knowing they wouldn’t have enough firepower, hungry and exhausted and getting ready to die. He’s thought-so many times, he’s been ready to give it all up for Atlantis. So.
It just seems stupid to die here, after all of it.
John is so alienated, missing Atlantis. It’s like earth isn’t even his planet anymore, he’s lost in a strange world, forced to defend a planet he has no attachment to, the ultimate stranger in a strange land.
They go to New York. They kill Wraith. John assigns himself to Daniel from the beginning, this time, and lets out some of his repressed anger. Daniel decides to pay attention today, and is as grim and ruthless as any of the military guys. They spend four hours wandering, and kill forty-seven Wraith between them.
The Trust official they were after hasn’t been home in a while, but her big store of cool stuff is still there. They pile it in their Jeep, and then they go back and kill more Wraith. John entertains fantasies of being a lieutenant again, of being the low man on the video game totem pole on purpose, of this being his real job. Maybe he’ll run away and become a traveling Wraith assassin.
“Isn’t this fun?” he says to Daniel in a break between Wraith sightings.
Daniel says, “Sure,” in the way that means you’re a crazy person, and John regrets saying it when he feels Daniel’s eyes on him for the rest of the mission.
Daniel rides next to him in the Jeep on the way back, and keeps watching him. John tries not to look like someone who wishes they could find a puddlejumper by the side of the road, so he could fly far, far away.
When they get back to Vermont, he helps John unpack, strips off his gear, and steps up to John in the locker room and says levelly, “If you leave me to do this by myself, I’ll find you and kill you. And I won’t come back.”
Leaving both John and the operation dead. John takes a careful breath and says, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” Daniel says, but he steps back and lets John go take a shower.
Daniel, we now see, is getting just as dependant on John as John is on him.
They go to find the scientist who’s somewhere in Maryland. Another road trip. John drives along back roads, over flat ground when he can find it, around the highways full of accidents. Daniel’s a quiet presence next to him, buried in papers. John sneaks some looks; no hieroglyphics that he can see.
They drive through burned and blackened land, through a city center where people are spilling out the doors and no one cares about the Wraith because the neighbors are worse, through silent apocalyptic suburbia. John catches Daniel looking exactly once, glasses off and eyes fixed and staring, and doesn’t even try to think of something to say.
He breathes through his mouth instead and wonders what the land looks like at eight, ten, fifteen thousand feet.
Deliberate disassociation this time, it’s one of John’s main defense mechanisms. The author communicates the desolation and despair, and John’s numbness so well that this is like experiencing John’s situation rather than just reading about it.
They don’t find the scientist; probably he’s dead, but his area of Maryland is too close to D.C. for them to really figure it out. They make camp far, far away, where most of what they see is green.
Daniel puts his papers away, finally-hell if John knows what he’s doing with them, his job is the same as John’s and John doesn’t spend that much time with papers-and drops down to the ground. There’s a fire, and eventually MREs for dinner, and then they lie on their backs and stare at the sky for a while.
“I’ll take first watch,” says Daniel after a while.
“Fine,” says John.
The stars are a lot brighter without city lights to drown them out. John’s been on worlds without any cities at all-and no air pollution, either-pretty regularly for the last couple of years, and he’s having a hard time remembering what the sky looked like when you really could count all the stars, if you wanted to.
“John,” says Daniel, low-voiced from two feet away.
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering. How long were you on Atlantis?”
Daniel’s read the reports, he has to know this-John spends a couple of seconds entertaining pod-person alien brain-takeover theories, and then goes with Occam’s Razor and decides that Daniel’s just being strange. “Two years.”
“Two years,” says Daniel. “When you were there…” he stops.
“Yeah?” says John again, after a minute.
“Nothing,” says Daniel. “It’s nothing.” He’s quiet until John falls asleep. In the morning, they start back toward Vermont.
John misses Atlantis like it’s a piece of him, and knowing that he’ll be dying here on Earth and never see the city again makes him gasp raggedly into his pillow at night, hyperventilating like Rodney on citrus. And beyond the long cool hallways, and the galaxy where only two hundred people even know what Lieutenant Colonel means, and the sheer blank thrill of fighting two hundred against millions-gone, now, all gone now-is the deep uncomfortable knowledge that Daniel’s wanted Atlantis like air since before John knew it existed.
Yes, as much as John misses Atlantis and all it represents, Daniel, without ever having been there, misses it more.
They visit Cincinnati, looking for another scientist who may or may not be there. McConnell came back alive from his mission with Xu, and his impulses toward mutiny appear to have quieted down a little, so they leave him in charge and take Thorman and Clay.
This one’s home, and alive, and recognizes Daniel and lets them in. “Thank God,” she says. “I thought I was the only one. Where are you based?”
They talk to her, learn what she’s been working on, the people she used to know that she can’t find anymore, the projects she’s been doing her best to finish, the weapons she’s hoping to complete, if she can ever find the raw materials. “And maybe a team of engineers,” she says, and the little smile doesn’t hide the desperation underneath. “It’s a little hard to manage all by myself.”
Her name’s Dr. Regina Sim, and she’s tall and brunette and has quiet lines of pain around her mouth. She’s a little older than John and Daniel, but not much, and she’s giving them looks that say, it gets lonely here in Cincinnati with only the Wraith and the desperate refugees for company.
It takes Daniel another twenty minutes to notice; John can tell because he almost levitates out of his chair when he figures it out. He fidgets uncontrollably after that, and John thinks sadistically about taking Dr. Sim aside and telling her how hard it is for Daniel all alone in their fallout shelter, but instead he just asks her if she’ll show him what she’s been working on, while Daniel does a perimeter sweep and checks in with the home base.
He pretends to understand what she’s telling him about the science behind it all, and follows her around her lab, which is in her basement slash bunker, and eventually she turns to him and says, “You realize I can’t come back with you. The equipment would be impossible to transport without attracting the attention of the Wraith.”
And yeah, John thinks, looking around at the gleaming silver metal stuff, that’s true. “Okay,” he says. “So we’ll talk about corresponding. We’ll make it a long-distance relationship. And you can come visit at Thanksgiving.”
She laughs at that, and they talk practicalities for another few minutes, and then she looks at him across a potential death ray and asks if they’re staying the night.
“We have to get back,” says John.
So they’re building an operation, moving up a few levels, getting some extra lives. John almost starts feeling like they could make some progress.
The video game metaphor works so well for John’s character.
Xu dies in Toronto, life-sucked. Daniel stands over the body for an eternal thirty seconds, while John waits a few feet away and isn’t sure whether he should be watching the street corners or Daniel. Eventually he decides that he’d rather die at the hands of a crazed Dr. Jackson-and why is it Xu who pushed him over the edge, rather than Powell or Davis or Ellsworth or any of the others? John has no idea-than a Wraith, so he turns his back and watches the corners.
For the rest of the day, Daniel twitches whenever he comes too close. John leaves him alone, lets him sleep on it, finds him in the cafeteria slash briefing room the next day.
“They’re arranging a funeral service,” he says.
“Good,” says Daniel. “Good for morale.”
“Everyone’s going to be saying something, I think,” says John.
“Good,” says Daniel again. “Release of feelings. Catharsis. It’ll be good for them.”
John has now reached the extent of his counseling skills, but he tries again anyway. “You could say something. If you wanted to.”
Daniel looks at him blankly. “I don’t think we ever even had a conversation.”
John’s attempts to comfort Daniel are painfully in character, and how telling of Daniel as mankind’s savior that he doesn’t need to know Xu to feel his loss deeply.
Despite evidence to the contrary, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Daniel is not the sane one. He projects well. He stands up in front of briefings and is authoritative and calm, he responds to stupidity with biting sarcasm, and John only ever catches things like broken coffee cups and drunken pronoun issues.
But then there’s a day when Daniel doesn’t show up to a briefing. John leans against a table, says, “Okay, guys, today we get to do this my way,” and pretends that Daniel’s off doing something too important for lowly mortals to handle while he briefs Saks, Singh, Thorman, and Hurley himself.
Afterward, he goes and knocks on Daniel’s door. He’s trying not to think about what happens if Daniel’s totally snapped.
“Go away, John,” comes from the other side of the door.
“Let me think about that,” says John. “No.”
He waits for a few minutes, and then he says, “Okay, I’m sitting down against your door. And I’m not moving until you let me in.” There’s no bathroom in there, and Daniel has to get hungry sometime. And-well, John’s pretty good at being annoying, and he learned a lot from working with Rodney McKay for two years. He’s confident.
What can I say about this beyond hahahahahaha? I like the humor in this story, it would be hard to bear all the bleakness without it.
As it turns out, it only takes three repetitions of Still here! He even keeps himself from falling over backwards when Daniel opens the door.
Daniel waits while John gets up and comes inside. He doesn’t look good.
“Hi,” says John. “What’s up?”
Daniel laughs at that, short and sharp. “Oh, nothing. Just having a little bit of a nervous breakdown, that’s all.”
“Well, hey,” says John, “happens to the best of us.”
“Right.” Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose, makes a face like he has a migraine. “Want some coffee?”
John never really drank coffee before Atlantis. Sometimes he thinks that has to be symbolic of something. “Sounds great.”
John gets coffee in a cup that proclaims, “Archaeologists Don’t Dig Dinosaurs.” Daniel’s says something in hieroglyphics. John was not aware that Daniel had been snitching novelty coffee cups while they were out, but he figures, whatever helps.
These little touches of an innocent earth before the Wraith are so poignant.
Daniel stares into his coffee for a while, and eventually he says, “Did you know, I almost went to Atlantis with the Daedalus, last year?”
Thinking about Daniel on Atlantis makes John uncomfortable for reasons he’s never really sat down and analyzed. “No, I didn’t.”
“We’d defeated the Goa’uld. It took us nine years.” Daniel sets his coffee cup down on the table, spins it slowly by the handle. “Understand that they ruled the galaxy unchecked for thousands of years, before we showed up. Nine years is,” he shakes his head. “It’s nothing. Teal’c had been fighting them his entire life. The Jaffa and the Tok’ra, for millennia. Millions and millions of people, enslaved for as long as they’d even been a species.”
John has no idea where this is going, but he drinks his coffee and traces the picture of the dinosaur on the cup and waits for it.
“What we did was miraculous. Maybe literally. Probably literally.” Daniel shakes his head, hard. “I don’t know. Point is, we did it, and it was done, and we were going our separate ways. And then,” his grin is quick and harsh, “the Ori showed up.”
And now John’s starting to get an idea of where this is going.
“So,” Daniel waves a hand, “forget retirement, forget research, time to save the galaxy again. Fine. We’d done it before. Except, then,” and now he laughs again, and it doesn’t sound good, “the next galaxy-destroying menace doesn’t even wait until we’ve gotten rid of the last one. And I have spent ten years sacrificing my life and my work and my friends and my family, and I had-some cold compensation in knowing that my skills, my experience, were going toward a valuable cause, and that I could use the work to which I had dedicated my life to make the galaxy a better place.” He draws in a deep, shuddering breath. “But now here I am, in a fifties fallout shelter, drawing up mission plans and shooting at aliens, and the world is ending and everything I have ever worked for,” he opens a hand, “is useless.”
It’s easy to overlook the human side of all of this, and the author has done a fabulous job of bringing the exhaustion home to us in this paragraph. Poor Daniel.
People should not be allowed, John thinks, people shouldn’t be allowed to say things like that.
Daniel bends his head, rubs his hands over his forehead. “I’m-propelled by inertia, lately. I can’t stop under my own power. I just-” he rubs his eyes. “I’ll be there tomorrow. 0900.”
“Good,” says John. It comes out kind of cracked.
Daniel looks up. “You can leave now.”
John leaves. He walks through the hallways, makes a few turns, goes into his own room, and shuts the door behind him. He drops down on his bed and finds himself staring at Daniel’s book of hieroglyphics.
Daniel cannot break. Daniel cannot break, because if Daniel deserts or shoots himself in the head or-whatever a snapped Daniel does-John is stuck here. And-and.
He breathes through the panic, keeps his hands down at his sides, stays leaning against the door. It was just a minor freak-out, just like the kind John has occasionally, had on Atlantis sometimes too, where he had to go to his quarters and sit down and shake because he’d just killed his C.O., or closed his eyes and waited for death that didn’t come, or almost turned into a fucking insect.
It happens.
The dependence on Daniel has increased to the point where John can’t deal with the idea of losing him.
One of the surreal things about life on post-Wraith Earth is that the chain of command is completely gone. The closest John has ever gotten to this kind of freedom was that first year on Atlantis, and even then, Elizabeth was the leader of the expedition, and the idea of an outside command was there, out beyond ZPMs somewhere.
Here, he can do whatever the hell he wants. It’s like living in free-fall, and he’s not sure how he feels about it.
Except then there’s Daniel. Daniel, whose plans slot in next to John’s the way Elizabeth’s never did, who kills Wraith with the sort of detached ruthlessness that John would never say he recognizes, who has built himself some delicate web of sanity, and John’s right there to see it starting to fall apart, bit by bit.
He doesn’t know how to do this. He doesn’t have anyone to fight against. There are only the endless, graceless, starving waves of dreadlocked alien menace, and Daniel. Daniel, who’s back there in his room with the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes. Shredding himself into pieces, or something.
Yes, it all comes down to the horror out there and Daniel beside him. Me and thee against the world. I’m completely convinced of the necessity of this pairing by this point in the story.
The next day, they go out and get lucky, find a ship that’s just landed, a bunch of Wraith grinning to each other, eating out. They almost-almost-get the ship. Although how they’d hide it, or what they’d use it for, is beyond John, he’s pissed off enough to punch somebody when it lifts off and escapes.
So he hangs around and kills the rest of the stragglers, while McConnell takes the others and goes to get a stash of naquadah that’s supposedly in the area, and Daniel disappears to God knows where.
When John finds him, after he’s calmed down a little, Daniel’s sitting on the ground with his eyes closed, breathing. John spent enough time among wannabe Ancients to know meditation when he sees it. He wonders, again, how Ascension would work for someone who’s already done it once. Could he do it again whenever the hell he wanted to? If so, John’s decided he’s feeling seriously cheated by the lack of an all-powerful being on their side.
Another example of John’s notion of Daniel as savior.
Daniel’s eyes blink open when John’s shadow hits him, and he looks up at John, wordless.
“It goes both ways,” says John.
Daniel’s stare is clear, endless, fucking scary. “What does?”
“You can’t go off and leave me to do this by myself.” Wherever off is. “Just-know that.”
I can’t hack this, he doesn’t say, and also I don’t know if I can make myself care enough to do it alone.
“I know,” says Daniel.
They’re committed to sticking together and even willing to state that commitment verbally. It’s huge that John is able to let Daniel know how much he needs him. Okay, it’s a trauma bond, but it’s still a bond.
Two nights later, John wakes up at one thirty-seven AM, covered in sweat and panting, holding his handgun like it’s the only thing keeping him from separating into his component parts.
He can remember the nightmare-nightmares-in bits and pieces; a Wraith sucking out his life, Atlantis blown up, standard nightmare fare that still leaves him seized up, freaking out. And other things-he saw Daniel’s face, Davis’s face, the Wraith-worshippers in the woods, but he’s shaking and he can’t calm himself down and he doesn’t quite remember which things are from the dream and which ones really happened.
He takes a walk. The corridors are people-free if you know where to go. It’s cool, and dim, and quiet, and he starts to calm down a little. He doesn’t put his gun away, though.
He means to pass Daniel’s door without knocking, even though he really, really wants to check and make sure Daniel hasn’t suicided during the night, but it opens as he’s walking by, and Daniel’s standing there, watching him. He’s wearing BDU pants, no shirt or socks, and he doesn’t look at all surprised.
There’s a lot of sleep deprivation going on, which seems to be a recurring theme for SGA. Interesting that Daniel seems to be awake whenever John is, it resonates with his not completely human persona.
“How did you know I was out here?” John asks after a second.
Daniel shrugs. “Do you want to come in?”
And this also shows Daniel as part ascended being, not just a mortal.
He almost asks why, but instead he just goes.
Inside, Daniel’s lit candles. “I was trying kel-no-reem,” he says. “Jaffa meditation.”
It’s John’s opinion that Daniel does not need more meditation, but he’s smart enough not to say anything about it. He plays with one of the candle flames, instead.
John doesn’t like the meditation, naturally, because it pulls Daniel away from the here and now where John desperately needs him to stay and fills him with fear that Daniel will leave through ascension.
“So I’m guessing the gun isn’t meant for anything in particular?” Daniel asks.
John forgot he was holding it. “No,” he says.
“Okay,” says Daniel. “Want to play chess?”
And he gets out an honest-to-God chess set, stolen from some store somewhere, solid wooden board and carved black and white pieces.
“I’m not going to be very good right now,” says John.
“Well, I’ll win, then,” says Daniel.
Daniel wins. John plays with his left hand, which is steady enough to move the pieces without a problem, and keeps his gun in his other hand.
“Again?” Daniel asks after they finish.
“What is this, therapy?” John asks, not as accusatory as he’d intended to be.
Daniel shrugs. “Getting you drunk didn’t seem like a good idea.”
They play again.
John decides, halfway through the second game, that Daniel’s stare is just as intense when it’s fixed on chess pieces. He thinks about every move, and his hands are confident, sliding his pieces into place and picking up John’s with quick, smooth movements. John moves almost randomly, more absorbed in watching how Daniel decimates the board than in trying to win. By the time the game’s over, he can feel his muscles starting to unwind.
Chess has been a sexually charged game ever since Spock’s long fingers caressed the pieces way back in ST:TOS. This scene cranks up the already high UST.
“You know, normally I’m more competitive than this,” he says.
Daniel glances up. “I know.”
They play again. This time, John works on setting up the board to create the coolest takedown sequence. Either it’s easier than he thought it’d be, or Daniel figures out what he’s doing and helps him out, because the pieces fall in patterns, until Daniel finally says, “Checkmate,” and starts gathering up the pieces and putting them back in their little felt-lined box.
John’s drowning in exhaustion, by now. The room’s hot from the candles, and the dream, whatever it was, has fallen back to the very edge of his consciousness. Daniel’s gotten up and is putting the chess set away, and when he comes back he’s golden in the candlelight, warm and solid, like John knows he isn’t. He reaches a hand down to John. “Come on.”
So much sexual energy, and the reference to Daniel golden in the candlelight reminds us of John’s image of Daniel as angelic and otherworldly.
He takes Daniel’s hand. It’s warm. He pulls himself up, but Daniel’s pulling, too, and he comes up too fast, runs into Daniel and a sudden, heavily-muscled stop. It feels-
He hasn’t moved, and Daniel still has his hand. He’s off-balance, and Daniel’s mouth is hot under his.
It’s five seconds of tongue and stubble rasp and a deep drowning sensation, before Daniel jerks back.
“No,” says Daniel carefully, watching him like he isn’t sure John understands.
John breathes in. It’s still too hot. “No,” he says. “Yeah.”
Daniel relaxes. “Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks,” he says carefully.
And then, after a 19,000 word build up, Daniel says no. Hahahaha. The author has given us plenty of time to get used to the pairing and to see the why of the relationship, and the UST is pretty fucking high, but apparently not high enough.
“Don’t mention it,” says Daniel, and his face twitches a little, like there was a smile there but it didn’t quite make it to the surface.
“See you tomorrow,” John says, and escapes into the hall.
Once he’s there, he walks until he’s turned the corner, and then he leans back against the wall and stares at the ceiling for a few minutes.
It was a stupid thing to do. He knows better. He told himself, way back in Utah, that Daniel was off-limits, and he-he’s looked, but he knows how these things work, knows how this could screw this-whatever they have-up beyond fixing.
He still wants-
He can’t handle this right now. He’ll sleep for a couple of hours, and maybe when he wakes up…something else will be true.
Yeah, that rings true as the type of coping skill John would have.
The next day, John takes a Jeep by himself and drives until he sees Wraith. It takes three hours and a lot of concentrated effort to get anywhere, and at the end of it he spends a satisfying couple of hours ridding the greater Portland area of any Wraith he can find. He deliberately doesn’t think about how much this is going to piss Daniel off.
When he gets back, tired and sore and glad that he’s managed to waste pretty much the whole day, Daniel’s in Granville’s lab, bent over some of the Goa’uld stuff they got from Dr. Sim. He doesn’t look up when John comes in, but he does say, “How was risking your life for no reason? Did you have a good day?” The sarcasm is palpable.
“Great,” says John, and it comes out defensive, which is stupid. He leans in to look at the thing Daniel’s working on, a little palm-pilot-ish screen with hieroglyphics on it, and frowns. “Is that a jar with legs?”
“Yes,” says Daniel, short and clipped. “Don’t read over my shoulder.”
John’s reminded abruptly of Rodney, and takes a step back. “Sorry about today,” he says. “Sometimes you just have to get out.”
“Yeah,” says Daniel, “and if I thought that said anything about what you’re thinking or whether you’re going to do it again, I might accept your apology.”
John can’t think of anything to say to that, and eventually Daniel says, “Go away,” so he leaves.
He ends up waiting outside Daniel’s door that evening with some really good beer, because life is miserable when Daniel’s pissed. John is prone to tripping over Daniel’s sharp-edged sarcasm and coming to a dead stop, and it’s much, much worse when Daniel’s actually aiming.
When Daniel walks up, he’s reading from a folder, and he doesn’t notice John until his hand’s reaching for the door. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hi,” says John. “I brought beer.”
Daniel blinks at him for a second, and then opens the door and holds it for John to follow him in.
Good. Great. Or something. John’s spent the last forty-five minutes trying to convince himself that an evening drinking beer with Daniel will be fun, but he hasn’t quite gotten himself there yet.
Sure enough, it’s tense and mildly hostile. John distracts himself by running through gun models in his head, but then he gets depressed at the thought that new ones probably aren’t going to be made for a while, and goes back to staring at Daniel while Daniel stares into his beer.
They both drink faster than they would normally, and halfway through his second beer, Daniel says abruptly, “You never really answered my question.”
John frowns. “What question?”
Daniel’s eyes flick down to his beer, and after a second they come up again. “How was risking your life for no reason?”
John can’t help the quick rush that comes up through him, vivid memory of earlier, crouching behind a building, pressed against warm concrete, ten Wraith just around the corner and no humans in sight. “I told you,” he says, and his voice is a little rough. “It was great.”
“Was it,” says Daniel, and now he’s watching John, intense.
“I killed fucking crowds of them,” says John. “Streets are full of dead bodies up there.” And this is a stupid thing to say, but, “You should try it.”
Daniel’s still watching him, but he shakes his head, slowly. “No, thank you,” he says. “I don’t do suicide. After all,” a short laugh, “I couldn’t be sure it would work.”
This is too weird a concept for John to get his head around, even after only two beers. Like what Daniel’s saying has five or six or ten dimensions, and John’s brain is only working in three or four. Although n the plus side, it’s distracting him from the way Daniel’s mouth shapes itself around the bottle. “It’s not suicide,” he says instead of trying to respond to the other thing. “It’s just de-stressing. And as far as I can tell, I’m alive.” He snags another beer.
It’s not just Daniel who hints at five or six or ten dimensions here, this whole section gives me goose bumps every time I read it.
“Whatever,” says Daniel. “I’m not going to try to convince you. I wouldn’t want to see what would happen if I managed it.” He takes another one for himself. “But your day was great.”
“Yeah,” says John, and opens the bottle.
“Your day of fighting massive amounts of Wraith alone in the streets.”
“Yeah.” And now he’s thinking about it again, sliding through alleys and taking them out wherever he could, sprinting through the streets away from or after them-and that grenade, that was a work of genius, he doesn’t even know how many he took out with that one-
Daniel’s got that same intent stare on him. John doesn’t shift in his seat, and doesn’t call attention to the arousal running through his body, but he thinks Daniel knows it’s there.
The silence stretches on and on and on, until John finally takes another drink of beer and says, “So. How was your day?”
Daniel takes a breath, and then there’s a few seconds before he says, “I translated the inscriptions on some of the things Dr. Sim sent us,” and he keeps talking. John breathes carefully while Daniel’s voice winds through declensions and conjugations and multilateral hieroglyphs.
John wasn’t lying when he said his day was great. He half-wishes Daniel would loosen up enough to try something like it, but the other half is pretty sure that if Daniel ever gets that loose, he’ll be shooting at whoever comes close enough.
He almost wants to be there. He bets it’ll be interesting.
He falls into sleep, like straight off a cliff, and it’s a blank, blind jump from ten-thirty to three, when he’s suddenly awake and up and searching the room for-nothing.
He looks down at his gun, looks around the room again, and pulls on a holster over his T-shirt, puts the gun away.
3:17 AM. He’s not getting back to sleep.
The mess is farther away than it usually seems, now that there’s nothing between his feet and the freezing concrete floors. When he gets there, he almost runs into Thorman, who’s standing inside the doors with a sandwich on a plate.
“Oh-I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know,” she says. John’s putting together didn’t know what? when she frowns and says, “Well, of course I didn’t know, you wouldn’t-uh, Dr. Jackson’s just over there, sir. I was just getting a sandwich, I didn’t see either of you.”
John takes longer than he really should to add Daniel’s in the mess hall to Thorman’s nervous and it’s three in the morning and get she thinks we’re having a secret meeting. Right. “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he says. “See you in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” says Thorman, and skedaddles.
Daniel is sitting with a mug and a stack of papers, and he doesn’t look like he’s moved in-ever, maybe. Like a statue, hands wrapped around his mug and eyes fixed on some point beyond the furthest manila folder.
It’s not like John didn’t know that Daniel doesn’t sleep. It gets creepy, though. He thinks he’ll relax about it the first time he gets up this late and doesn’t find Daniel already awake.
He makes noise, deliberately, as he walks over, but Daniel doesn’t twitch. John comes up behind him, puts his hands on Daniel’s shoulders. It’s a shock, finding him warm and real underneath John’s hands, like anyone else would be.
Again, John sees Daniel as more than human.
Two days later, John hasn’t slept in long enough that the world is taking on a sharp, bright crystal-quality, hard and too clear. His eyes are burning, and they’re out in the wilds of-somewhere-taking out a nest of Wraith who’d decided that their commute was too long.
And he knows he’s tired enough to start getting stupid, because he keeps getting distracted by Daniel.
Daniel kills like he’s pulling off a band-aid. John can almost see him thinking let’s get this over with. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s fucking good at it, though, and John has to watch whenever he has a free second, because there’s something about Daniel taking a deep breath and steeling himself and going out to kill twenty fucking Wraith at once.
He doesn’t even care that Daniel gets more than he does, this time.
“What’s wrong with you?” Daniel asks in the Jeep, frowning at him.
“So nice of you to be concerned,” says John, and starts it up. “I’m fine. Tired.”
John isn’t sure if he’s jealous of Daniel’s apparent ability to live without sleep. If it comes with the package of being Daniel Jackson, Daniel can keep it.
“Good day today,” he says. “I don’t even know how many we killed.”
“Yeah,” says Daniel, “go us. We’ve eradicated a percentage of the Wraith force probably prefixed with nano.”
“Hey,” says John. “I’d give that at least a milli.”
Daniel looks at him.
John sighs. “Yeah.”
The author has made me feel the horror of not being able to feel enough here.
They can’t keep nickel-and-diming this, and they both know it. It’s the reason they’ve got three scientists and a slowly-growing cache of tech in the lower levels of their fallout shelter. But they can’t-they can not, and John knows this even when he kind of doesn’t know it at all-they can’t tip their hand. They can’t reveal their position, they can’t risk it all in a major operation, they can’t use too much of their equipment, because there are a zillion Wraith and not enough of them (two, John thinks, and forgets the other number half the time) and that math does not work.
Problem is, Daniel wanders through this war wanting any place but here, and John lies awake at night and breathes through the panic of knowing, deep inside, that he’s never going to see Atlantis again.
This story delineates John’s pain and isolation so well. It’s hurt/comfort in a way, but the hurt is emotional and the comfort is sparse and full of angst.
They go home and shower and debrief and eat dinner, and John’s almost beginning to understand Daniel’s whole-futility thing, because he keeps thinking nano, and pointless.
After dinner, he stays behind Daniel, ends up in his room, kicks back on the floor. Daniel gives him an expressive look-I am on to you and whatever it is you’re doing, but I will let you stay on my floor anyway, which is a nice trick, since John doesn’t even know what he’s doing-and lays out two decks of cards for spider solitaire.
John watches until the cards blur. When he lets his eyes close, he holds onto the picture, and he zones out to the sound of cards whispering and snapping down against each other.
When he opens his eyes, it’s after one and Daniel’s drinking tea, watching him. His head feels clear and too-awake, tired haze swept away. He says the first thing that comes into his head, which is, “You didn’t have to do that.”
Daniel frowns. “What?”
“Today,” he points at Daniel, “you killed the mood.”
Daniel raises an eyebrow. “I killed the mood.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Daniel’s humoring the crazy man, “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.” Daniel rubs his forehead. “Maybe you could tell me what I’m not sorry for.”
“Nano?” says John. “Nano?” He got enough sleep to realize he should be angry about this. He definitely didn’t get enough to realize he shouldn’t be, which he’s glad about around the edges.
“Oh,” says Daniel. “I don’t get it.”
“For God’s sake,” says John, “we kicked ass. That’s good. You understand good?” Like it’s a foreign word, which for Daniel it might be, for all John knows. Maybe if he picked a different language, the concept might make it through to Daniel’s brain.
“Of course I do, but I don’t see what’s wrong with a little realism-”
“So when’s the last time you were in a good mood, then,” says John, because okay, maybe he’s not the happiest guy in the universe, but he at least knows how to enjoy good moments when they come. But Daniel-
“How is that relevant to anything?” says Daniel.
Sometimes Daniel makes John wants to bang his head against the wall. Or bang Daniel’s head, maybe. “Forget it,” he says.
I don’t know what to say about this exchange. I feel like I should say something, but it speaks for itself, I guess.
But he’s still kind of pissed off-not that there’s any real reason to be pissed at Daniel for being Daniel, but hey, anger and logic are not best friends-so when Easton and Rigby come back at one AM with possibly reliable intel about a weapons stash, he drags Daniel out of bed to go check it out. John leaves McConnell a note tacked to the door in the garage. Daniel’s curled protectively around a travel mug of coffee.
John likes driving at night, and the Wraith mostly left the gigantic New England forests alone, so he can almost pretend that he’s alone on the two-lane highway because it’s one-thirty in southern Vermont, not because of the devastating alien scourge.
“How’s the coffee, Daniel?” he asks, about ten minutes into the drive.
Daniel mutters something that John figures doesn’t need a translation.
He starts waking up around the Massachusetts border. “So what’s this-intelligence,” he asks, and if he was a lawyer, he’d have said alleged in there somewhere.
“Possible explosives in Hubbardston, Mass,” says John. “Also possible Wraith in the area. We’re seeing if we can get to the explosives before they do.”
“Hubbardston?” says Daniel.
“Just south of Gardner,” says John. “I have a map.”
Daniel squeezes his eyes shut for a second, shakes his head a little, and tries for awake again. “Gardner?”
“We drove through it last time,” says John. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember. It’s the furniture capital of New England, after all.”
“The size and population of this country, plus modern communication technologies, leads small American towns to try and differentiate themselves in any way they can,” says Daniel. “Up to and including chair manufacturing.” He yawns.
John grins and doesn’t say, Not anymore. “Breakfast?”
“Um,” says Daniel.
John tosses him a Powerbar anyway.
They hit Wraith before they get there, driving through one of the countless tiny little towns. John crouches behind a building with Daniel and plays guerilla, sneaking around the little down and shooting from behind walls, inside buildings, rooftops. Their stunner blasts are slower than bullets, easier to avoid, and they don’t take out the property around him, but it takes a lot of shots to bring them down; any time he kills one, he’s been in one place long enough to give his position away. John compensates by picking up the pace, shooting faster, running faster.
Daniel’s a foot behind him the whole way, over the fire department, through the park, across to the library, shooting right along with. They kill them and kill them and kill them, until John’s vision is blurry and his ears are ringing and Wraith corpses are covering the streets.
An extreme example of me and thee against the world tightening up the intimacy.
After they’re finished, John stands in one place and pants for a few minutes, then says, “Okay, so you can’t say we didn’t kick ass, right there.”
“Fine,” says Daniel, “we kicked ass,” and he’s not smiling but he’s not frowning either, just watching John with the specialty Daniel stare that makes him feel like he’s being stripped and examined by inquiring eyes.
The idea of someone seeing into and knowing one well is an underlying theme in a lot of slash writing, but here also is a small hint of Daniel’s inhuman (or perhaps superhuman) knowledge and insight into the human condition in general.
They finally reach the seriously tiny town of Hubbardston, and come up with a bunch of C-4 hidden in the basement of the address they were given. A ton of dead Wraith plus a ton of captured explosives equals a successful trip as far as John’s concerned, and he’s in a definite good mood when they make camp a ways outside of town.
Daniel’s still watching him, here and there, eyes flicking up, fixing on John, and flicking back down again. It’s uncomfortable, but John’s in too good of a mood to let it bother him.
He gets his pack out of the Jeep, sets up his bedroll. When he pulls off his shirt to replace it with one sans Wraith juice, Daniel’s eyes trace his bare chest.
The reason John has always avoided sex with people at work is because no matter how good it is, it ends up messy and uncomfortable and it never turns out well for anyone. But work is gone, and now this is the only thing they have. And he knows what Daniel feels like pressed up against him, and he can guess what Daniel’s thinking. Neither of them has mentioned kissing late at night in Daniel’s room, but John hasn’t forgotten, and there are moments when the memory trickles up to the surface and takes over.
But Daniel clears his throat and says, “So, for dinner-MREs, or MREs, or maybe MREs?” with a brisk nothing-to-see-here tone in his voice, so John sits back and-fails to forget about it.
Part 4
Author: frostfire_17
Fandom: SGA/SG1
Commentator: keefaq
At the next planning session, McConnell bites his tongue while Daniel’s fingers trace twisting paths through New York City, and John watches him until the meeting breaks up and everyone drifts out of the briefing room slash cafeteria.
He’s leaning against the wall outside when he hears, “Look, Dr. Jackson, I know you’ve spent a lot of time in the field, and you’ve served under some good Air Force people, but this is a war you’re trying to run, here. And Colonel Sheppard might have decided to turn a large part of the command over to you, but have you given any thought to letting an experienced military officer take your place?”
John translates. Look, Dr. Jackson, you’re a pansy, Sheppard’s an idiot, and I get off on telling people what to do. Put me in command or I’ll take over when you aren’t looking. Maybe he should have been paying a little more attention to McConnell.
Papers shuffle for a second, and then Daniel says, “Are you done?”
“That was all I had to say, yes.”
“Great. You’re going to Hartford, where you’ll go to this address-” papers rustling “-and get the crate of raw naquadah that should be in the sub-basement, and then to this address, which you will blow to hell. Pick someone to go with you, visit Dr. Granville to get your explosives, and you leave at 0900 tomorrow.”
“I-” says McConnell, and stops.
“I’d advise Xu, for this sort of mission,” says Daniel. “But I’m leaving it to your discretion.”
There’s a very long pause. “Yes, sir.” Another pause. “Finding Dr. Granville in Boston-was that part of some long-term strategy?”
“What?” Daniel sounds distracted already, and John makes a private bet with himself that he’s doing it on purpose. He also sounds like that’s the dumbest question anyone’s asked him since the invasion, but that isn’t anything new. “That’s classified, Major.”
Haha. Nothing better than sneaky smart Daniel.
“Right,” says McConnell softly, and a second later, he comes out the door.
“Have fun, Major,” says John, and grins as McConnell spins around.
“Uh-yes, sir,” he says, and makes his escape.
John wanders into the briefing room slash cafeteria. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” says Daniel. “What do you think?”
“That was good,” says John. “You almost sounded like we have a secret plan. And next time you stop a mutiny like that, can we get it on tape?”
Daniel heaves a sigh. “Good.”
John finds them some food, and sits down, and thinks that if McConnell took this long to figure out that Absent-Minded Professor Daniel is a mild-mannered alter ego for Utterly Single-Minded Daniel, then maybe McConnell will be spending a lot of time on solo missions from now on. “So. Plan time.”
Halfway through the-they like to call them command meetings, if only because it’s funny-the overhead light flickers, goes out. They’re out of fluorescent bulbs; it’s on their shopping list for New York. John gets a candle.
A little reminder of just how bad their situation is, and what a huge effort of will it is for them to pretend differently.
“So if we can find Granville’s buddy where he says he’ll be,” also known as somewhere in Maryland, “-what?”
Daniel’s staring at the candle. “Just thinking about something.”
By now, John knows Daniel well enough to know when distracting him will take more effort than John’s willing to give. He waits.
After a second, Daniel looks up, and John says, “Any closer to enlightenment?”
That gets him a smile that’s sort of halfway there. “Depends on how you look at it,” says Daniel.
“Cryptic,” says John.
Daniel grins. “Oh, you don’t know cryptic.”
“Hey,” says John. “Veteran of the Pegasus galaxy, here. I’ve met some people. Mysterious people. Enigmatic, even.”
“I was remembering something,” says Daniel. He reaches out, plays with the candle flame. “If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.”
“Okay,” says John after a second, “you win.”
John never spent much time at the SGC, but he does know what it looks like, and their little bunker under the Vermont hill is basically the same. Concrete tunnels, harsh lights. Steel doors. Bunker.
He dreams about long silvery hallways, colored lights and crystals, laptops interfaced with blinking displays, ocean stretching out blue in all directions. Transporters. The chairs that were never really comfortable, the weird alien food. The gateroom. Elizabeth serene and confident, Rodney deciding that John was the single stupidest vertebrate in two galaxies, Teyla kicking his ass and then drawing his forehead down to hers.
Masterful summing up of John’s ideas about his relationship with Atlantis.
He’s been furious and frightened and disgusted and ashamed and halfway to murder, he spent months and months waiting, knowing they wouldn’t have enough firepower, hungry and exhausted and getting ready to die. He’s thought-so many times, he’s been ready to give it all up for Atlantis. So.
It just seems stupid to die here, after all of it.
John is so alienated, missing Atlantis. It’s like earth isn’t even his planet anymore, he’s lost in a strange world, forced to defend a planet he has no attachment to, the ultimate stranger in a strange land.
They go to New York. They kill Wraith. John assigns himself to Daniel from the beginning, this time, and lets out some of his repressed anger. Daniel decides to pay attention today, and is as grim and ruthless as any of the military guys. They spend four hours wandering, and kill forty-seven Wraith between them.
The Trust official they were after hasn’t been home in a while, but her big store of cool stuff is still there. They pile it in their Jeep, and then they go back and kill more Wraith. John entertains fantasies of being a lieutenant again, of being the low man on the video game totem pole on purpose, of this being his real job. Maybe he’ll run away and become a traveling Wraith assassin.
“Isn’t this fun?” he says to Daniel in a break between Wraith sightings.
Daniel says, “Sure,” in the way that means you’re a crazy person, and John regrets saying it when he feels Daniel’s eyes on him for the rest of the mission.
Daniel rides next to him in the Jeep on the way back, and keeps watching him. John tries not to look like someone who wishes they could find a puddlejumper by the side of the road, so he could fly far, far away.
When they get back to Vermont, he helps John unpack, strips off his gear, and steps up to John in the locker room and says levelly, “If you leave me to do this by myself, I’ll find you and kill you. And I won’t come back.”
Leaving both John and the operation dead. John takes a careful breath and says, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” Daniel says, but he steps back and lets John go take a shower.
Daniel, we now see, is getting just as dependant on John as John is on him.
They go to find the scientist who’s somewhere in Maryland. Another road trip. John drives along back roads, over flat ground when he can find it, around the highways full of accidents. Daniel’s a quiet presence next to him, buried in papers. John sneaks some looks; no hieroglyphics that he can see.
They drive through burned and blackened land, through a city center where people are spilling out the doors and no one cares about the Wraith because the neighbors are worse, through silent apocalyptic suburbia. John catches Daniel looking exactly once, glasses off and eyes fixed and staring, and doesn’t even try to think of something to say.
He breathes through his mouth instead and wonders what the land looks like at eight, ten, fifteen thousand feet.
Deliberate disassociation this time, it’s one of John’s main defense mechanisms. The author communicates the desolation and despair, and John’s numbness so well that this is like experiencing John’s situation rather than just reading about it.
They don’t find the scientist; probably he’s dead, but his area of Maryland is too close to D.C. for them to really figure it out. They make camp far, far away, where most of what they see is green.
Daniel puts his papers away, finally-hell if John knows what he’s doing with them, his job is the same as John’s and John doesn’t spend that much time with papers-and drops down to the ground. There’s a fire, and eventually MREs for dinner, and then they lie on their backs and stare at the sky for a while.
“I’ll take first watch,” says Daniel after a while.
“Fine,” says John.
The stars are a lot brighter without city lights to drown them out. John’s been on worlds without any cities at all-and no air pollution, either-pretty regularly for the last couple of years, and he’s having a hard time remembering what the sky looked like when you really could count all the stars, if you wanted to.
“John,” says Daniel, low-voiced from two feet away.
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering. How long were you on Atlantis?”
Daniel’s read the reports, he has to know this-John spends a couple of seconds entertaining pod-person alien brain-takeover theories, and then goes with Occam’s Razor and decides that Daniel’s just being strange. “Two years.”
“Two years,” says Daniel. “When you were there…” he stops.
“Yeah?” says John again, after a minute.
“Nothing,” says Daniel. “It’s nothing.” He’s quiet until John falls asleep. In the morning, they start back toward Vermont.
John misses Atlantis like it’s a piece of him, and knowing that he’ll be dying here on Earth and never see the city again makes him gasp raggedly into his pillow at night, hyperventilating like Rodney on citrus. And beyond the long cool hallways, and the galaxy where only two hundred people even know what Lieutenant Colonel means, and the sheer blank thrill of fighting two hundred against millions-gone, now, all gone now-is the deep uncomfortable knowledge that Daniel’s wanted Atlantis like air since before John knew it existed.
Yes, as much as John misses Atlantis and all it represents, Daniel, without ever having been there, misses it more.
They visit Cincinnati, looking for another scientist who may or may not be there. McConnell came back alive from his mission with Xu, and his impulses toward mutiny appear to have quieted down a little, so they leave him in charge and take Thorman and Clay.
This one’s home, and alive, and recognizes Daniel and lets them in. “Thank God,” she says. “I thought I was the only one. Where are you based?”
They talk to her, learn what she’s been working on, the people she used to know that she can’t find anymore, the projects she’s been doing her best to finish, the weapons she’s hoping to complete, if she can ever find the raw materials. “And maybe a team of engineers,” she says, and the little smile doesn’t hide the desperation underneath. “It’s a little hard to manage all by myself.”
Her name’s Dr. Regina Sim, and she’s tall and brunette and has quiet lines of pain around her mouth. She’s a little older than John and Daniel, but not much, and she’s giving them looks that say, it gets lonely here in Cincinnati with only the Wraith and the desperate refugees for company.
It takes Daniel another twenty minutes to notice; John can tell because he almost levitates out of his chair when he figures it out. He fidgets uncontrollably after that, and John thinks sadistically about taking Dr. Sim aside and telling her how hard it is for Daniel all alone in their fallout shelter, but instead he just asks her if she’ll show him what she’s been working on, while Daniel does a perimeter sweep and checks in with the home base.
He pretends to understand what she’s telling him about the science behind it all, and follows her around her lab, which is in her basement slash bunker, and eventually she turns to him and says, “You realize I can’t come back with you. The equipment would be impossible to transport without attracting the attention of the Wraith.”
And yeah, John thinks, looking around at the gleaming silver metal stuff, that’s true. “Okay,” he says. “So we’ll talk about corresponding. We’ll make it a long-distance relationship. And you can come visit at Thanksgiving.”
She laughs at that, and they talk practicalities for another few minutes, and then she looks at him across a potential death ray and asks if they’re staying the night.
“We have to get back,” says John.
So they’re building an operation, moving up a few levels, getting some extra lives. John almost starts feeling like they could make some progress.
The video game metaphor works so well for John’s character.
Xu dies in Toronto, life-sucked. Daniel stands over the body for an eternal thirty seconds, while John waits a few feet away and isn’t sure whether he should be watching the street corners or Daniel. Eventually he decides that he’d rather die at the hands of a crazed Dr. Jackson-and why is it Xu who pushed him over the edge, rather than Powell or Davis or Ellsworth or any of the others? John has no idea-than a Wraith, so he turns his back and watches the corners.
For the rest of the day, Daniel twitches whenever he comes too close. John leaves him alone, lets him sleep on it, finds him in the cafeteria slash briefing room the next day.
“They’re arranging a funeral service,” he says.
“Good,” says Daniel. “Good for morale.”
“Everyone’s going to be saying something, I think,” says John.
“Good,” says Daniel again. “Release of feelings. Catharsis. It’ll be good for them.”
John has now reached the extent of his counseling skills, but he tries again anyway. “You could say something. If you wanted to.”
Daniel looks at him blankly. “I don’t think we ever even had a conversation.”
John’s attempts to comfort Daniel are painfully in character, and how telling of Daniel as mankind’s savior that he doesn’t need to know Xu to feel his loss deeply.
Despite evidence to the contrary, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Daniel is not the sane one. He projects well. He stands up in front of briefings and is authoritative and calm, he responds to stupidity with biting sarcasm, and John only ever catches things like broken coffee cups and drunken pronoun issues.
But then there’s a day when Daniel doesn’t show up to a briefing. John leans against a table, says, “Okay, guys, today we get to do this my way,” and pretends that Daniel’s off doing something too important for lowly mortals to handle while he briefs Saks, Singh, Thorman, and Hurley himself.
Afterward, he goes and knocks on Daniel’s door. He’s trying not to think about what happens if Daniel’s totally snapped.
“Go away, John,” comes from the other side of the door.
“Let me think about that,” says John. “No.”
He waits for a few minutes, and then he says, “Okay, I’m sitting down against your door. And I’m not moving until you let me in.” There’s no bathroom in there, and Daniel has to get hungry sometime. And-well, John’s pretty good at being annoying, and he learned a lot from working with Rodney McKay for two years. He’s confident.
What can I say about this beyond hahahahahaha? I like the humor in this story, it would be hard to bear all the bleakness without it.
As it turns out, it only takes three repetitions of Still here! He even keeps himself from falling over backwards when Daniel opens the door.
Daniel waits while John gets up and comes inside. He doesn’t look good.
“Hi,” says John. “What’s up?”
Daniel laughs at that, short and sharp. “Oh, nothing. Just having a little bit of a nervous breakdown, that’s all.”
“Well, hey,” says John, “happens to the best of us.”
“Right.” Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose, makes a face like he has a migraine. “Want some coffee?”
John never really drank coffee before Atlantis. Sometimes he thinks that has to be symbolic of something. “Sounds great.”
John gets coffee in a cup that proclaims, “Archaeologists Don’t Dig Dinosaurs.” Daniel’s says something in hieroglyphics. John was not aware that Daniel had been snitching novelty coffee cups while they were out, but he figures, whatever helps.
These little touches of an innocent earth before the Wraith are so poignant.
Daniel stares into his coffee for a while, and eventually he says, “Did you know, I almost went to Atlantis with the Daedalus, last year?”
Thinking about Daniel on Atlantis makes John uncomfortable for reasons he’s never really sat down and analyzed. “No, I didn’t.”
“We’d defeated the Goa’uld. It took us nine years.” Daniel sets his coffee cup down on the table, spins it slowly by the handle. “Understand that they ruled the galaxy unchecked for thousands of years, before we showed up. Nine years is,” he shakes his head. “It’s nothing. Teal’c had been fighting them his entire life. The Jaffa and the Tok’ra, for millennia. Millions and millions of people, enslaved for as long as they’d even been a species.”
John has no idea where this is going, but he drinks his coffee and traces the picture of the dinosaur on the cup and waits for it.
“What we did was miraculous. Maybe literally. Probably literally.” Daniel shakes his head, hard. “I don’t know. Point is, we did it, and it was done, and we were going our separate ways. And then,” his grin is quick and harsh, “the Ori showed up.”
And now John’s starting to get an idea of where this is going.
“So,” Daniel waves a hand, “forget retirement, forget research, time to save the galaxy again. Fine. We’d done it before. Except, then,” and now he laughs again, and it doesn’t sound good, “the next galaxy-destroying menace doesn’t even wait until we’ve gotten rid of the last one. And I have spent ten years sacrificing my life and my work and my friends and my family, and I had-some cold compensation in knowing that my skills, my experience, were going toward a valuable cause, and that I could use the work to which I had dedicated my life to make the galaxy a better place.” He draws in a deep, shuddering breath. “But now here I am, in a fifties fallout shelter, drawing up mission plans and shooting at aliens, and the world is ending and everything I have ever worked for,” he opens a hand, “is useless.”
It’s easy to overlook the human side of all of this, and the author has done a fabulous job of bringing the exhaustion home to us in this paragraph. Poor Daniel.
People should not be allowed, John thinks, people shouldn’t be allowed to say things like that.
Daniel bends his head, rubs his hands over his forehead. “I’m-propelled by inertia, lately. I can’t stop under my own power. I just-” he rubs his eyes. “I’ll be there tomorrow. 0900.”
“Good,” says John. It comes out kind of cracked.
Daniel looks up. “You can leave now.”
John leaves. He walks through the hallways, makes a few turns, goes into his own room, and shuts the door behind him. He drops down on his bed and finds himself staring at Daniel’s book of hieroglyphics.
Daniel cannot break. Daniel cannot break, because if Daniel deserts or shoots himself in the head or-whatever a snapped Daniel does-John is stuck here. And-and.
He breathes through the panic, keeps his hands down at his sides, stays leaning against the door. It was just a minor freak-out, just like the kind John has occasionally, had on Atlantis sometimes too, where he had to go to his quarters and sit down and shake because he’d just killed his C.O., or closed his eyes and waited for death that didn’t come, or almost turned into a fucking insect.
It happens.
The dependence on Daniel has increased to the point where John can’t deal with the idea of losing him.
One of the surreal things about life on post-Wraith Earth is that the chain of command is completely gone. The closest John has ever gotten to this kind of freedom was that first year on Atlantis, and even then, Elizabeth was the leader of the expedition, and the idea of an outside command was there, out beyond ZPMs somewhere.
Here, he can do whatever the hell he wants. It’s like living in free-fall, and he’s not sure how he feels about it.
Except then there’s Daniel. Daniel, whose plans slot in next to John’s the way Elizabeth’s never did, who kills Wraith with the sort of detached ruthlessness that John would never say he recognizes, who has built himself some delicate web of sanity, and John’s right there to see it starting to fall apart, bit by bit.
He doesn’t know how to do this. He doesn’t have anyone to fight against. There are only the endless, graceless, starving waves of dreadlocked alien menace, and Daniel. Daniel, who’s back there in his room with the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes. Shredding himself into pieces, or something.
Yes, it all comes down to the horror out there and Daniel beside him. Me and thee against the world. I’m completely convinced of the necessity of this pairing by this point in the story.
The next day, they go out and get lucky, find a ship that’s just landed, a bunch of Wraith grinning to each other, eating out. They almost-almost-get the ship. Although how they’d hide it, or what they’d use it for, is beyond John, he’s pissed off enough to punch somebody when it lifts off and escapes.
So he hangs around and kills the rest of the stragglers, while McConnell takes the others and goes to get a stash of naquadah that’s supposedly in the area, and Daniel disappears to God knows where.
When John finds him, after he’s calmed down a little, Daniel’s sitting on the ground with his eyes closed, breathing. John spent enough time among wannabe Ancients to know meditation when he sees it. He wonders, again, how Ascension would work for someone who’s already done it once. Could he do it again whenever the hell he wanted to? If so, John’s decided he’s feeling seriously cheated by the lack of an all-powerful being on their side.
Another example of John’s notion of Daniel as savior.
Daniel’s eyes blink open when John’s shadow hits him, and he looks up at John, wordless.
“It goes both ways,” says John.
Daniel’s stare is clear, endless, fucking scary. “What does?”
“You can’t go off and leave me to do this by myself.” Wherever off is. “Just-know that.”
I can’t hack this, he doesn’t say, and also I don’t know if I can make myself care enough to do it alone.
“I know,” says Daniel.
They’re committed to sticking together and even willing to state that commitment verbally. It’s huge that John is able to let Daniel know how much he needs him. Okay, it’s a trauma bond, but it’s still a bond.
Two nights later, John wakes up at one thirty-seven AM, covered in sweat and panting, holding his handgun like it’s the only thing keeping him from separating into his component parts.
He can remember the nightmare-nightmares-in bits and pieces; a Wraith sucking out his life, Atlantis blown up, standard nightmare fare that still leaves him seized up, freaking out. And other things-he saw Daniel’s face, Davis’s face, the Wraith-worshippers in the woods, but he’s shaking and he can’t calm himself down and he doesn’t quite remember which things are from the dream and which ones really happened.
He takes a walk. The corridors are people-free if you know where to go. It’s cool, and dim, and quiet, and he starts to calm down a little. He doesn’t put his gun away, though.
He means to pass Daniel’s door without knocking, even though he really, really wants to check and make sure Daniel hasn’t suicided during the night, but it opens as he’s walking by, and Daniel’s standing there, watching him. He’s wearing BDU pants, no shirt or socks, and he doesn’t look at all surprised.
There’s a lot of sleep deprivation going on, which seems to be a recurring theme for SGA. Interesting that Daniel seems to be awake whenever John is, it resonates with his not completely human persona.
“How did you know I was out here?” John asks after a second.
Daniel shrugs. “Do you want to come in?”
And this also shows Daniel as part ascended being, not just a mortal.
He almost asks why, but instead he just goes.
Inside, Daniel’s lit candles. “I was trying kel-no-reem,” he says. “Jaffa meditation.”
It’s John’s opinion that Daniel does not need more meditation, but he’s smart enough not to say anything about it. He plays with one of the candle flames, instead.
John doesn’t like the meditation, naturally, because it pulls Daniel away from the here and now where John desperately needs him to stay and fills him with fear that Daniel will leave through ascension.
“So I’m guessing the gun isn’t meant for anything in particular?” Daniel asks.
John forgot he was holding it. “No,” he says.
“Okay,” says Daniel. “Want to play chess?”
And he gets out an honest-to-God chess set, stolen from some store somewhere, solid wooden board and carved black and white pieces.
“I’m not going to be very good right now,” says John.
“Well, I’ll win, then,” says Daniel.
Daniel wins. John plays with his left hand, which is steady enough to move the pieces without a problem, and keeps his gun in his other hand.
“Again?” Daniel asks after they finish.
“What is this, therapy?” John asks, not as accusatory as he’d intended to be.
Daniel shrugs. “Getting you drunk didn’t seem like a good idea.”
They play again.
John decides, halfway through the second game, that Daniel’s stare is just as intense when it’s fixed on chess pieces. He thinks about every move, and his hands are confident, sliding his pieces into place and picking up John’s with quick, smooth movements. John moves almost randomly, more absorbed in watching how Daniel decimates the board than in trying to win. By the time the game’s over, he can feel his muscles starting to unwind.
Chess has been a sexually charged game ever since Spock’s long fingers caressed the pieces way back in ST:TOS. This scene cranks up the already high UST.
“You know, normally I’m more competitive than this,” he says.
Daniel glances up. “I know.”
They play again. This time, John works on setting up the board to create the coolest takedown sequence. Either it’s easier than he thought it’d be, or Daniel figures out what he’s doing and helps him out, because the pieces fall in patterns, until Daniel finally says, “Checkmate,” and starts gathering up the pieces and putting them back in their little felt-lined box.
John’s drowning in exhaustion, by now. The room’s hot from the candles, and the dream, whatever it was, has fallen back to the very edge of his consciousness. Daniel’s gotten up and is putting the chess set away, and when he comes back he’s golden in the candlelight, warm and solid, like John knows he isn’t. He reaches a hand down to John. “Come on.”
So much sexual energy, and the reference to Daniel golden in the candlelight reminds us of John’s image of Daniel as angelic and otherworldly.
He takes Daniel’s hand. It’s warm. He pulls himself up, but Daniel’s pulling, too, and he comes up too fast, runs into Daniel and a sudden, heavily-muscled stop. It feels-
He hasn’t moved, and Daniel still has his hand. He’s off-balance, and Daniel’s mouth is hot under his.
It’s five seconds of tongue and stubble rasp and a deep drowning sensation, before Daniel jerks back.
“No,” says Daniel carefully, watching him like he isn’t sure John understands.
John breathes in. It’s still too hot. “No,” he says. “Yeah.”
Daniel relaxes. “Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks,” he says carefully.
And then, after a 19,000 word build up, Daniel says no. Hahahaha. The author has given us plenty of time to get used to the pairing and to see the why of the relationship, and the UST is pretty fucking high, but apparently not high enough.
“Don’t mention it,” says Daniel, and his face twitches a little, like there was a smile there but it didn’t quite make it to the surface.
“See you tomorrow,” John says, and escapes into the hall.
Once he’s there, he walks until he’s turned the corner, and then he leans back against the wall and stares at the ceiling for a few minutes.
It was a stupid thing to do. He knows better. He told himself, way back in Utah, that Daniel was off-limits, and he-he’s looked, but he knows how these things work, knows how this could screw this-whatever they have-up beyond fixing.
He still wants-
He can’t handle this right now. He’ll sleep for a couple of hours, and maybe when he wakes up…something else will be true.
Yeah, that rings true as the type of coping skill John would have.
The next day, John takes a Jeep by himself and drives until he sees Wraith. It takes three hours and a lot of concentrated effort to get anywhere, and at the end of it he spends a satisfying couple of hours ridding the greater Portland area of any Wraith he can find. He deliberately doesn’t think about how much this is going to piss Daniel off.
When he gets back, tired and sore and glad that he’s managed to waste pretty much the whole day, Daniel’s in Granville’s lab, bent over some of the Goa’uld stuff they got from Dr. Sim. He doesn’t look up when John comes in, but he does say, “How was risking your life for no reason? Did you have a good day?” The sarcasm is palpable.
“Great,” says John, and it comes out defensive, which is stupid. He leans in to look at the thing Daniel’s working on, a little palm-pilot-ish screen with hieroglyphics on it, and frowns. “Is that a jar with legs?”
“Yes,” says Daniel, short and clipped. “Don’t read over my shoulder.”
John’s reminded abruptly of Rodney, and takes a step back. “Sorry about today,” he says. “Sometimes you just have to get out.”
“Yeah,” says Daniel, “and if I thought that said anything about what you’re thinking or whether you’re going to do it again, I might accept your apology.”
John can’t think of anything to say to that, and eventually Daniel says, “Go away,” so he leaves.
He ends up waiting outside Daniel’s door that evening with some really good beer, because life is miserable when Daniel’s pissed. John is prone to tripping over Daniel’s sharp-edged sarcasm and coming to a dead stop, and it’s much, much worse when Daniel’s actually aiming.
When Daniel walks up, he’s reading from a folder, and he doesn’t notice John until his hand’s reaching for the door. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hi,” says John. “I brought beer.”
Daniel blinks at him for a second, and then opens the door and holds it for John to follow him in.
Good. Great. Or something. John’s spent the last forty-five minutes trying to convince himself that an evening drinking beer with Daniel will be fun, but he hasn’t quite gotten himself there yet.
Sure enough, it’s tense and mildly hostile. John distracts himself by running through gun models in his head, but then he gets depressed at the thought that new ones probably aren’t going to be made for a while, and goes back to staring at Daniel while Daniel stares into his beer.
They both drink faster than they would normally, and halfway through his second beer, Daniel says abruptly, “You never really answered my question.”
John frowns. “What question?”
Daniel’s eyes flick down to his beer, and after a second they come up again. “How was risking your life for no reason?”
John can’t help the quick rush that comes up through him, vivid memory of earlier, crouching behind a building, pressed against warm concrete, ten Wraith just around the corner and no humans in sight. “I told you,” he says, and his voice is a little rough. “It was great.”
“Was it,” says Daniel, and now he’s watching John, intense.
“I killed fucking crowds of them,” says John. “Streets are full of dead bodies up there.” And this is a stupid thing to say, but, “You should try it.”
Daniel’s still watching him, but he shakes his head, slowly. “No, thank you,” he says. “I don’t do suicide. After all,” a short laugh, “I couldn’t be sure it would work.”
This is too weird a concept for John to get his head around, even after only two beers. Like what Daniel’s saying has five or six or ten dimensions, and John’s brain is only working in three or four. Although n the plus side, it’s distracting him from the way Daniel’s mouth shapes itself around the bottle. “It’s not suicide,” he says instead of trying to respond to the other thing. “It’s just de-stressing. And as far as I can tell, I’m alive.” He snags another beer.
It’s not just Daniel who hints at five or six or ten dimensions here, this whole section gives me goose bumps every time I read it.
“Whatever,” says Daniel. “I’m not going to try to convince you. I wouldn’t want to see what would happen if I managed it.” He takes another one for himself. “But your day was great.”
“Yeah,” says John, and opens the bottle.
“Your day of fighting massive amounts of Wraith alone in the streets.”
“Yeah.” And now he’s thinking about it again, sliding through alleys and taking them out wherever he could, sprinting through the streets away from or after them-and that grenade, that was a work of genius, he doesn’t even know how many he took out with that one-
Daniel’s got that same intent stare on him. John doesn’t shift in his seat, and doesn’t call attention to the arousal running through his body, but he thinks Daniel knows it’s there.
The silence stretches on and on and on, until John finally takes another drink of beer and says, “So. How was your day?”
Daniel takes a breath, and then there’s a few seconds before he says, “I translated the inscriptions on some of the things Dr. Sim sent us,” and he keeps talking. John breathes carefully while Daniel’s voice winds through declensions and conjugations and multilateral hieroglyphs.
John wasn’t lying when he said his day was great. He half-wishes Daniel would loosen up enough to try something like it, but the other half is pretty sure that if Daniel ever gets that loose, he’ll be shooting at whoever comes close enough.
He almost wants to be there. He bets it’ll be interesting.
He falls into sleep, like straight off a cliff, and it’s a blank, blind jump from ten-thirty to three, when he’s suddenly awake and up and searching the room for-nothing.
He looks down at his gun, looks around the room again, and pulls on a holster over his T-shirt, puts the gun away.
3:17 AM. He’s not getting back to sleep.
The mess is farther away than it usually seems, now that there’s nothing between his feet and the freezing concrete floors. When he gets there, he almost runs into Thorman, who’s standing inside the doors with a sandwich on a plate.
“Oh-I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know,” she says. John’s putting together didn’t know what? when she frowns and says, “Well, of course I didn’t know, you wouldn’t-uh, Dr. Jackson’s just over there, sir. I was just getting a sandwich, I didn’t see either of you.”
John takes longer than he really should to add Daniel’s in the mess hall to Thorman’s nervous and it’s three in the morning and get she thinks we’re having a secret meeting. Right. “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he says. “See you in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” says Thorman, and skedaddles.
Daniel is sitting with a mug and a stack of papers, and he doesn’t look like he’s moved in-ever, maybe. Like a statue, hands wrapped around his mug and eyes fixed on some point beyond the furthest manila folder.
It’s not like John didn’t know that Daniel doesn’t sleep. It gets creepy, though. He thinks he’ll relax about it the first time he gets up this late and doesn’t find Daniel already awake.
He makes noise, deliberately, as he walks over, but Daniel doesn’t twitch. John comes up behind him, puts his hands on Daniel’s shoulders. It’s a shock, finding him warm and real underneath John’s hands, like anyone else would be.
Again, John sees Daniel as more than human.
Two days later, John hasn’t slept in long enough that the world is taking on a sharp, bright crystal-quality, hard and too clear. His eyes are burning, and they’re out in the wilds of-somewhere-taking out a nest of Wraith who’d decided that their commute was too long.
And he knows he’s tired enough to start getting stupid, because he keeps getting distracted by Daniel.
Daniel kills like he’s pulling off a band-aid. John can almost see him thinking let’s get this over with. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s fucking good at it, though, and John has to watch whenever he has a free second, because there’s something about Daniel taking a deep breath and steeling himself and going out to kill twenty fucking Wraith at once.
He doesn’t even care that Daniel gets more than he does, this time.
“What’s wrong with you?” Daniel asks in the Jeep, frowning at him.
“So nice of you to be concerned,” says John, and starts it up. “I’m fine. Tired.”
John isn’t sure if he’s jealous of Daniel’s apparent ability to live without sleep. If it comes with the package of being Daniel Jackson, Daniel can keep it.
“Good day today,” he says. “I don’t even know how many we killed.”
“Yeah,” says Daniel, “go us. We’ve eradicated a percentage of the Wraith force probably prefixed with nano.”
“Hey,” says John. “I’d give that at least a milli.”
Daniel looks at him.
John sighs. “Yeah.”
The author has made me feel the horror of not being able to feel enough here.
They can’t keep nickel-and-diming this, and they both know it. It’s the reason they’ve got three scientists and a slowly-growing cache of tech in the lower levels of their fallout shelter. But they can’t-they can not, and John knows this even when he kind of doesn’t know it at all-they can’t tip their hand. They can’t reveal their position, they can’t risk it all in a major operation, they can’t use too much of their equipment, because there are a zillion Wraith and not enough of them (two, John thinks, and forgets the other number half the time) and that math does not work.
Problem is, Daniel wanders through this war wanting any place but here, and John lies awake at night and breathes through the panic of knowing, deep inside, that he’s never going to see Atlantis again.
This story delineates John’s pain and isolation so well. It’s hurt/comfort in a way, but the hurt is emotional and the comfort is sparse and full of angst.
They go home and shower and debrief and eat dinner, and John’s almost beginning to understand Daniel’s whole-futility thing, because he keeps thinking nano, and pointless.
After dinner, he stays behind Daniel, ends up in his room, kicks back on the floor. Daniel gives him an expressive look-I am on to you and whatever it is you’re doing, but I will let you stay on my floor anyway, which is a nice trick, since John doesn’t even know what he’s doing-and lays out two decks of cards for spider solitaire.
John watches until the cards blur. When he lets his eyes close, he holds onto the picture, and he zones out to the sound of cards whispering and snapping down against each other.
When he opens his eyes, it’s after one and Daniel’s drinking tea, watching him. His head feels clear and too-awake, tired haze swept away. He says the first thing that comes into his head, which is, “You didn’t have to do that.”
Daniel frowns. “What?”
“Today,” he points at Daniel, “you killed the mood.”
Daniel raises an eyebrow. “I killed the mood.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Daniel’s humoring the crazy man, “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.” Daniel rubs his forehead. “Maybe you could tell me what I’m not sorry for.”
“Nano?” says John. “Nano?” He got enough sleep to realize he should be angry about this. He definitely didn’t get enough to realize he shouldn’t be, which he’s glad about around the edges.
“Oh,” says Daniel. “I don’t get it.”
“For God’s sake,” says John, “we kicked ass. That’s good. You understand good?” Like it’s a foreign word, which for Daniel it might be, for all John knows. Maybe if he picked a different language, the concept might make it through to Daniel’s brain.
“Of course I do, but I don’t see what’s wrong with a little realism-”
“So when’s the last time you were in a good mood, then,” says John, because okay, maybe he’s not the happiest guy in the universe, but he at least knows how to enjoy good moments when they come. But Daniel-
“How is that relevant to anything?” says Daniel.
Sometimes Daniel makes John wants to bang his head against the wall. Or bang Daniel’s head, maybe. “Forget it,” he says.
I don’t know what to say about this exchange. I feel like I should say something, but it speaks for itself, I guess.
But he’s still kind of pissed off-not that there’s any real reason to be pissed at Daniel for being Daniel, but hey, anger and logic are not best friends-so when Easton and Rigby come back at one AM with possibly reliable intel about a weapons stash, he drags Daniel out of bed to go check it out. John leaves McConnell a note tacked to the door in the garage. Daniel’s curled protectively around a travel mug of coffee.
John likes driving at night, and the Wraith mostly left the gigantic New England forests alone, so he can almost pretend that he’s alone on the two-lane highway because it’s one-thirty in southern Vermont, not because of the devastating alien scourge.
“How’s the coffee, Daniel?” he asks, about ten minutes into the drive.
Daniel mutters something that John figures doesn’t need a translation.
He starts waking up around the Massachusetts border. “So what’s this-intelligence,” he asks, and if he was a lawyer, he’d have said alleged in there somewhere.
“Possible explosives in Hubbardston, Mass,” says John. “Also possible Wraith in the area. We’re seeing if we can get to the explosives before they do.”
“Hubbardston?” says Daniel.
“Just south of Gardner,” says John. “I have a map.”
Daniel squeezes his eyes shut for a second, shakes his head a little, and tries for awake again. “Gardner?”
“We drove through it last time,” says John. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember. It’s the furniture capital of New England, after all.”
“The size and population of this country, plus modern communication technologies, leads small American towns to try and differentiate themselves in any way they can,” says Daniel. “Up to and including chair manufacturing.” He yawns.
John grins and doesn’t say, Not anymore. “Breakfast?”
“Um,” says Daniel.
John tosses him a Powerbar anyway.
They hit Wraith before they get there, driving through one of the countless tiny little towns. John crouches behind a building with Daniel and plays guerilla, sneaking around the little down and shooting from behind walls, inside buildings, rooftops. Their stunner blasts are slower than bullets, easier to avoid, and they don’t take out the property around him, but it takes a lot of shots to bring them down; any time he kills one, he’s been in one place long enough to give his position away. John compensates by picking up the pace, shooting faster, running faster.
Daniel’s a foot behind him the whole way, over the fire department, through the park, across to the library, shooting right along with. They kill them and kill them and kill them, until John’s vision is blurry and his ears are ringing and Wraith corpses are covering the streets.
An extreme example of me and thee against the world tightening up the intimacy.
After they’re finished, John stands in one place and pants for a few minutes, then says, “Okay, so you can’t say we didn’t kick ass, right there.”
“Fine,” says Daniel, “we kicked ass,” and he’s not smiling but he’s not frowning either, just watching John with the specialty Daniel stare that makes him feel like he’s being stripped and examined by inquiring eyes.
The idea of someone seeing into and knowing one well is an underlying theme in a lot of slash writing, but here also is a small hint of Daniel’s inhuman (or perhaps superhuman) knowledge and insight into the human condition in general.
They finally reach the seriously tiny town of Hubbardston, and come up with a bunch of C-4 hidden in the basement of the address they were given. A ton of dead Wraith plus a ton of captured explosives equals a successful trip as far as John’s concerned, and he’s in a definite good mood when they make camp a ways outside of town.
Daniel’s still watching him, here and there, eyes flicking up, fixing on John, and flicking back down again. It’s uncomfortable, but John’s in too good of a mood to let it bother him.
He gets his pack out of the Jeep, sets up his bedroll. When he pulls off his shirt to replace it with one sans Wraith juice, Daniel’s eyes trace his bare chest.
The reason John has always avoided sex with people at work is because no matter how good it is, it ends up messy and uncomfortable and it never turns out well for anyone. But work is gone, and now this is the only thing they have. And he knows what Daniel feels like pressed up against him, and he can guess what Daniel’s thinking. Neither of them has mentioned kissing late at night in Daniel’s room, but John hasn’t forgotten, and there are moments when the memory trickles up to the surface and takes over.
But Daniel clears his throat and says, “So, for dinner-MREs, or MREs, or maybe MREs?” with a brisk nothing-to-see-here tone in his voice, so John sits back and-fails to forget about it.
Part 4