Airman Harris 8
Airman Harris
Chapter Eight
Rated: Adult
Pairing: Xander/Daniel (and who the hell knows where this is going)
Summary: If there's one thing that Jack does not want to get involved in, it's Daniel's private life. Ironically, Daniel's private life required rescue and military intervention more often that not, and Jack is not sure that this Harris kid is any different.
Previous chapters: One : Two : Three : Four : Five : Six : Seven
Chapter Eight
Jack watched as the nurse examined Xander. “Does this hurt?” he asked before poking a bit of leg that didn’t look as bruised but that had a definite raised lump.
“A bit. It’s like you’re pushing on the whole leg.” From the nurse’s expression, that was not good. As far as Jack was concerned, this whole situation was FUBAR, even without the very serious nature of Harris’ injuries. The nurse moved to a nasty purple bruise dangerously low on Xander’s back. That would be one of Teal’c’s strikes because no soldier trained in the service would risk that sort of hit with an untrained recruit straight out of basic. That had been a dangerous hit.
“How about here?” The nurse pushed his thumb into the center of the bruise. “On a scale of one to ten, where’s the pain?”
“Um, more like a ‘I’m going to have some pink in the pee tomorrow’ but not really enough to think I hurt anything seriously,” Xander said after he’d hissed in pain. Jack had suffered a few of Teal’c’s nastier blows, so he knew how very serious the injuries could be. Usually Teal’c was more careful with the newbies, though. It definitely suggested that Teal’c considered Harris a real player. Jack needed to get his hands on the surveillance tapes ASAP.
“If you’re bleeding into your urine, you have hurt something seriously. That needs to be noted on your medical file and we need to do testing to see the extent of the damage. We need to get you in for a CT scan and sonography.”
“It’s not that bad. Hey, I’ve had worse and lived to take the trig test the next day,” Harris protested softly. However, when he caught Jack’s eye, he closed his mouth. The kid had some sense of self-preservation, then. Jack just couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t kicked in when Teal’c had been beating the stuffing out of him.
“You also need to avoid any activity that might aggravate the injury. So, if you’re on a gate team, we need to contact your commanding officer and arrange for desk duty until you heal.” The nurse looked over to Jack.
“He’s on dishwashing duty,” Jack commented, and the nurse gave Harris a quick sympathetic look as if that were some punishment duty. Considering that the second-in-command of the country’s most secure facility was overseeing the kid’s treatment, the nurse had reason to assume that Harris was normally more than just a dishwasher.
“You can do some translations from bed,” Daniel offered brightly.
“I can identify texts with specific words. I don’t actually know enough to do real translations.”
“I’ll send you the scans, and you can tag texts according to the god and which version of hell is mentioned, okay?” Daniel stepped close enough to rest his hand on Harris’ ankle. From any other department head in the mountain, that would be the same as stepping out of the closet, but everyone knew Daniel got his mother-hen going with his translators. The nurse just stepped around Daniel and started preparing the stretcher to roll. He called some other helpers over and then nicely invited Daniel to get the hell out of the way so they could take Harris to testing. If Jack hadn’t known better, he’d swear from the look on Daniel’s face that they were taking Harris out to execute him.
The two nurses started pushing Harris out of the room, and Daniel was left with his arms wrapped around his waist.
“It’s a test, Danny. He’s probably right about this being nothing.”
Daniel glared at him. “So, tell me, exactly how long were you out there in my living room?” Oh yes. And angry Daniel was a Daniel on the offense.
“Drop it, Daniel.”
Daniel slowly turned red, although Jack couldn’t figure out if Daniel was embarrassed or angry. With Daniel, he was never quite sure what the man was thing. “You… you,” Daniel finally spluttered. Angry then. Daniel only ran out of words when he was really, truly furious.
“Me… me,” Jack shot right back. He’d discovered around year one that it was better to lance the boil and just let Daniel blow. Otherwise his slow burns were nasty enough to make entire departments put in for transfers. “Look, I didn’t interrupt you, did I?”
The red color spread to Daniel’s neck. “Oh my God. You were… the whole time?” Daniel’s whole body practically vibrated with tension.
“Well, for the main event anyway,” Jack said with a shrug. He’d gotten an earful. He never would have guessed that Daniel was gay, and he really never expected the man to be such a talker during sex. Actually, Jack planned to repress the memory of what Daniel sounded like when he came. Daniel glared murder, but Jack figured that he’d gotten that look so often that he had developed immunity. “Hey, that was me being polite. I could have barged in.”
“Only if you wanted me to shoot you.” Daniel shifted his arms to they were crossed over his chest.
“Yeah, yeah. You keep threatening, but you never actually pull the trigger.” Jack sighed. He had tried to take the moral high ground here, and he was still getting shit for it. “Look, I was worried.”
“About what? Me having a friend?”
“That was more than a friend.”
Daniel’s eyes narrowed.
“And you have to admit that something’s not right with him.”
“No, no I don’t. Xander is a very nice young man. He’s not an alien. He’s not a psychopath. He’s not trying to kill me.”
“Two out of three I agree with, but the jury is still out on number three,” Jack warned. There were just too many holes in Xander’s story, and too many odd reactions. Jack would feel a lot better about this when he could track down this Captain Finn and get a briefing that made sense out of all Harris’ reactions.
“Don’t start.” Daniel poked a finger in Jack’s face.
Jack shoved Daniel’s hand to the side. “I am very used to being surrounded by people who are smarter than me, including you, Danny. However, when it comes to relationships, you need a keeper. Look me in the eye and tell me that you haven’t noticed that there’s something wrong with Harris.”
Daniel backed off a step, but Jack could see the color fade from his face and the way his lips pressed into one thin stubborn line. Yeah, Daniel had noticed. As usual, he’d just ignored the warning signs.
“Carter tried to look up the kid’s hometown. She couldn’t. All the census data and crime statistics from Sunnydale, California are missing.”
A bit of anger faded, replaced with confusion. “What?”
“Do you know how she found them? She hacked the NID database. Would you like to guess why the NID has an entire town blacked out?”
“Why?” Daniel’s big old brain was starting to spin now.
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked, but I think it’s interesting. Even more interesting, Harris doesn’t deny anything.”
Daniel glanced toward the infirmary door. “He’s a nice young man.”
“Maybe,” Jack agreed. It actually bothered Jack how nice Harris had been to Daniel in bed. He’d said all the right things to make Daniel feel good, he’d teased him and gotten Daniel to laugh, and Jack was really not ready to face what any of that might mean. “Harris told me that I had to ask a Captain Finn about Sunnydale because he wasn’t going to go telling other people’s secrets.”
“Was he NID?” Daniel’s whole body stiffened. An uncharitable part of Jack wanted to say ‘yes,’ but he didn’t think that was true.
“He was too young for that kind of work. However, I think he was caught up in the middle of something. Terrorist cell, secret testing, secret training… I don’t know. I do know that Harris is not just a nice young man. I’ve spent twenty years around new recruits, and when they have injuries like that, they have two reactions. Either they show everyone every single bruise and brag about how tough they are or they whine. I mean, they really whine. I’ve considered shooting one or two recruits just to shut them up.” Jack wasn’t sure which reaction annoyed him more, but Harris’ sort of blasé attitude came after years of hard injuries in the field where no one had time to listen to whining or bragging. “Harris’ attitude doesn’t match the image of a small-town kid just out of high school.”
“Not everyone reacts the same way to stimulus,” Daniel said, but he had that absent-minded professor tone that suggested his brain was busy mulling something else over.
“Daniel?”
“What?” Daniel’s gaze shot up to Jack, the eyes wide. Yep, that was his guilty expression.
“What did you just remember?” Jack demanded.
“Nothing.”
Jack sighed. Some days he missed having a team that actually listened to orders. “Daniel, this is a serious situation. We have an unknown in the middle of our most classified military secrets, and we have some nebulous connection to the NID and not even the NID will admit to being interested in Sunnydale. I do not have time for you to keep secrets.”
“Xander is not plotting against us.”
“But…” Jack drew out the word, inviting Daniel to share whatever thought he had rattling around in that oversized brain of his.
Daniel sighed. “But he has a very skewed Akkadian vocabulary. He can recognize multiple geographical variations on the names of all the gods, eleven different variants of hell, and any number of words we associate with alien technology-magic, spells, wonders, miracles-all of them. However, he doesn’t know ‘goat’ or ‘mother.’ I thought it was because his friend was some sort of Goth who taught him words associated with magic or wicca or whatever they call it.” Daniel made a face.
“But now you’re remembering something else,” Jack prompted him. A strange vocabulary alone wouldn’t make Daniel look this worried, especially since a screwed up teenage obsession with magic would explain it.
Running his hand over his face, Daniel leaned back against the wall. “When I teased him about not knowing ‘goat,’ he asked why he needed the word. When I asked why he needed to know eleven versions of ‘hell,’ he looked…” Daniel stopped.
Jack was getting a bad feeling about all this. “Daniel?”
“He looked panicked,” Daniel blurted out. “Guilty. I thought maybe he was religious and his friends had gotten into magic spells or something, but he looked really uncomfortable with the whole conversation, so I dropped it. And he changed the subject to some girl he knew who had a rabbit phobia.”
The back of Jack’s neck itched. He needed to find out what was going on, and he needed to do it before any of this came home to roost. “Daniel, I know you like him.” And boy was Jack avoiding thinking how much Daniel liked him. “But be careful. Even if Harris isn’t the bad guy here, he’s been mixed up with bad guys, and we don’t know who might be lurking behind the corner. Stay on base, and don’t go anywhere alone with him.”
“But, Jack,”
“No buts. He’s going on report for failure to tend to injuries sustained during training, so he won’t be leaving base for at least a week, anyway. But the last thing I need is for the two of you to get kidnapped by someone from Harris’ messy past. Am I clear?”
“Crystal,” Daniel agreed. Of course, Jack knew that meant he only had a sixty percent change of Daniel actually following his orders, but it was a start. Harris would be the safer bet. Jack would put in an on-base order for him and that would stop Harris from going anywhere, at least until Jack got a handle on what the hell was going on.
“Jack, about what happened.” Daniel stopped and his arms were around his stomach again. Jack really needed to convince Daniel to join the poker game because he could not hide his emotions. Maybe that’s why every bad guy in two universes gravitated to Daniel-they could see how every word impacted Daniel and tailor their bullshit to match.
“It’s your life. As long as you aren’t taking a serial killer to bed,” and here Jack intentionally edited out the word again, “then it’s not my business. I just want to make sure you’re safe.” As far as Jack could see, Harris was a kid caught up in something, not another Hathor or Shyla, but given Daniel’s track record, he wouldn’t bet his favorite archeologist’s life on it.
“You aren’t bothered by….” Daniel stopped, and his face was pinking up again. Jack decided to put him out of his misery.
“What? Your crappy taste in men?” Jack rolled his eyes. “You have hundreds of men on base, dozens of which are gay, and you pick a nineteen year old dishwasher. Danny, I’m more worried about your taste in men than your sexual orientation.” Jack slapped Daniel on the shoulder and turned to head for his office. He had a Captain Finn to track down and a general to brief. This was turning out to be the messiest transfer they’d had yet.
Daniel, however, had his normal need to talk everything to death. He followed after. In the open hallways, Jack really did not want to discuss anyone’s orientation. Those sorts of conversations ended military careers. Harris might not think he wanted to be career, but Jack also knew how fast that could change. Besides, there were some people who might make a fuss if Daniel were openly gay. Of course after the alien Viagra ray sent all the soldiers off to bonk like bunnies in the closets, there would probably be less. Jack wasn’t a fan of alien tech that screwed with people’s heads, but it was one way to get rid of some of the homophobia that could sometimes breed in all-male stations, and they were pretty damn close.
“Jack!”
“Daniel, not here,” Jack warned.
“I don’t want you to take this out on him.”
Jack spun around, nearly taking out a sergeant who had the bad luck to be passing him at the time. “Do I look like a vindictive man?”
“Yes,” Daniel shot right back. Jack flinched. Okay, he really shouldn't have asked that when Daniel knew him so well.
“I’m vindictive toward Tok’ra, not kids from California.”
“He’s not a kid.”
“Trust me, I heard.” Jack’s sarcasm got ahead of his good sense, and Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not trying to ruin his career.” Jack turned and started for his office again. He needed a little time away from Daniel to get his balance back. Sitting out in Daniel’s living room listening to the sound of his best friend sleeping with a guy, not because of some alien device but because he wanted to fuck a nineteen year old dishwasher-that was doing strange things to Jack’s head. Unfortunately, Daniel chased him down the hall. “Not now, Daniel,” Jack warned. Of course, he didn’t expect the warning to work. It never did with Daniel.
Jack reached the elevator and pressed the close button as fast as he could. Daniel was faster. “If you have a problem with this, we need to clear the air.” Daniel had his stubborn face on again.
“I don’t have a problem with it. Now, the way you go running off chasing rocks when people are shooting at us, that I have a problem with. Do you want to talk about that?”
“I don’t want this to get between us in the field.”
Jack rubbed his hand over his face. Before this assignment, he never thought he’d miss living in a six by six hut with four other special ops soldiers as they tried to take out a target, but he was starting to miss that. Career soldiers knew to just not mention some things. If you didn’t say anything, then it wasn’t real. You didn’t mention that you hated the way your teammate scratched his junk or picked his zits or looked at your ass. You didn’t mention these things, and they slowly faded into the background where they could be ignored. But if you talked about them, that was light shining a big, fucking spotlight on them. It made it hard to ignore.
“We’re fine, Daniel,” Jack said. He wanted to beg Daniel to drop it, and he would if he thought it would do any good. When it came to Daniel, Jack had very little dignity left to protect. “I have a lot of work to do. Carter’s trying to dig through NID databases looking for more intel and I’ve got to find Captain Finn. Maybe we can talk about this later.”
“By later, you mean never.”
“Yes, yes I do,” Jack agreed.
“Jack….”
“Daniel, not now. If I’m lucky, not ever.”
“Because you have a problem with it.”
The elevator opened and Jack headed for his office as fast as he could without looking like he was fleeing from a hundred and fifty pounds of scrawny archeologist.
“Jack, we have to talk about this.”
Most of the time, Daniel respected Jack’s office. Oh, he would stand at the threshold and point out all the ways that Jack was a repressive, repressed, gun-happy fascist, but he wouldn’t actually come into Jack’s office. It was like they had a tacit rule that Jack needed one safe place on base that Daniel wouldn’t burst into without warning. However, this time, the power of the office failed and Daniel stormed in after Jack, slamming the door behind him. Yep, this was hell.
Jack collapsed into his chair. “I could order you to leave, you know.”
“Yes, and I’d ignore the order.” Daniel stood with his arms around his stomach, his body fairly radiating fear and insecurity and distress, and yet he stood there ready to go toe to toe with Jack. It was funny. When Jack had first seen Daniel, he’d thought the man was soft. Without a doubt, he had a soft exterior, but that just hid a spine of steel and balls the size of watermelon. Yeah, his Danny did have balls, and after tonight, that phrase had a whole new meaning. Jack glanced at the clock. Oh-two-hundred. Fuck.
“I don’t care if you’re gay, Daniel.”
Daniel dropped into the other chair. “Bisexual.”
“Gay, bisexual, anti-sexual, straight, omni-sexual or tri-sexual. I don’t care, Daniel. Your life is yours.”
Daniel studied Jack, and Jack tried hard to look honest. True, he was a little bothered by the idea of Daniel with Harris, but in his defense, he’d wanted to lock Daniel in a cell to keep him away from Shyla. The general had to veto him on that one because Jack never would have let Daniel go back and visit that nutjob. And the thought of Hathor and Daniel was still enough to make him want to hurl.
“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable if we’re sharing a tent.”
Closing his eyes, Jack silently asked the universe what he’d done to piss it off. Sadly, there were more answers to that question than he could count. “Daniel, I don’t care if you’re bisexual. I won’t care when we’re sharing a tent. I won’t care when we’re sharing a sleeping bag because of the cold. I won’t even care the next time you fall into poisonous thingamajigs and we have to strip, wash and change in forty degree weather.” Daniel had the grace to blush when reminded of that incident. “You’re my teammate, and what you do in your private time does not change that. If you were a special ops soldier, you’d know that. You’d know that I will have your six no matter what stupid thing you do.”
“Are you implying that sleeping with Xander was stupid?”
“Yes,” Jack said. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat his opinion about that.
“You’re wrong.”
“We’ll see once I find this Captain Finn and figure out what happened in Sunnydale.”
Daniel continued to stare at Jack for some time, and Jack just gave him time to sort out his thoughts. Eventually, Daniel stood up. “You’re going to apologize once we get the whole truth.”
“I doubt that,” Jack said. Daniel opened his mouth, probably to lecture Jack again, but Jack held up a hand to stop him. “But if it’s warranted, I will. Meanwhile, you need to make sure that both of you stay out of trouble until we figure out what sort of spooks might be on his tail. If he’s bringing NID trouble to base, I need to know you won’t be in the middle of it.”
“I’m not avoiding Xander.”
“Fine, just make sure you’re not avoiding him on base where the NID can’t get to you.”
Slowly, Daniel nodded. Now that Jack felt like he could trust.
“Now get out. Your friend has doubled my workload and I plan to take my bad mood out on anyone who has the nerve to come within twenty feet.”
“Okay, okay.” Daniel stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “Jack, thank you.”
“For what? Not interrupting you mid-coitus?”
“Actually coitus means…” Daniel stopped. “Nevermind. But thank you for not making a big deal out of this.”
“It isn’t a big deal, Danny. Now, you choosing the one man on base that has nebulous ties to the NID and a questionable background. That’s a big deal, so go check on Harris while I try to clean up that mess.”
Daniel nodded and headed out the door, closing it softly behind him. Jack glanced at the clock and wondered if he should call Carter. No way would she go home without solving the mystery, and if she had solved it, her first call would have been to him. Deciding to leave her to her work, Jack started the computer and decided to focus on finding Finn and writing up a report for the general. General Hammond was going to be just thrilled, especially since Jack had asked for Harris’ transfer. Yeah, there was plenty of shit rolling down this hill, enough for everyone to get splattered with it.