Airman Harris 4
Airman Harris
Chapter Four
Rated: Adult
Pairing: Xander/Daniel (and who the hell knows where this is going)
Summary: After a quick delivery to Cheyenne Mountain puts Xander at ground zero of a whole new set of secrets, he finds that sometimes living in a new place is the best way to find yourself.
Previous chapters: One : Two : Three
Four
Jack looked up at Sam and Teal'c walked into the room minus Danny. Great. Danny was probably nose-deep in a book and exhausting himself. It never failed to amaze Jack just how single-minded the man could be. Some days, he interrupted Daniel's intense studies only to have the man just about knock him over as he dashed for a bathroom. Daniel would honestly forget about peeing until he looked up from his books. Jack had never been that focused about anything in his life, not even flying. As far as he was concerned, when a man had to pee, a man had to pee. However, that wasn’t how Daniel saw life.
"Hey kids," he greeted his team. Carter dropped into a seat across from the table while Teal'c offered a nod of his head before going to get food. Leaning closer, Jack studied her. "Carter, is your nose growing or is the rest of you shrinking?"
She offered him a withering stare. "I got hit, sir."
Jack leaned back. "You? Come on, Carter. You're getting slow if you're letting the trainees get in a hit."
She gave him another look. For a career military officer, she did know how to give an insubordinate glare. Luckily, Jack didn't really hold with some of the regs. "So, does that mean we have some potential in the group?" He rubbed his hands with glee. He could use some good hand-to-hand fighters.
The commissary was almost empty and Teal'c came walking across the room with a tray overloaded with food. "Indeed. Many of these recruits will make fine warriors."
“Richas is good," Carter noted. "She didn't get distracted when Butler grabbed her crotch."
"He what?" Jack nearly choked on his cake, which would be a terrible waste of carrot cake. "What sort of training session did you two run? Am I going to be doing paperwork on sexual harassment, because you know how I feel about paperwork."
Carter made a face and then reached up to touch her nose. "It was an interesting day."
"I concur. This group is more flexible in their thinking," Teal'c observed. Jack narrowed his eyes. Teal'c's definition of flexible thinking could be a little scary.
"That would be Harris' fault." Carter stole an apple off Teal'c's tray, but then Teal'c had gotten three apples, so he probably expected it.
"Wait, Airman Harris? The guy Danny...." Jack handwaved the rest of the sentence away. He knew what Danny and Harris had done, but that didn't mean he had to say it out loud. He was grateful as hell that he and the general had been at a staffing meeting topside because he would not want to deal with all the fallout. At least twenty soldiers had asked to change units, three women were pregnant and one had asked to leave the command altogether. He couldn't blame her. Even the base personnel were in danger, and a single parent really needed a safer assignment. So if Harris and Danny got it on in a closet, he really didn’t want to think too much about that. Jack figured if he kept this up, his mental repression closet was going to be so full he was going to have to add on a new addition to the brain.
“With whom Daniel copulated,” Teal’c said. Jack was almost sure that the choking sound from Carter was actually a laugh.
“Thank you,” Jack offered dryly. “But what does Harris have to do with the training session getting out of control?”
“Everything,” Carter offered, shaking her head. “He makes Daniel look positively competent.”
Jack cringed. Daniel was damn good at his job, but he was a menace militarily. The man ran though friendly field of fire, misjudged enemy positions, and generally had his head up his ass until the gunfire threatened one of his precious rocks. He admired the hell out of Daniel, but he still wanted to murder him on a semi-regular basis.
“I disagree. Harris competently disabled a man of superior strength.”
Jack frowned and looked from Carter to Teal’c. Carter didn’t look convinced, and he trusted her evaluation of people’s leadership abilities. That’s why he had her sit in on the training sessions and evaluate the candidates and their military acumen while Teal’c put them through their paces. However, he trusted Teal’c’s evaluation of fighting skills and Teal’c had that angle to his head that meant that he wasn’t budging in his opinion. “What exactly happened?” Jack mentally scheduled in time to go and pull the security tapes.
“He ran,” Carter started, but Teal’c quickly corrected her with, “He moved to a more advantageous position.”
“He ran to what more advantageous position?” Jack wondered if they shouldn’t go and pull those security tapes now because whatever happened, Carter and Teal’c had very different opinions about it, and that wasn’t very common. Most of the time, Jack trusted his team to come to the right answer and agree-all except Daniel who had both the worst and best ideas of any of them. The problem was sorting out one from the other.
Teal’c inclined his head toward Carter, ceding the floor to her. Putting her apple down, Carter started, “He ran from the fight. We’re talking rabbit levels of jumping and running and hiding behind the gym equipment. I haven’t Daniel run that fast, although if I had to teach him a fighting style, that wouldn’t be a bad one for him.”
“He disabled an opponent,” Teal’c observed.
Jack frowned. “Between the jumping and the running he managed to clock a Marine? The quality of the candidates is dropping around here.”
“It was an accident,” Carter insisted.
“I disagree.”
Yep, Carter and Teal’c were still not making any sense. “Would one of you like to explain what happened?”
Carter started before Teal’c could. “Harris was hiding behind a chest press machine, and Bothell reached through the machine to grab him. Harris dropped to his knees and Bothell’s elbow got slammed on the metal plate.”
Jack cringed. That was going to sting.
“I do not believe the maneuver was an accident,” Teal’c said firmly, still holding to his side in his own obdurate Jaffa way. For someone who was so polite, Teal’c could really get his stubborn on.
“You think he did it on purpose?” Jack asked. For a second, Teal’c just looked at him. Jack could almost hear Homer Simpson’s “d’oh” in Teal’c’s thoughts. If Teal’c didn’t believe something with his whole heart, he pretty much didn’t say it. “Why do you think it was intentional?” Jack amended himself.
“Airman Harris never failed to put himself in an advantageous position and he is the only combatant to land a hit on Major Carter.”
“Carter! Harris hit you?” Jack stared at his second in command in horror. He didn’t know who had taught her hand to hand combat, but either the trainer had been very concerned about teaching Carter to defend herself or he’d been trying to drive a woman out of the service. Either way, whoever had trained her had turned her into a beautifully vicious and dirty little fighter.
Her answering glare would have stripped the paint off the side of a house. “And I put him on the ground, sir,” she snapped right back.
“Indeed, you are the only one who did,” Teal’c pointed out. “His ability to avoid offensively superior fighters speaks highly of his skills.”
Carter was touching her nose again, feeling for sore spots, probably. It really did look puffy and red, but Jack figured one Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer joke and Carter would put him on the floor the next time they sparred. Jack wasn’t a young man anymore, and Carter really was a dirty fighter. “And I was trying to be nice to him,” Carter complained.
Jack didn’t buy that. When it came to sparring, Carter wasn’t nice to anyone. The woman was the heart of charity off the gym floor, but no way would she have cut Harris slack on the sparring floor, especially not if he was pulling some crazy stunt like running away from his opponent.
“I mean,” Carter kept going, “after Cantone pulled his caveman routine, I felt bad for the kid.”
“Warrant Officer Jason Cantone?” Jack asked.
Teal’c nodded once. “He showed undue interest in causing harm to Airman Harris.”
Jack ran a hand over his face. The last thing they needed was some testosterone-driven jarhead who couldn’t rein in his own frustration. At least, that’s what Jack assumed Teal’c meant. Sometimes Teal’c’s habit of understatement made him hard to understand. Jack definitely needed to pull the video from this afternoon.
“He wanted to kill the guy,” Carter agreed. “I haven’t ever seen anyone take such a sudden hatred of a simple airman. Although it was worth it to see Cantone’s face after Harris pointed out that beating up on a cook made you pathetic. Harris does know how to run his mouth.”
“Great.” Jack sighed. “Just what we need, another mouthy geek.”
“At least this one isn’t going into the field, not if he keeps running away from anyone who raises a fist to him,” Carter reassured him. However, the look on Teal’c’s face told a whole different story. It was funny how-after years of practice-Jack could read the tiny shifts in Teal’c’s expression. Either that or Teal’c was loosening up. Either way, Teal’c had some doubts about Carter’s opinion.
“Considering he’s our dishwasher with a part-time pass to translate squiggles for Daniel, I don’t think it’s an issue,” Jack said as he stabbed his cake with his fork. This was getting a little too messy. “Speaking of Danny, one of us should probably blast him out of his office before he falls asleep on his books, or worse, he doesn’t go to sleep at all. One of these days the man is going to forget to breathe and won’t that be a mess?”
“He has left the base,” Teal’c observed.
“Whoa? Really? What, did they have some big documentary on the most boring subject ever and his VCR is broken?” Jack loved Danny, but his taste in television was atrocious.
“I am unaware of his plans, but he met Airman Harris at the gym. They left for Daniel’s house together,” Teal’c informed them, and Jack had a moment of mental gray-out. He just couldn’t even come up with an appropriate response for that. Danny left with Harris. Danny voluntarily left his work to go home with Harris. Danny voluntarily left translating his beloved dusty crap to go home with a man he had pinned in a closet and demanded sex from while under the influence of an alien device. Nope. Not computing.
“Really?” Carter asked. “After, you know…”
“Certainly you are no less cordial with Dr. Fraiser after you-”
“Yeah, yeah, but,” Carter quickly cut him off, “Janet and I were friends before and we understand the nature of alien… you know.” Carter was now as red as her nose, and Jack focused on stabbing his cake into little crumbs. He was not thinking about what Frasier and Carter would look like together, and he was not a little jealous of Teal’c for seeing it. Nope. He was not. Jack started building that mental addition onto his repression closet.
“I believe Daniel Jackson and Airman Harris are now friends,” Teal’c said in a perfectly calm voice. Jack really wished he knew exactly what definition of ‘friends’ Teal’c was using because this whole situation was odd, and coming from him, that was saying a lot. Jack had seen more odd in his life than he cared to remember.
“I’m surprised Daniel left that early. We finished up in the gym at what… eighteen hundred? I’ve never seen Daniel leave the base before ten, and usually that’s only when the general orders him.” Carter shook her head in a sort of fond disbelief. Jack could relate because before Daniel, he’d pretty much assumed that military people had cornered the market on obsessive dedication to the job.
“Daniel came to the gym at twenty-one, twelve.”
Jack frowned. “Harris was still there three hours later?” Jack mentally snickered at the thought of the man taking a three hour hot shower. Carter might have really taken him down a peg or two. It surprised Jack how much satisfaction he took from that thought.
“Indeed. He requested information on how to disable Jaffa. We practiced a number of techniques.”
Narrowing his eyes, Jack studied Teal’c. He was hiding something in his perfectly calm, Jaffa way, and Jack wondered if the thing he was hiding had anything to do with why his opinion on Harris differed so much from Carter’s. “What exactly did you do for three hours?”
“I began the teaching of ta'ka'rema.”
“You mean the stupid Jaffa martial arts that don’t actually work?”
Teal’c raised an eyebrow. Okay, either Harris liked getting his ass kicked or he was a little too savvy about understanding your enemy to be a real dishwasher. Jack scratched the side of his neck as he wondered if someone could have slipped a plant into the base. Of course, if that were the case, acting like an idiot during training didn’t make much sense. A double agent would try to either keep his head down or he would try to impress the targeted organization. From the description of Harris’ actions, that wasn’t the case. None of it made sense. A dishwasher simply did not worry about enemy tactics and battle psychology.
“Any insight on that, Teal’c?” Jack just came right out and asked. He was too tired and it was too late for him to be working his brain this hard, and that meant that Jack was really starting to get a bad ‘pit of his stomach’ feel about this Harris.
Teal’c seemed to take some time to gather his thoughts, and that was never a good sign. “He requested information on how a Jaffa’s symbiote could be used as a tactical advantage in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Advantage?” Jack really did not like where this was going, and from the concerned look on Carter’s face, neither did she.
Teal’c gave a slow nod of his head. “I showed him how to remove a symbiote and we discussed Jaffa reactions to one who had possession of their symbiote.”
“He…. Your….” Jack stopped. Yeah, he was definitely too tired for this conversation.
“Teal’c, did he take your symbiote out?” Carter asked the question that Jack couldn’t quite seem to get out. She looked from Teal’c to Jack and back to Teal’c with this look of utter shock that Jack wasn’t used to seeing on her face.
“He did.”
Jack had a whole body shiver go through him. Anyone who voluntarily touched a slimy snake had something wrong with him. His elevator didn’t go to the top floor. His box of crayons was missing burnt sienna. The man had more than one marble rattling around loose. Now Jack was really worried.
“Carter, get a background check on this kid.”
“He passed vetting for access to classified materials, sir.”
“I don’t care.” Jack put his fork down carefully before he could slam it down. Something was wrong. “Go deeper. I want to know which hand he….” Jack stopped and cleared this throat. Sexual references in front of his team… not kosher. “I want to know everything,” he amended himself. “Teal’c, get a copy of the training session tape for me and put it in my office.” Jack stood up.
“Sir, where are you going?” Carter called after him as he started out of the room.
“Harris is with Danny, and I think we all know what kind of person Danny has a habit of attracting,” Jack pointed out. No way was he leaving his linguist with someone who set off every warning bell in his head. Damn. Daniel had even talked him into going to the general to get Harris on the Stargate mission. Heading for the elevators, Jack wasn’t sure who he was angriest with-Harris, Daniel or himself. But the next time Daniel wanted someone brought into the program, Jack was going to…. Kneecapping them was probably out of the question, but he certainly wasn’t going to go out of his way to help Daniel get his way.
Jack pushed the elevator button about a dozen times before it finally opened and he headed for the surface. Glancing at his watch, he started making calculations. It was twenty-three, thirty. That meant that Harris had two hours head start. Two hours with Daniel. God only knows how much trouble Daniel could get into in two hours. Jack could feel panic wrap around his heart as he fought an urge to call Daniel’s house. If there was trouble, Jack didn’t want Harris getting any sort of warning. Nope, Jack was going with a stealth attack.