PG-13. Jack/Daniel, echoes of Sam/Jack UST, angst, apocafic, character deaths. Big spoilers for Lost City. Thanks: Christine, Jojo, Karen, and Michelle.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit.
Jack is still confused and Daniel is still talking, which should mean that all is right with the world. Except that, apparently, all is not right with the world. Apparently, the world kind of no longer exists.
Jack feels about this sort of the way he’d feel about a disaster movie he hasn’t seen yet. He can’t quite picture the special effects.
And as far as he remembers, it’s only been a few days since he stuck his head in that stupid Ancient thing again. It’s been even less since an overly nervous Carter showed up at his door, wanting more than Jack was prepared to give her. He figured that he wouldn’t live to regret that, but apparently he figured wrong. Because he’s alive and Carter is dead, or at least Daniel thinks she’s dead, and Teal’c is God knows where, and Daniel — unshaven, not properly caffeinated, and frankly not smelling so great — is still talking.
Jack has lost almost a year. And, yeah, there were special effects. Apparently.
“Daniel?”
Daniel stops, blinks, like he’s only now remembering he has an audience.
Jack says, “I really need to take a piss.”
Jack figures he’d better take control before Daniel starts to confuse him all over again.
“So,” he says, feeling the beginnings of a headache that he might, in fact, have had for an entire year, “let me get this straight. That thing. That thing over there, that’s been on the planet since before we were even swinging from the trees — that thing was a violation of the Protected Planets Treaty.”
“Artificially advanced beyond our —”
“Right.” Daniel’s annoyance at being interrupted feels like a flashback. “So, no treaty. No Asgard?”
He sighs as if he’s talking to a dull child. “No Asgard, Jack.”
“Whole mess of Goa’uld.”
“Yes, I think they wanted to get us out of their hair before we figured out how to work that thing again. I don’t even know —”
“Yes. You don’t know which Goa’uld. I got that part.” Daniel has said that at least four times. It seems a funny thing to be irritated about, considering. “No mountain?”
“No mountain, Jack.”
“So no Stargate.”
“I told you, it was the first thing they hit.”
“And a whole bunch of other cities.”
Daniel’s eyebrows are getting dangerously close together, and Jack’s headache is getting worse. “Yes, Jack.”
“But you think Teal’c made it out?”
“Well, he was planning to when I talked to Sam. He was going to try to take Cassie. But there were only a couple hours and I don’t think they had time to evacuate … well. I don’t think they had enough time.”
Right. Mountain go boom. Jack got that part, too. He’s trying not to think about it. He also got the part where the SGC’s attention had been diverted from trying to get him out of the ice block to dealing with the collapsed treaty.
“How the hell did you get down here?” he asks.
“We managed to steal a cargo ship.”
“We?” But more importantly, “We have a ship?”
“Um … no.”
Jack is sort of wondering if Daniel put all the pieces of his brain back in right. Engineering was never his specialty. “No ship? What’d you do, crash it?”
“No.” He sounds kind of insulted. What, like he could ever fly? “I — they’d have seen it. They’d have known we were here. We were just lucky they hadn’t stationed a permanent guard.”
And again with the we. “Dammit, Daniel, who the hell are you talking about?”
“What? Oh. Me and Jonas. Jonas was with me in Washington when they showed up — we were trying to negotiate for more naquadriah. He was going to come back a month after he dropped me off.”
It takes a minute for Jack to clue in to the tense involved, and the look on Daniel’s face. “Was going to?” he asks. “How long?”
“I’ve been here for fifteen weeks. It took me that long just to translate —”
“So basically,” and this time Jack’s interruption makes Daniel twitch, “you woke me up so you wouldn’t have to die alone.”
Daniel juts his chin out. “Pretty much,” he says.
Jack says, “Swell.”
Jack tallies their supplies, because Daniel’s not good at that sort of thing. Canned food, MREs, and God knows there’s plenty of ice to melt. (Hasn’t he seen this movie before?) There’s a cookstove and sleeping bags, off in a little alcove Jack hadn’t noticed when they first ringed down. He hadn’t noticed much when they’d first ringed down.
Daniel’s back to translating again. There are writings on the walls here — they’d been hidden under ice, but the SGC teams had discovered them while trying to unthaw Jack almost a year ago.
Jack stands by the weapon he’d once used to wipe out a Goa’uld invasion. “Can’t get this thing to work again, huh?”
“No. I think I’d need Sam for that.” And Jack thinks that Daniel meant for those words to hurt. “But maybe,” Daniel says, “there’s some sort of communication device in here that’s strong enough to reach Teal’c. Teal’c might come for us.”
“Sure,” Jack says. “Sure, Teal’c'll show up. Teal’c, who probably thinks you’re dead and wouldn’t know where to look for you anyway.”
Daniel gives him a “well, duh” look. “Teal’c knows where you were. He might come looking for you.”
Jack thinks this is unlikely, but chooses not to say so. Daniel studies the wall for a minute, looks at one of his notebooks, and studies the wall some more.
“Jack, are you sure you don’t remember any of this?”
“Haven’t we had this conversation before?”
“Yes, Jack. Yes, we have. So great to have you up and around again, did I mention that?”
The tone is sarcastic but it works, wriggling in to Jack’s subconscious. Daniel, after all, has spent the better part of a year thinking Jack was mostly dead, watching the world fall to bits, and losing people one by one.
Jack, on the other hand, is just exceptionally well rested.
“Sorry,” he says.
Daniel nods, but doesn’t turn from the wall. “It’s okay. I didn’t exactly expect you to take the news well.”
Jack looks up. “They still out there?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like — it seemed like they’d decided enslaving us wouldn’t get them far, after what happened the last time. They seemed pretty focused on extermination.”
“Well, who can blame them?”
“If they’re done with that, they might have left, I don’t know.” Daniel looks over his shoulder and fiddles with his flashlight. It’s a very Jack-like gesture. “Jack … most of Eastern Colorado was taken out in the first blast. The satellites were still working then so there was news footage …” He trails off, shrugging a little, and gives Jack a meaningful look. What the look means is: not only are Carter, Hammond, Jonas Quinn, and everybody at the SGC gone, but your ex-wife, too, and your kid’s grave is dust.
Jack doesn’t like that look.
“You know, Daniel, I’m not sure I want to know all this crap.”
Daniel just shrugs again and shines his flashlight back on the wall.
Jack wonders how long the batteries will last.
Jack wakes from a dream of a blonde who might have been Sara and might have been Carter and it’s the fact that he can’t tell the difference that really fucks with his head.
“I know you were in love with her,” Daniel says behind him.
Jack starts. Had he said a name? He doesn’t think he’d said a name. “With whom?” he asks, intending for his tone to shut Daniel up.
“You know exactly who I’m talking about.”
Jack says nothing, but wonders whether “in love” is the right phrase. Loved, yes — he’d loved them all, his whole team. Wanted, definitely. Had the potential to fall in love if he’d ever gotten around to going on a date with her, maybe.
Misses like a lost arm, absolutely. He’d always thought she’d outlive him. Always. He was supposed to be the reckless one.
But this is not the kind of thing he discusses with Daniel. He shrugs and it makes his shoulder dig into the ground. It hurts and it does no good, anyway; Daniel can’t see him.
“We all loved each other, Daniel,” he says finally.
Daniel doesn’t answer.
“How’d she sound?” Jack asks, ignoring the fact that this is a tacit admission that Daniel wasn’t entirely wrong. “When you talked to her?”
“Scared,” Daniel says. “Angry. Really, really pissed off that there was nothing she could do.” There’s a rustling of microfiber and down, like Daniel’s rolling over. “We didn’t think they’d go straight for the gate. We actually thought I’d die first.”
Jack knows he’s reaching. But it’s all suddenly started to seem real, listening to Daniel talk, and he figures a little denial is warranted at this stage. “Maybe she got out,” he says.
“You know she wouldn’t leave.”
Jack does know this. “She would if Hammond ordered her to.”
Daniel’s quiet for a minute. “I hate to think of Sam and Teal’c saying goodbye in the gate room,” he says. “It was supposed to be the four of us back to back at the end, you know?”
Jack knows this, too. “So maybe,” he says, “Teal’c dragged her kicking and screaming up the ramp, and they’ll both show up in a big honkin’ ship to get us out of here.”
Yeah. Denial. Denial’s pretty great.
“Maybe,” Daniel says, “that’s the theory we should work with for a while.”
Jack stares in the direction of the ring platform, which he can’t see at all. “It’s not too likely, is it?”
Daniel says, “No.”
Jack still wonders if Daniel put all the pieces back in right. The last thing he remembers is offing Anubis, and he actually does remember that. He just can’t get his brain around how it’s all gone to hell since. And he’s not sure he wants to.
When he gets tired of pacing and solitaire, and the look Daniel keeps shooting him, he sits on the floor next to Daniel and taps the stack of books. “Maybe I can help you with that,” he says. But he knows miracles don’t come from him. Miracles come from geniuses like the one sitting beside him, and the one who maybe got dragged offworld with Teal’c.
“Thanks,” Daniel says, surprised and maybe a bit suspicious. “Here — start with this. You learned it once before.”
And Jack spends the next hour studying basic grammar without complaint. It’s all written in Daniel’s overeducated scrawl — declensions and conjugations, stems and suffixes. It’s boring as hell, but then Jack was bored before.
“What happened to Sarah?” he asks eventually. “Your Sarah. Osiris.”
Daniel doesn’t look up, but begins to beat out a rhythm with his pencil. “Never made it out of the psych ward at the Academy hospital.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack says, and he genuinely is. He thinks — for the first time in months, well, in over a year, apparently — of the clone. Wonders how he got along in school, whether he ever ran into his (their) ex-wife at the supermarket. Whether he was in the city when the mountain got hit.
Wonders whether any of them saw death coming from the sky.
“I wish I knew if they were still out there,” he says, because it’s an easier question to ask than all the others.
“Well, I can’t exactly help you with that, can I?” Daniel asks. “Can we get back to work now?”
“You know, Daniel, I think maybe hell is an ice chamber filled with Ancient grammar.” He’s trying to joke, but he knows even as he says it that it’s a mistake.
Daniel gets a little red around the ears. “Jesus. You are a piece of work, you know that?”
“Excuse me?” Even though he knows it’s true.
“You have no fucking idea what this last year has been like, Jack. Watching it all, not being able to do a goddamn thing. It would have killed you.”
“You know what? Maybe I’d have been better off not knowing.” And he really means this.
“So I was supposed to just leave you here? So some aliens could unthaw you in 50 million years or so?”
“Oh, you so did not do this for me.”
“No. I did it because one of my best friends was dead and the other was halfway across the galaxy and that just left you, Jack. God help us both.”
Aw, crap. Yeah, big mistake. Jack’s at least smart enough to shut up and ride it out, though he thinks that he probably would have done what Daniel did. If he’d been able to.
“God, you — ” Daniel’s literally shaking with anger. Jack has, in the past, often found this to be amusing, but he’s always known better than to say so. “You have no idea, Jack. I didn’t know — when I came down here, I didn’t even know if you’d still be you. I didn’t know if you’d understand a word I said or if you’d just die anyway or if your brain had turned to jello and fuck you, Jack.”
Jack tries to figure out an appropriate way to apologise without apologising. Eventually he spots the dark pile in the corner. “How much food you figure we’ve got left?” he asks, gesturing with his chin.
Daniel looks at him, works his jaw a little. “Couple months, I guess,” he says. “The extreme survival thing is more your area of expertise.”
“See?” Jack says. “I’m not completely useless.”
Their eyes meet. “Not completely,” Daniel says, and goes back to his book.
Jack stares at a page full of vocabulary, tries to look at Daniel without being caught. Finally he decides to risk it. “You bring a weapon?” he asks. He didn’t see one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hidden somewhere.
“I brought a weapon,” Daniel says quietly.
And Jack knows he’ll have to watch Daniel die first. He’s good at that sort of thing.
Jack thinks of crazy things. He thinks of the smell of his son’s baseball glove, the feel of a pine cone under his bare foot, the way his wife’s eyes looked by firelight. He remembers the taste of a delicacy of tree grubs on P4C-108 (he remembers the numbers) and he remembers a morning spent looking in on his team — one hairless head eating a monumental breakfast, one brown head babbling happily about a new discovery, and one blonde head bent over a pile of wires and circuits. She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t even known he was watching from the door, and he’d stayed a long time.
Melted Antarctic ice has a funny taste. He gets up, checks the perimeter, and gets back to his translating. Daniel doesn’t seem to notice.
“Daniel,” he says, “are you sure you followed the instructions when you unthawed me?”
Daniel tells him to fuck off.
Jack thinks, while staring at a page of Daniel’s scribbling, that maybe he never really woke up. After all, he didn’t see any of the special effects.
And then he thinks of Carter with Teal’c and the Jaffa, or maybe even with her dad, and he thinks that if either of those pictures is true then maybe, maybe, that’s all that matters. Two out of four is probably a better survival rate than they deserved.
He asks Daniel to explain to him, again, what Eastern Colorado looked like. He asks whether they could see the ships.
When he realises he’s going to end his life just the way his kid did — the way Jack himself had intended to when he got recalled and sent through the Stargate the first time — he walks away, finds a dark corner, and bashes his fist into a wall of ice.
Jack lets Daniel splint and bandage his hand. There’s an emergency medkit but the ibuprofen is gone, and it was Carter who was the trained field medic.
“What the hell kind of idiot smashes his hand into a wall on purpose?” Daniel grumbles, gripping Jack’s right wrist possibly tighter than he needs to.
“A pissed off idiot,” Jack says.
Daniel pulls the bandage taut. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Maybe I should have left you.”
“No, that’s not — it’s got nothing to do with you, Daniel.” The words come out sounding cruel and that isn’t how he meant them, not at all.
Daniel stops working. “I do, you know.”
Jack shakes his head. “I’m telling you, Daniel, you didn’t put all the pieces back in right. I can’t follow your logical leaps the way I used to.”
That earns him a bit of a smile. Huh. Surprising.
“What you said — that we all loved each other, all four of us. It was true.”
“I —” Jack shakes his head again. “I — yeah.”
Fuck, his hand hurts. He’d known it would. That was kind of the reason he’d done it. “It wasn’t that I was angry with you, Daniel,” he says.
He tries to tell Daniel why. He fails. The words won’t form.
Jack rechecks the perimeter, retallies the supplies. They’re running low. What they’ve managed to translate seems to be some sort of epic poem about traveling to the land of the dead, which Jack thinks is pretty ironic, considering.
There are no more instructions, no communication system that they can find.
Jack catches Daniel, in the middle of the night, trying to get the cryo-chamber to work again. “Maybe I can put you back,” Daniel says.
“No.” And not only because the thing is now unusable. “Sleep,” he says. And he grabs Daniel’s wrist and heads back to the sleeping bags. He pulls them closer together, lies on his side and wraps his good arm around his friend, and what’s crazy is that this doesn’t seem crazy at all.
“We’re not getting out of here,” Daniel says.
“No.” Jack’s known this for a long time. He’s also known this: “You could’ve taken the ship. You and Jonas. Made it to Kelowna, maybe.”
“It was supposed to be the four of us,” Daniel says, “at the end.”
“Two and two isn’t so far off.”
Daniel takes a few breaths. Jack can feel them. “Jack, she wouldn’t have gone with him. You know she wouldn’t.”
Jack’s quiet for a long time and fuck, his hand hurts. “I know,” he says.
Daniel is silent, and Jack is silent, and then Daniel turns to face Jack. And Daniel’s mouth tastes like the weird Antarctic melted ice and it’s funny, because this is where it sort of started with Carter, too. Whatever the hell it was he had with Carter.
They pull apart, touch their foreheads together, and hey, except for the beards they’ve both got going, kissing a guy isn’t all that different from kissing a girl. Inside the mouth it’s exactly the same.
And Jack still wonders, as their lips meet again and he feels Daniel’s hand moving down his stomach, whether Daniel put all the pieces back in right.
He’s having a hard time picturing the special effects.
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