Archive of Our Own

"Oh shit."

When Jack says that, something has gone very wrong.

Like a clockwork mechanism Sam, Teal'c and I pointed our P90s in the direction Jack was facing.

Our empty mother ship wasn't empty.

"Hello... Daniel," Osiris said.

She looked beautiful, in a horrible kind of I-wish-I-wasn't-seeing-this kind of way. Well, Sarah looked beautiful; Osiris probably looked like the same nasty snake he always looked like, but I couldn't see him. All I could see was Sarah, which was why I didn't fire.

But Sam and Teal'c and Jack did.

Not that it did them any good. Osiris' personal shield deflected the bullets.

Not good.

We'd known it might be a trap. A big juicy mother ship, sitting all unprotected on top of a pyramid on an uninhabited planet. It was old, but I'd bet it would still fly. In fact, I had bet, ten bucks, with Sam.

I'd bet a hundred, now that Osiris is here too. He... or she wouldn't be interested if this thing couldn't still fly.

Hope I get the chance to up my bet.

"Finders keepers!" Jack yelled. "Get off our ship!"

"Insolence," sneered Osiris. "You dare to steal from a god? Jaffa! Kree!"

The jaffa who kree-ed were two, small, and young. Teal'c dealt with one easily; Jack handled the other. Where was Sam? Oh. Backing up to where the rings were. If we could reach them...

I was headed the other way. I was headed for Osiris.

If I could get inside that shield...

"Sir!" Sam called. Jack and Teal'c fell back.

That was when Jack saw where I was. So close... I'd tried to save her, save her twice, and now she was back where I could reach her, touch her...

Not Sarah. Osiris. It was Osiris I was looking at.

Unfortunately, since the rest of SG-1 was now looking at me, Osiris looked at me too. I could have screamed. So close...

She knocked the knife from my hand, brought her other hand up and the weapon hit me dead on.

I flew back and my head made a nasty cracking noise as it hit the wall, I heard it. I couldn't keep myself from letting out a groan as I slid down the wall. I could actually see stars, the white exploding kind.

"DANIEL!" shouted Jack, and he started toward me but Osiris turned her hand weapon on him. He stopped.

I laughed.

Well, that had everyone's attention.

"Better keep that weapon on me, Osiris," I managed to get out. "I'm still your biggest problem." I pushed myself up the wall. I could stand.

That made Osiris frown, but the hand weapon came back to me. Get out, get out, get out, I tried to tell Jack telepathically. Sam, hit the button. Teal'c, hit the button.

But they stayed, three useless weapons trained on Osiris, who had her weapon trained on me.

Why the hell didn't they run?

I walked. Toward Osiris. Between her and them.

I touched the back of my head, hissed a little as my fingers came away sticky with blood. I rubbed it between my fingers, shook my head a little, and laughed again.

I showed my bloody fingers to her.

"Bring back memories? You should know I've been through worse. Lots worse."

Sarah would have been appalled. Osiris was intrigued.

It wasn't an old lover I was looking at. It was a Goa'uld.

I could see her searching through her stolen memories. I took the opportunity to turn my head a little. "Go!" I spat through my teeth at my teammates.

"No!" Jack wasn't even being quiet. "Daniel, get back here!"

I walked the other way.

Toward her.

"Ah," I could see Osiris reaching a realization. "These are memories from my host."

"Right," I said, walking towards her, hands spread as if I wasn't going to wring her neck as soon as I got close enough. I could do it, I thought to myself. Just a little closer...

"You enjoy this," Osiris said, backhanding me across the face.

That one hurt. The handweapon caught and tore across my cheek; the blood was dripping.

"Not really," I managed to grit out through my teeth.

"But you allowed others to do such things to you. For money."

Behind me I heard my teammates go very, very still.

"Yes," and I had to say it softly, hoping the others wouldn't hear.

"This is interesting to me."

"Well, it bores the hell out of me."

"I do not know these expressions... rough trade? Blood sports? My host says that you sold yourself for blood sports for ... money. This requires a rare combination of traits." Osiris raised an eyebrow. "I would like to learn more about you."

"Daniel!" Jack yelled, and he sounded almost frantic. "Get back here! Dammit, that's an order!"

I was so close... Another step and I could... rescue Sarah from her prison...

She raised her weapon again and this time it all happened at once.

I don't know how Jack could have moved so fast. Maybe he'd started while Osiris and I were staring at each other. But suddenly I felt a jerk on my collar and I went flying backwards. In an instant Jack threw me to the floor inside the perimeter of the rings.

"YOU INTERRUPT US!" roared Osiris, and raised her weapon again --

--and hit Jack, who went flying --

--out of the rings, just as Sam hit the controls --

--and we ringed out of there --

--minus our commander.

Without Jack.

---

I saw the rings engage and I would have had a cold, sinking feeling in my stomach except that it was already there.

What the hell had Osiris been talking about?

Daniel selling himself? As... what? Rough trade? What the hell was that? For blood sports? I didn't even know what that meant, but I didn't like the sound of it.

"You are O'Neill." She was advancing on me. Where were her jaffa? The two we'd taken out still lay on the floor; no one else had shown up.

"Well, duh."

"This host has no knowledge of you. Can you explain this idea of rough trade?"

"No, thank God." I pushed myself up using the wall at my back. I still had my P90. It made me feel a little better. "I don't know what Daniel was talking about."

"So you did not know?" She thought about it a while. "Yes, humans will do anything if sufficiently motivated. This has not changed. When he freed me, Daniel Jackson told me that the Tau'ri were now free. This cannot be true. This host has memories of Daniel Jackson after he sold himself in that way. Would a free man allow himself to be so used?"

Osiris smirked at me, and that didn't make me any more cheerful. Oh Daniel, I thought to myself, what did you do?

"I do not believe that there is any real impediment that would prevent me from ruling Earth, as long as the Tau'ri are willing to be ruled. Daniel should not have reminded me how willing they are."

Run, run, run, I thought hard at them. Carter, get them back to the gate. Get out of here.

"You have interfered with a god, and you should be punished. But I may need you more for a different task. My resources are few and I must make do with whatever comes to hand. This ship." She looked me up and down, and her eyes glowed. "You."

"Yeah, you can't find me at just any Home Depot."

I knew they wouldn't leave without me.

And I hated myself for wishing they'd come back.

---

"We don't have a lot of time here," I said, trying not to joggle Sam's elbow, wishing we were ringing right back into that ship and right back out again with Jack.

Jack, why didn't you go?

"Daniel, I have to talk to General Hammond first."

I looked at her. She was rattled. Was she rattled by being left in command, or by what Osiris said?

She looked up, saw me looking at her, couldn't look me in the eyes. What Osiris said, definitely.

"Look, Sam -"

"You don't have to say anything, Daniel. It's none of our business."

I felt a fleeting smile, shook my head. "So you believed what Osiris said?"

She stepped toward me before she could stop herself. Sweet, gentle Sam. She so wanted me to tell her something that would let her look me in the eye again. "Of course not. I wouldn't believe anything a Goa'uld said."

"Yes you did. You believed her." I shrugged. "Because it's true."

Now I was the one who couldn't look her in the eyes. Not pity, Sam. Please don't.

Teal'c came to my rescue. "I do not understand what has occurred, Daniel Jackson," he said in the soft way he had sometimes.

"Sam's upset because she just found out from a Goa'uld that I used to, uh, sell my body for money." I turned towards the jaffa. It was much easier to look him in the eye. "Uh, for other people to, uh, hurt."

"I am familiar with the type of slavery that involves selling your body for money, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said again, still very gently. "This occurs on many worlds, and if I am not mistaken, it is very common on your world too."

"Uh, yeah, Teal'c, it is." Trust Teal'c to make me feel a little less sick to my stomach. "Not usually among people of my education and, uh, apparent class. Especially not this type of work, where you let other people hurt you for their own pleasure."

Teal'c's hand rested, warm and heavy on my shoulder, and suddenly I wanted to cry. "I am extremely glad that you have escaped this form of slavery, Daniel Jackson."

I patted his hand. "Thanks, Teal'c. Me too. It was only for a couple of years, just to get me started in school."

"To get you started in school?" Now Sam's jaw had really dropped. "Daniel, you're one of the most brilliant men in the country, probably the world. You went through school on scholarships."

"What, you think I would lie about this?" She wasn't embarrassing me any more; instead she was kind of pissing me off. "You came from a whitebread middle America family, Sam, not me. I didn't have the grades - for some years I didn't even have grades! Depended on what country I was in, what foster parents I had, whether I could even go to school. I didn't just want to go to college, Sam, I wanted the best. And I got in. But not full scholarship, not right away. And I had to close the gap somehow. Student credit cards couldn't cut it. For - I didn't even have parents to co-sign on a loan!"

Yes, she'd pissed me off. I didn't have to explain anything to her.

They were my bad decisions, not hers.

She'd never been a skinny kid with no one in the world to count on, no skills, and no ideas on how to get any.

And then once I'd started...

She had no idea how much money you could make, and how fast.

"Daniel, don't." Sarah looked pleading.

"It's just one night."

"You don't need to do this any more."

"Sarah, I have to. I got an internship at a dig, don't you understand? I had to argue my way in. They don't even want me, but they'll take me if I can buy a ticket!"

"I'll loan you the money!"

"You have fifteen hundred bucks?"

Tears leaked from her eyes. I knew she didn't have it.

"Besides, I don't have to take money from you. I can earn it."

"Daniel, this isn't earning money! This is... something sick!"

I turned to go. "This is none of your business, Sarah."

"I'm not letting you go!" She wrapped her arms around me, around my waist, clinging to my back, and I could feel her tears soaking into my shirt. I brushed my own away.

"I'm going."

As I reached the door and laid a hand on the doorknob, she shouted at me. "Don't expect me to clean you up! Don't you ask me to nurse you afterwards!"

"Don't worry," and I turned to look at her, beautiful and crying. I knew she was just trying to get to me, but it hurt nonetheless. I wouldn't have asked her. I didn't need her. "I won't ask."

I sighed, taking off my glasses to rub my eyes. The cut on my cheek stung. "Think what you want, Sam."

Her eyes, huge blue saucers, couldn't tear themselves away from me. "Oh no, Daniel, I didn't mean..."

"We've got kind of a problem here, guys," I interrupted. "Jack? On the mother ship? With Osiris?"

"I believe we can rescue him."

Sam and I both turned to Teal'c.

"Osiris' jaffa were young and inexperienced. I believe if she had many more warriors, she would have called them to her aid. She is here to retrieve this mother ship, just as we are."

Sam surveyed the ship thoughtfully. "Yeah. They didn't follow us out here, either."

I felt it necessary to point out the obvious. "Or they could know we won't leave Jack there and they're waiting for us to come back. So they can catch us and kill us all at the same time."

"Perhaps." Teal'c raised an eyebrow at me. "But I believe this is an excellent opportunity for us to eliminate the Go'auld Osiris as well as retrieve this ship, and retrieve Colonel O'Neill in the process."

"Well, I'm all for that," I muttered.

"We will require some assistance from SGC."

"Backup," Sam nodded, even as she dialed the DHD.

"And some devices of Tok'ra manufacture."

People always talk about their brain spinning in a crisis. Mine was clicking like clockwork. Pieces of the future laid themselves together, a self-assembling puzzle, as I could see what would have to happen.

"We can do this without a full-on assault," I told Sam. "I can do this."

Sam paused, her hand over the symbols. "...What?"

"No one has to die. Tell General Hammond that we need backup, but that we can do this ourselves." She narrowed her eyes at me - a very un-Sam-ish expression, and I wondered if it came from the burden of command - but I just kept looking at her.

She was as sick as I was of seeing people killed.

"I won't ask you to trust me, Sam. You know you can."

She looked away, held some sort of conversation with her eyes with Teal'c. Testing the trust levels. Thinking about me. I could see her reach her decision.

I felt the sickness in my stomach lifting a little as the wormhole engaged.

---

My hands were cold. It wasn't because the cell was cold.

Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, I kept thinking to myself. What did you do?

I'd told Osiris I had no idea what he was talking about. Truth was, it wasn't too hard to figure out. And all I had to think about was Daniel as I first met him. He'd been a decent sized guy but he folded in every fight. His first instinct was always to curl up and take it.

And he could take a beating like no one I'd ever seen before.

All I could think about was those eyes, bright blue, soft yet wary, and the way he folded his arms across his chest --

--maybe to protect himself, I thought now.

And the guarded way he'd smiled at me - big mean soldier guy showing up unasked again in his secret desert paradise - and how I'd brushed past him to see Skaara, to hug Skaara.

Not brushed past him, pushed past him.

I had no idea what he'd looked like as I pushed past him. Now, years later, was the first time I'd wondered.

All those years of watching him in the shower, watching him in the infirmary, watching him off base and on all kinds of missions, and I hadn't seen anything, anything that might tell me that what Osiris had said was true. But I knew it was, the minute that she said it. It was so obvious, so clear, once it'd been said out loud.

I thought of how often I had stopped myself from looking at him, figuring he'd be, I dunno, alarmed if he knew that his friend Jack had memorized the sight of every part of him, filed them all carefully away in a locked place in his head that even he didn't think about too often. That I didn't think about too often. Because Daniel gives such an impression of being sweet and gentle and, well, I guess innocent, really, that I didn't want to freak him by giving away for an instant that a guy like me might think he was hot.

Gentle Daniel. Constantly asking me not to shoot people, please, to think before setting off bombs, to bypass the violent option, knowing damn well that the violence was the only thing I was good at.

Sweet Daniel, always healing in the infirmary from something someone had done to him, and never complaining.

Too often in the infirmary, if you asked me. Which he didn't.

My throat closed because I couldn't swallow the lump in it.

Daniel, I called inside my head. What did you do?

The door slid open and Osiris stepped in, flanked by two more junior-league jaffa.

"You may well cry for yourself, O'Neill," Osiris said in her freaky Go'auld voice, which I know perfectly well they use because it sounds unhuman and they do so love trying to unhinge humans. "Your friends have left. The Stargate has been engaged."

Run, run, run, I thought to my teammates in my head.

Help me, I thought too, but that thought I killed ruthlessly.

"You will have little time to mourn their abandonment of you. I have decided. You are to be my king."

"Hey, thanks, but no thanks. I already have a date for the prom. And, y'know, word on the street is that you're nowhere close to being crowned prom queen. Not as popular as you think."

"You should be honored!" She raised a hand and one of the jaffa shot me with a damn zat. I guess the little bastards weren't as dumb as they looked - at least they weren't dumb enough to get close enough for me to eliminate.

"You will rule beside me for generations. You will carry my beloved."

Now I was busy writhing on the floor, fighting off the blast, but I couldn't get my jerking, spasming muscles to obey me before Thing 1 and Thing 2 locked arms under my armpits and hauled me up. "You've been awfully busy since we found you, what with that summit thing we ruined for you and all. When did you find time to date?"

"Hmph." She pulled my chin up, looked into my face. "Not a perfect specimen. But we are in a hurry and he will have to do."

"Hey!" But she didn't stay to talk, and I was running out of witty rejoinders. Shit, my head felt like it was about to explode, and unless I was very wrong, Osiris was about to put a snake in my head - my absolute least favorite way to go, if you're keeping a list, and I wish you would, because I'm busy trying to figure out how to commit suicide before the snake gets all the classified knowledge in my head, and that would probably be my third or fourth least favorite way to go.

I shouldn't have been so snotty with that Russian colonel when he was talking about the cyanide pills they give their soldiers, I thought to myself as they dragged me out the door. There are times when a man needs a way out.

And in the back of my head, I couldn't stop thinking about Daniel. Talk about needing a way out.

Daniel, Daniel, what did you do?

---

"I don't like this plan."

I heard Sam's voice echoing in my head as I crept down the corridor, practically bristling with weapons, looking for Jack.

Thank God that was all she'd said right before I'd ringed back onto the ship.

And yes, there were the jaffa, just like I figured they would be. I managed to take two out with my P90 before I was cut off and they zatted me in the back.

Interesting, I thought as I fell over. They seemed to be under orders to take me alive.

I'd been counting on that.

---

"My queen, this one has returned alone."

They tossed me at Osiris' feet. Amateurs. They hadn't even tied my hands. They didn't have the imagination to do anything but follow orders at this stage.

If they'd worked for Jack, they'd have known better.

They had found all my weapons, though.

Osiris studied me. "Why have you done this?"

"I came for my commander. My friend."

"Alone?"

"My -- The others wouldn't come." I bent my head so she couldn't see my eyes. "They feared you too much."

"As should you." She came towards me then, yanked up my head by my hair. I couldn't stop the tears from gathering but that was okay, I let them, let her see them. "Why do you not?"

"I told you. I don't care if you hurt me."

"I wonder." Still with her fingers in my hair, she pulled me up and threw me against the wall. I heard the hair rip from my scalp. Some habits come back to you in times of stress. Collapse into the wall, don't bounce. Looks better, hurts less.

I collapsed at her feet.

"And of course," Osiris purred, "if I did exceed your limits, I could revive you with the sarcophagus and begin again."

Now that did worry me. I wasn't sure if it would be better or worse for this plan if she had one, but I knew I didn't want to go in it again. I shuddered, let her see it.

"Stand," she commanded me, and I stood back up. I wobbled a little for her - it wasn't all an act, either; that had been a nasty crack on the head I'd had earlier, and hadn't really needed the refresher.

She came up to me, and I remembered how tall Sarah had been. A good height, at least as far as I was concerned.

Now Sa... Osiris could look me in the eye.

But she didn't, which was good for me, because I wasn't ready yet. I was afraid she might see in my eyes how much I hated her, how determined I was to kill her before this was over, and how frightened I was. I needed more before I could reach the place where I could show her the pain and the fear she wanted to see but keep the rest to myself.

"This host has many interesting memories of you," Osiris said into my ear, then bit the earlobe. Not a love bite. She slid her incisors, slicing into the flesh, then licked the cut delicately.

"Such an odd flavor," she said thoughtfully.

"I find it hard to believe it's all that new to you," I said, but kept my eyes down.

"Silence!" she roared, half-deafening me, as close as she was to my ear. Right. Time for that part of the game.

"It will be new for my king, for he is a young Go'auld, and hungry for experience." She waved at the jaffa near the door, and they stepped back, making room for someone to enter -- someone tall and broad-shouldered, even taller than Osiris --

Oh God no.

"Jack!" I screamed and lunged toward him. I wasn't sure whether it was to rescue him or kill him.

Offhandedly Osiris raised a hand and cracked it across my face, another slap hard enough to spin me around. Thank God this wasn't the one with the weapon, otherwise I might scar pretty badly.

Yep, just like riding a bike. Worry about facial scars, and cower.

I dropped to my haunches quickly, knees together, hands together, head down, a protective retreat. It was automatic. When was the last time I'd done this? Oh yes, when Chaka had me tied. Old habits really do die hard.

"Interesting," Jack said, only it wasn't Jack, please let me be hallucinating, but no, it wasn't Jack, it was the double voice of a Goa'uld and when I dared to look up at him, through my eyelashes, I didn't need my glasses to see his eyes flash with yellow light.

Oh no, I thought in the screaming, panicking part of my brain. The rest of my brain still ticked puzzle pieces into place, tick tick tick. Not such a large adjustment to the plan, really.

This was going to be much, much worse than I had thought.

He slid his hand beneath my chin, that big, callused hand I knew so well, and locked it around my jaw, pulling me upright.

His eyes I looked into.

Looking for Jack.

But Jack wasn't there.

They were the same near-black eyes, but the warmth, the spark that was Jack was gone. They were cold and hard. They always say that in books, but I wonder how many of the people who write those books have actually seen cold hard eyes, as flat as unpolished stone and with no hint of humanity in them. I have.

He compressed his lips, and my eyes were drawn to the shape of his cheekbones. Just like my Jack. But not.

I could close my eyes and picture my Jack. My Jack, looking surprised, or angry - at me - or determined. Cracking a terrible joke; locking a loaded magazine.

My Jack looked completely different.

This Jack seemed fascinated by my neck. He shoved my head back - I resisted a little, because otherwise I would have cracked my head again - and bent to fix his mouth at the base of my throat.

He bit me.

I felt the eyeteeth puncture. I didn't move.

"How curious," he said in his Go'auld voice, and it helped that he sounded nothing like Jack.

Because God help me, he smelled like him.

"Look," he said to Osiris, "you can see, here, where his blood pulses just below the skin."

"Ye-es," I managed to say. "But puncture me there, and your fun is over, because I die."

"Hmm," and I could practically hear what he was thinking. If they had a sarcophagus, they wouldn't even worry about it. What's a few murders before dinner?

But if they didn't have one, they'd have to be more careful with me, and that would take some of the fun out of it for them.

I'd have to make it good.

He licked a drop of blood, too, at the base of the neck, and I hissed for him as if it stung even worse than it did.

"I see," and his voice rumbled deep in his chest, a little like Jack's...

Please please, I thought, don't sound like him. Don't.

I can do this if you don't sound like him.

I can.

---

Just like riding a bike, I thought a long while later. I wished I dared to look at my watch.

But I was busy trying not to suffocate from a cock stuffed down my throat.

Relax, I told myself. Don't gag, breath through your nose, keep your teeth covered. God help you if you accidentally snag a pubic hair between your teeth and pull it out.

Or even just yank it.

He was getting close, I could feel it. I sucked harder, closing my eyes so I couldn't see the soft skin of his belly just past my nose.

He had his hands locked on my head, was pushing me closer and closer. He had to be almost there.

Just do it, I thought angrily. My knees hurt.

One of my eyes was half-swollen shut and I was pretty sure I had a broken finger, but overall I was in pretty good shape.

Osiris had a taste for cutting, and blood was crusting over half-a-dozen slices along the sides of my ribs, but she was getting bored with that, whereas this new guy - not Jack - couldn't seem to get enough of getting his dick sucked.

She was going to get more bored soon, I thought to myself and kicked my tongue into play. He moaned.

Come on, goddamit, I thought. My lips were getting dry and his hands wouldn't let me back off enough to lick them but I would have to in a minute.

But just then I felt him tense, Hallelujah, and he started to spurt, thick salty liquid that I could swallow. He moaned, a deep Go'auld echoey moan.

Good, I thought. Don't sound like Jack.

"That... is very pleasurable," he said, fighting for his breath a little.

"Does he please you, my king?" Osiris smiled at him. "I will keep him for you, if you do not tire of him."

Translation: aren't you tired of the whore yet?

But he wasn't, I could tell. Jesus, what a Go'auld must be able to do. Jack was not young any more, but this guy had gotten it up three times already and looked like he wanted to go some more.

"My queen," a jaffa said, appearing at the door. I reminded myself I wasn't embarrassed to be on my knees in front of a Go'auld dick. Why should I be?

"What is it?" Osiris snapped at him.

"Forgive me, my queen, but we have not been able to activate the main drive."

Huh, I thought to myself. Was I about to lose a hundred bucks to Sam?

"I will inspect it myself in a moment," she said impatiently, and the jaffa backed away quickly.

"You will not need my assistance, my love," the other Go'auld said - not Jack, not Jack, just looks like Jack, feels like Jack, smells like Jack - "why do you not go, and I will retire."

Translation: I'm taking the whore to the bedroom, where I can be more comfortable while I fuck him.

"Fine," she sighed, still irritated.

Bingo, I thought to myself. Go, go, go. Leave me alone with him. Unguarded.

She left, fuming, and he led me through a door. Must be where they had been holding him. The sn- the symbiote. Glass jar, bed, not much else. Osiris had apparently fallen on hard times.

He stumbled as he led the way into the room. I was watching his every move, like you have to do.

One of his hands wandered up to his forehead, not steadily. He turned and looked at me. There was a grimace on his face, as if he were the one who was sliced and broken.

I could see his mouth working but he didn't say anything. Couldn't, apparently.

"Jack?" I was quiet, but there were three of us to hear.

I could see him fighting inside his own eyes.

His hands pushed into air, pushed towards me, as if they were pushing me away. The muscles in his throat and jaw jumped convulsively and I wished I knew what he was trying to say to me, though I thought I could guess. Something about running.

He knew me better than that. I didn't do that.

Anything I could say the host would hear. I hoped he could see what I was thinking in my eyes like I could see it in his. I can't leave you like this, Jack, and I won't, I promised him.

What I said was, "Do not fight."

And what I hoped was that someday before I died I would forget the look of disbelieving horror in his eyes as he faded away from himself, leaving me alone with the enemy.

---

He told me to strip before I got into the bed, so I got rid of my pants, which was all I had left, and knelt at the edge of the bed.

He looked at me from every angle. I kept my head down.

"Your beauty is a curious one," he said finally.

Huh? What? Did the Go'auld just say I was pretty?

I didn't even know if I was supposed to respond to that, and if I did respond, I had no idea what to say.

So I kept my mouth shut.

"This host's memories of you do not match your appearance exactly."

Huh? What the hell did that mean?

I had to ask.

"Are you sure the host's eyes are working right?" I asked him.

I kept my head down, but he slapped me anyway, just a little. He was a natural at this.

Of course, he probably had thousands of years of sadism in his genetic memories to draw on.

"This is your most attractive angle," he said, standing behind me, as if he were an art critic at the Louvre. I sighed, but soundlessly.

I knew it was coming.

Again, I just wanted to get it over with.

"Bend," he commanded, and I had to suppress a flash of real fear. This was going to hurt. And, as I already knew, blood made a terrible lubricant.

How could he possibly be hard again already?

But he was. I felt the blunt head pressing between the cheeks of my ass practically before I had my hands braced.

I had to relax, had to...

He pressed inside and shoved home, without warning, and there I was, once again, grunting with pain and trying desperately to relax the muscles that were protesting, the skin that was burning, the whole body that was hunched against the agony of him shoving into me and practically scraping out again.

I could have told him that he wouldn't enjoy it as much without some lubrication himself, but maybe he would. After all, my pain was at least as good for him as his pleasure.

Like I said, he was a natural.

How can I be here like this again, I wondered to myself, and then,

whoosh,

the part of my brain that was me went away and I could be just a sore, grunting animal, doing whatever needed to be done, hoping it would soon be over.

Yep, just like riding a bike.

---

It was taking a lot longer for Osiris to deal with the drive than she must have thought it would. I was hungry, I was thirsty, but those weren't my biggest problems. I had to get past the pain if this was going to work.

Breathe slowly, I told myself. Breathe through your mouth.

Try not to touch any more of you to the bed than you have to, because that always hurts.

"My lord," I said through my split lips, and he raised his head lazily.

I had to work my tongue around in my mouth for a few seconds, working up enough spit to speak.

This guy didn't know me. If I was going to convince him to do anything, it had to be while she was gone.

Of course, Jack knew me. But Jack didn't know me like this. And I was counting on that.

This guy would not have any memories of Jack's seeing me like this, talking like this.

"My lord," I said again, more loudly. "My apologies if I bore you."

"Eh," he said, waving a hand dismissively. Stupid. His imagination seemed to have run out for the moment. Of course, he was limited by a shortage of equipment, but still. Not the smartest snake in the tank.

I slid a hand out, slid my fingertips over his belt where it lay tossed aside on the bed.

Quickly, very quickly, I made a loop, and offered it towards him.

"If my lord wishes to try something new."

"Explain."

I did.

"I am not an idiot," he boomed at me, aiming a kick at my ribs, which I did my best to dodge.

"Indeed not, my lord. If you wish me to try first, I would be more than grateful."

"Hmmm." Whatever else he was, he was not a swift thinker. I could practically hear the gears grind.

"Show me."

I bowed so that my head almost touched the sheets - don't touch them, I'd just bleed on them, after all, and it would hurt - and straightened back up, slowly, because I wasn't feeling all that great with the balance, slid the noose over my own head, and handed the end to him.

And looking him in the eye - because this wouldn't work if he killed me, and I figured by now that if they'd had a sarcophagus they'd have let me die at least once already - so that he would see when my eyes rolled up into my head, I put my life in his hands and took hold of my own cock.

It was hard, and that was the secret of my success. Even through a lot of pain, I could get it up. And I hadn't come once through any of what he'd done, even the stuff that didn't hurt that much. There was enough residual stimulation to make me hard even if I didn't want it.

But now I did.

"Allow me to remind you, my lord," I rasped as the loop slid tighter on my throat, "that unless you have a sarcophagus, you will not be able to revive me if I die."

"And yet, you suggested that I try this," he rumbled at me.

"My lord is a god, and would not die if it killed him." The last part, at least, was true. If he asphyxiated, his symbiote would revive him. I knew that; I'd seen Teal'c's do it often enough.

I was counting on it.

Because he'd be out for at least a minute or two.

He really didn't need to tighten it much. I could feel it cutting off my air, fought the sensation of strangling the way I'd fought the gagging, the clenching.

My only skill, I thought to myself bitterly, was making my body do what it knew it shouldn't do.

The worst that could happen would be that he'd crush my windpipe and kill me.

And that would be okay with me.

Because then I'd never have to look into Sam's eyes, into Teal'c's eyes - into Jack's real eyes - after this.

Sam and Teal'c would come through, I knew they would.

And I prayed they'd find a way to save Jack, or to kill him.

But that was the worst case scenario.

The best case scenario had me coming - and passing out - in a few more seconds.

The combination of hypoxia and orgasm has been fascinating humans since the Marquis de Sade wrote about it. I had a feeling the Goa'uld had been interested in it for a lot longer.

It's not such a great orgasm that it's worth dying for.

But I made it look as good as I could, gasping, and ignoring the way my come shot all over the bed - as if there was anything I could do to prevent it.

And then, with the blood concentrated below my waist and cut off from my brain, my vision tunneled and I blacked out.

---

I came to, it couldn't have been more than a minute later, as he slapped me.

The cuts on my lips really hurt like fire at this point, and I whimpered.

But I steeled myself, and opened my mouth to say --

Oh God, let me die before anyone finds out I said this --

"Thank you, my lord."

The words rasped in my throat and I thought I might throw up for a second, but I fought the urge down ruthlessly. There was nothing in my stomach to vomit anyway.

I looked up at him through my eyelashes - well, through one set of eyelashes, as the other eye was mostly swollen shut - and then down again.

Sam had always said that was one of my cuter looks.

Oh Sam, I thought to myself, and knew if I thought about her one more instant - ONE MORE - I would burst into tears. And this wasn't the moment for that.

Hope that looked good to you, fucker, I thought to myself. Want some?

"This is intriguing," he said, running his hands - familiar, long hands - over the loop I'd made. "I have many memories of other Go'auld using such devices, but never one made so simply. You are ingenious."

"Thank you, my lord. I live to serve." Don't lay it on too thick, Daniel. The real Jack somewhere inside this guy's head might give you away if you sound too bizarre to him.

Like I wouldn't have already.

Fortunately, he figured he'd be more comfortable if I washed him first - I set up a silent prayer of thanks for that, even though I couldn't manage to sneak a drink of the water first, because I didn't know if even I could have managed to put my mouth on that thing the way it was after he'd--

And then the stupid idiot put his head in the noose and his dick in my mouth.

He didn't seem to be that into it - I think I'd appealed more to his curiosity than his lust at this point, even he had to be less excited about more orgasms after almost half a dozen - but I gave it whatever I was still worth, until I could feel him relaxing, his attention not on me but on himself, the sensations his dick was causing in him.

And I gently, gently increased the pressure...

It took a while.

As he started to shudder, just about to come again, I slipped it just a little tighter, and felt him shake...

And then I pulled that damn loop tight.

Not too tight! part of my brain screamed at me, because I didn't want to actually crush Jack's windpipe. But most of my brain had long ago forgotten that this body, the source of all my agony, had anything to do with Jack. It didn't even look like Jack to me any more.

Not too tight, not too tight.

But he WAS out.

So that I could slip the noose off his neck, and use it to tie his hands.

I let the strap cut into his hands.

Quick as lightning, I was up off the bed, finding pieces of bedding to twist into another rope for his feet. I didn't have much time.

I slid my hand under the bench against the far wall --

Nothing.

I didn't scream, didn't scream, didn't scream. Try the other bench.

Slid my hand underneath -

Bingo.

A zat, a P90, and a knife were duct-taped underneath.

I had never felt anything so wonderful in my whole life. I almost cried as I pulled each one free, pulled off the tape, feeling the hard, wonderful weapons that Teal'c and Sam had put there for me, feeling the future in my hands...

And just as I was pulling the zat free, I heard her coming.

"My love?" said Osiris, her voice echoing in the metal passageway. "I have come to join you..."

Yes yes yes, I thought to myself, gritting my teeth. If you're going to come in, come in naked. I put down the zat and hoisted the P90. It felt more satisfying in my hands.

And yesssss, there she was. Naked...

She must have been so damn sure I was a real slave, the kind you turn your back on.

Bitch was so wrong.

I sprayed her with bullets before she even cleared the doorway.

But the damn shield was in place, flashing gold around her, batting the bullets away.

Guess she hadn't been so sure of me after all.

I picked up the zat in my left hand and the knife in my right and went for her.

I don't know what I looked like, but she backed up a step, then another, as I advanced. She didn't want to turn and run.

She should have.

Firing the zat to keep her immobilized as I moved, I was right next to her in seconds,

and that knife went right through the shield, nice, slow knife,

and into her gut, just the way Jack had showed me in practice.

Jack hadn't mentioned how odd it would feel to slide the hard steel into the skin and muscles of another human being.

She let out a noise - not quite a scream - and a couple of the baby jaffa followed her in, but they had even less chance. On a normal day I would have just zatted them once, hoped that when they came to they'd learn the error of their ways and revolt against the Go'auld the way Teal'c had.

Today I zatted them three times and admired the cleanliness of their disintegration.

When I looked again at the bed, he was awake, and looking at me.

I went and got the P90, trading it for both zat and knife. It fit nicely in my hands. I realized, for the first time, why Jack was always cradling his.

"Release me at once," the stupid fucker said, and I almost shot him just for being so damn stupid.

"There aren't enough words to convey the... No fucking way," I told him as snottily as I could manage.

I slid my hand under the bench again. There was a canopic jar taped under there too.

I lifted it so he could see it. "You know what this is?" I asked him. "It's in your snakey memories. Just look for it."

He nodded, once, keeping his eyes on me. He didn't look defeated, just a little wary.

Stupid fucker didn't know when he was finished.

"You will leave the body you are in, and enter this jar at once," I told him. "If you do, I will leave you here in suspended animation. Another Goa'uld will undoubtedly come, trying to salvage this ship as Osiris did. They will most likely let you out. This is your only chance for survival. Otherwise I will kill you now."

He narrowed his dark, dark eyes. "You would not. This host is your friend."

"And that one was once my lover," I said, my voice absolutely icy as I gestured toward Osiris lying on the floor, groaning. "You know this to be true. I would not hesitate to kill the abomination who has taken over my friend's body, especially if it was the only way to free him. But if you leave him alive, now, I will do as I say and leave you in this jar."

I could see him glance at Osiris, then at me. Calculating. He wasn't very bright, even for a Go'auld, but he better see the light, and soon, because I was going to lose it, big time. I clenched the gun till my knuckles were white. I couldn't let him see it shake.

"That host knows me. You know I mean exactly what I say. And that I will keep my word."

He seemed to be considering.

"This... is... your...last... chance..." I hissed at him, placing the jar on the bed near him, and open.

He looked into my eyes for a moment.

I don't know what he saw there.

But suddenly, Jack screamed.

The cords of his neck stood out, and he screamed again, pulling at the ties, cutting his wrists and ankles.

The snake exited through the raw wound he'd made at the back of the neck getting in.

It flew at the jar, the horrible way they do, and slid inside.

I fastened the lid on tight, carried it carefully into the hallway.

I set it on the floor against the far wall.

I pulled the trigger on the P90 and pulverized it. I mean, reduced it to dust and a slight slime of snake. No pieces larger than a few molecules remained. I let the bullets keep pouring in for a while, satisfied with the way the smear kept spreading, until one ricocheted toward the door and I stopped, afraid of hitting Jack.

I went back toward the bedroom.

And I suddenly had a wish, a great wish, not to go back into that room naked.

But my pants were in there.

I had to wander a bit back to the ring room. There was my jacket, in a heap on the floor. I was surprised at how clean it looked.

I didn't put it on. I wanted my pants. But I didn't want to go in there for them.

My radio was near the jacket, with my vest. I pulled it toward my face, pushed the button. It seemed like a very odd thing to do, like a thing I had once done in some other life eons ago, that had nothing to do with here and now. But I did it.

"Sam? Teal'c?"

"We have eliminated most of the rest of the jaffa, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c's deep voice came through.

Daniel Jackson? Was that my name? Oh yes. I remembered now.

"The last of them are trapped in the passageway outside the drive room," Sam chimed in.

"So Sam, who wins the bet? Will it fly?"

"Sorry, Daniel. I don't know what's wrong, not even enough to try to fix it. Maybe with a team of specialists. We could come back for it, try again, with a lot more time and fewer jaffa hanging around."

Huh. So I had lost my hundred bucks after all.

"Osiris?" Sam asked.

"I hope she's dead." I would have to go back into the room to check.

I couldn't make myself do it.

"We will join you immediately," Teal'c said.

"Yeah. I'll be here."

I had to go in there, see if Jack was still alive, if he was conscious, if he was bleeding to death, if Osiris was already dead. I had to. It had to be done.

That was my skill, I reminded myself. Making my body do what it should not do.

I got as far as the door outside.

I couldn't make myself go in.

I sat down instead. Wrapped my arms around my knees. I felt cold.

Teal'c and Sam found me there. I guess I must have looked pretty bad. Sam let out a sort of a strangled scream when she saw me.

"I'm fine," I told her, in the same voice I had used over the radio. I hoped I sounded something like myself. "Go check on Jack." I could hear my voice, dry and bruised, sounding huskier than usual. "Please come back and tell me if he's dead."

She looked funny, really funny, like she might throw up. Teal'c went into the room.

He carried Jack out, like a baby doll in his arms, and set him on the floor next to me.

"He is indeed alive, Daniel Jackson."

"Oh good." I could feel the tears threaten to swamp over me. He looked just like he should look, like Jack, even in ridiculous Go'auld gear and blood streaked across his back and on his wrists where, oh no, the strap had cut him. I couldn't see his eyes, and I wouldn't be sure until I saw them. But I could pretty much tell. It seemed like Jack to me.

"Osiris, however, is not in that room."

Well hell, I thought to myself.

"We should ring out of here," I rasped.

"Let me help you," Sam said.

She reached for me, but I could see her having trouble deciding where to grasp me without touching some spot that was bruised or bleeding.

"Just give me a second," I told her, intending to take a few deep breaths and get up under my own power.

Instead, I passed out.

---

Daniel was in the infirmary longer than I was.

I could go in there as long as he was out of it. He'd had a concussion, and that had made it a little dicey for a while, but eventually Frasier had put him on some decent pain medication, just for fun. From the bruising, big and blue and black and spectacular, I would have sworn he'd had a cracked rib, but apparently not. He had a broken finger along with the crack in his skull, but no serious wounds.

No serious wounds. What a joke.

He'd been weakened, too, by the blood loss, which again the doc described in the chart as "not serious".

The guy had been covered in his own blood.

When was blood loss serious? When you've lost some large fraction of the volume of fluid in your circulatory system? Or when you could feel it and smell it all over yourself?

He'd gotten some stitches, a couple of places on his sides, and some butterfly stitches on his face. When he came to for a minute, those were the ones he was worried about.

He'd explored the deepest cut a little with his fingers before the doc pushed his hands away so she could dress it. "Don't let it scar," he'd said to Janet in a raspy dry voice before he drifted off to sleep again, courtesy of drugs.

He hadn't mentioned the stitches in his rectum; maybe he didn't even know they were there.

But he was busy worrying about scars on his face.

As if a scar could change the way he looked.

All the same, it was only about two days before he was fully conscious.

I didn't let him see me.

I'd been behind the gurney, sitting in a chair, when a nurse came in with a basin and motored his bed flat to wash his hair. I knew he was awake and that he didn't know I was there. His eyes were closed, he looked peaceful.

She rinsed his hair first, her fingers moving very slowly, very carefully around his scalp, avoiding the dressing where he'd whacked his head the worst.

"Is the water warm enough?" she'd half-whispered to him. I didn't even know her name but at that moment I wanted to give her everything I owned.

"Yes, it's fine," he sighed, still not moving his head.

She poured a little more over the top of his head, and with a small, fine comb, she combed tiny flecks of dried blood out of his hair.

Where it had pulled out of his scalp. I hadn't seen that part.

After that I couldn't go in there any more.

---

When I handed my resignation to Hammond he didn't even look surprised.

"Jack," he said in his quiet this-is-not-the-General, this-is-George voice. "I think you need more time before you make this decision."

"I don't, sir." I couldn't even look him in the eye. He had my mission report. It had vague euphemisms scattered in it here and there and I'd used the word "torture" instead of the word I should have used, "rape". But I couldn't even face that word myself, and I couldn't face putting it on paper, couldn't face having General Hammond read it, couldn't face having it in the files. Government files last forever.

Daniel didn't deserve that.

"What are you going to do with yourself? You know we need you here."

I just shook my head, staring at the floor. "I can't help anyone any more, General. Least of all..." I had to swallow for a second, "SG-1."

"Colonel." I had to look up at him then. He was giving me the General tone but still the George face. "I could order you into psychiatric evaluation."

"I don't think so, sir. Witness the resignation you're holding."

"We both know I could. You've been on too many classified missions to just release you to the general public if you're in any way compromised or might compromise the safety of this facility." His voice got gentler again. "Don't make me do this, Jack. Come in and talk to someone yourself. Mackenzie. Anyone you want."

"I'm sorry to let you down, sir. But I'm heading home."

"Jack." He was looking closely into my eyes, and I knew what he was thinking. Something tipped him off. He didn't want me to go home and eat a bullet, that's what he really didn't want. I wasn't considering it, but I could see that's what worried him as he said, "Leave your weapon here."

I didn't think I was considering it.

"That's not really necessary, is it, George? We both know that if I'm determined to do something, I do it, isn't that right?" I tried to put a note of my old bravado into it but I couldn't make it stick. My voice cracked at the end, and I unholstered my handgun, laid it on the table.

I had to get out of this mountain as fast as I could. It didn't matter how I did it.

---

It was only a couple of days before he showed up on my doorstep.

As soon as he knocked, I knew who it was - don't ask me how I knew. I couldn't decide whether or not to open the door.

I don't know how long he waited out there, waiting for me to decide.

"Jack," he called through the door. "You might as well let me in, because I'm not leaving until you do."

I wished I had time for a shot of whisky.

I went to the door and laid my hand on it. I leaned forward till my forehead was resting on it, too.

It was so solid and real, it reminded me that I wasn't just imagining this, as I'd imagined it so many times... before.

No, it was real.

"Jack," he called, softer this time, as if he too could sense I was just on the other side of the door.

I opened it.

There he was.

He had a soft sweater on - probably the better to provide breathing room for his bandages, I thought, and winced - and baggy jeans, probably for the same reason.

He had his glasses back.

I suddenly realized he hadn't had them the whole time... during.

I wondered where they'd been.

I wondered why I hadn't noticed.

And he was looking at me.

So I looked at him.

And he had to look away.

"Hello, Jack," he said to my doorjamb. "May I come in, please?"

I didn't say anything, just left the door open and walked back to the living room where I could sit down and drink beer and my knees wouldn't shake so much.

He followed me in there.

And he stayed standing, hands stuffed into his pockets, looking down and around and anywhere but me.

I couldn't take my eyes off him.

His lips weren't so swollen any more - at least, they looked more like Daniel's usual lips. The cuts across them were closed and dry - that was good - as was the one over his eye.

The butterfly stitches on his left cheek were starting to peel.

And even though I couldn't see into them, I knew his eyes were still the same shade of blue, but one of them was bruised and still a little puffy.

He kept his eyes on the floor, and I realized how many times I'd seen him standing like that, his hands in his pockets. And yet I hadn't known him at all.

"I sure wish you'd say something first, Jack," he said, his voice a little husky.

I wanted to ask him if he sounded that way because his throat was still sore, but I couldn't.

"Okay, then I'll say what I came to say. General Hammond told me about your resignation. I mean, he told all of us, actually. But I... we all want you back at the SGC, Jack. You belong there." He raised a hand, scratched behind one ear, and looked out the window behind me. "I'm the one who, uh, doesn't belong. So I... I thought you should know I've requested a transfer to the Pentagon. I can do a lot of my work from there, and... the General asked me to do some consulting work, and I told him I'd, ah, I'd be happy to come and consult with any of the teams when..." He couldn't seem to figure out where to look now, "... as long as SG-1 is in the field."

I dropped my eyes to where my fingers were peeling the label from the beer bottle in my hands.

"So you, uh... you won't have to..." he turned and moved toward the door, but I heard the last words under his breath, "...you won't have to look at me again."

Oh God.

What I used to think when I looked at him. And how much would I give if I could look at him now without seeing what I saw.

The pain stabbed me in the gut like a sucker punch with a blade hidden in it. I couldn't catch my breath.

It hurt, but not nearly enough.

I just sat there, frozen, unable to say anything to him to make it better, because what was there to say? What was there that could possibly make it better?

And I don't know what he thought, or if he looked at me again, but he moved, and he left, slowly, as if waiting for me to say something.

But what could I say?

The beer bottle thudded on the floor but I wasn't paying attention to it any more.

I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes but I couldn't stop the tears from dropping onto my shirt, couldn't stop the horrible wet gasping noises I made as I tried to draw another breath.

And he hadn't gone far enough. He heard me.

I'd thought he'd gone, but apparently I wasn't paying close enough attention, because Daniel is not that stealthy. He hadn't gone far enough.

And just like that, he was next to me, kneeling on the floor, his arm draped around my shoulders, the other hand patting my knee.

"Don't, don't," I choked out, but I couldn't stop, and now the sobs were really twisting me, thumping me in the chest, and my hands were covered with tears and snot and I couldn't stop.

Somehow he was leaning into the chair, and pulled me across his chest into his arms, holding me, rocking me, his lips next to my ear as he whispered "Shh, shh," and rocked me. If I could have relaxed into his arms, it would have been straight out of one of my old fantasies, with his warm body against mine and his lips...

He was kissing me on the temple, and murmuring "Shh, shh," all the while, rocking me as if I were the one who was hurt, as if I needed...

"It's okay, Jack," he breathed into my ear. "It'll be all right. Don't cry. I'm so sor--"

"Don't you dare apologize to me," I growled, and I felt him jump.

I would have been perfectly happy to stay there in those arms, maybe for an eternity or two, but I couldn't stand it. I sat up. But I looked him in the eye so he could see my face. "Don't you dare, don't you DARE apologize to me."

He was puzzled, I could see that from the telltale chevrony frown between his eyebrows, but he raised his hands, backed up an inch or two. "Okay. Okay."

"I should be -- no, I shouldn't apologize to you, either, how can I apologize for - You should be - you should shoot me in the head right now. If I had a gun on me I'd make you do it." That really seemed to rattle him but now I was furious, and that felt better, so much better than the choking horrible sadness. I was glad to be furious.

"In fact," I went on, as I jumped up to leave him sitting on the floor, "why didn't you shoot me? WHY DIDN'T YOU SHOOT ME?"

He sighed as he rocked himself back on his heels, and I realized his stitches must be hurting him when he put out his hand.

For me to help him up.

Oh God.

I pulled him back up to his feet but then I couldn't help touching him, checking his wounds through the sweater, touching the stitches on his face, making sure nothing had pulled, nothing was bleeding. And all the time I kept asking him, "Why, why didn't you shoot me? You should have shot me. Why didn't you shoot me?"

"Jack, I had no intention of shooting you. I wanted to get you back."

"You could have zatted me."

"And you would have let me get to the zat? You're faster than me, Jack."

"Then Teal'c or Sam --"

"They were occupied elsewhere with the jaffa."

"Leaving you to deal with two Goa'uld."

"We'd thought there was just one."

"One with superior weapons."

"One whose guard might be down because the host knew me." Daniel made an annoyed noise. "With two... I needed an opportunity to immobilize you, one that would convince the Goa'uld that I would kill him if he didn't do as I said."

"Even at the cost of your life?"

"I didn't die."

"But you might've." I flashed back to the way he handed the noose over - to me, I saw it behind my eyes as if it had been to me, but it hadn't been, it had been to -- "He could've killed you as soon as looked at you."

"I didn't think he would."

"You didn't know that."

"I've had some practice... judging these things."

That made me back up a step, and he sighed again.

"Isn't that what you're really angry at me about, Jack? Not that I did the wrong thing, but that you can't believe what I did, can't believe that I'd... done it before."

"Had you really done that before?" That wasn't me asking that, was it? I didn't want to know.

"Well, not quite that bad, but essentially..." He shrugged.

"Had you completely lost your freaking mind?"

"I don't think so. I mean... Well, I'm not sure. Look, I'm not like that any more, okay? I mean, I don't do that. Well, of course I don't do that, I don't need to do that. But I'm --" His hands curled up into fists and he shook them around in the air, he couldn't figure out what to do with them, "Look, it was a long time ago and it's none of your business and I don't do that, any more, okay, I don't. I was never -- I'm not into that sort of thing, not for fun. It was just the money, and I needed the money, and maybe it was a poor choice but it worked out, okay? And who's to say if I would even be as useful to you if I hadn't -- I had a whole academic career that I wouldn't have had if I'd -- Hell, SGC wouldn't even need me if I hadn't -- I mean, who better than me to understand that people do -- Look, I cut my hair. I wouldn't ever do that any more."

I couldn't make heads or tails out of what he was saying, so I asked the last question first. "What do you mean you cut your hair?"

"I cut my hair, my hair is short. I realized I'd been keeping it long out of habit."

"What habit?"

"Long hair works better for the job, it gives them something to, uh, hold on to," he said, again not meeting my eyes, his hands waving in the air around his head as if to indicate the missing phantom hair.

"Jesus Christ."

"Well, I don't know if that's why he had long hair, but that's why I had mine," he said, losing patience.

"And it was a shitty plan! I can't believe Carter let you -- why didn't she stop you?"

"We were in a hurry! And she wanted you back as much as I did!" Then he looked at me, and the piercing blue of his eyes seemed to tremble for a second before he looked at the floor again. "We didn't have a lot of options."

"Where were your glasses?"

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me! WHERE WERE YOUR FUCKING GLASSES?"

He didn't say anything. And I knew.

"So you wouldn't ever do that any more. Except to rescue me. That's why you didn't wear your glasses. You decided what you were going to do and you didn't want to get them broken. You planned to -- I knew it, I knew something was wrong when we let you go to that summit meeting, I didn't like it from the start. You were too comfortable with the whole plan, too comfortable with the idea that they might catch you and --" I tossed up my arms, just realizing for the first time exactly what was behind all the times he'd taken what was, in my estimation, an unnecessary risk.

"That's why you don't fucking run, isn't it?"

He turned back toward the door, but this time I wouldn't let him go. I couldn't touch him, but I could plant myself right in front of him, making it difficult for him to run away through six foot two of solid colonel.

"That's why you always put yourself in danger, isn't it? You don't care what happens to you. Maybe you never did."

Then he looked at me again, with the puzzled crink back between his brows, and searched my eyes as if there were answers in there he couldn't find on his own.

"I don't think that's... true, Jack," but he didn't sound convincing, and I don't think he convinced himself.

"I think it is. Holy Mother of God. If you cared about yourself half as much as we care about you, a tenth as much as I -" I choked on it, but I had to say it, "as I care about you, Jesus, you'd never do it again."

"But don't you see," he said with sudden animation, as if he were explaining some Egyptian cuneiform to me and it was vitally important that I understand it, "it's not really me you're thinking of. It's some... version of me, some... part of me that I can show to people, not the whole... of me."

"Yes, it is. It's you we care about. It's you I care about. All of you, the all of you that will be dead if you -- Dammit, you're such a fucking idiot I don't know whether to --" Kick you or kiss you, i thought to myself, but I couldn't say that. My hand was shaking but I laid it against his unstitched cheek, my thumb just gliding over the skin, over a bruise that was healing, but still showed all too dark, blue against his light skin.

His mouth opened and his eyes closed and I could feel my heart skipping several beats. Such beautiful eyes, such a beautiful mouth, and all covered with bruises and cuts. Because of me.

"I wish you hadn't done it, Daniel." I hadn't meant to sound so hoarse but I couldn't help it. "I wish you'd shot me instead."

At that his eyes flew open. "Don't say that," he pleaded, in that soft, husky tone I'd only heard a couple of times before in my life. "Say my name. That's the first time you've said my name since -- since. Say it again. Please." He laughed, a sad little laugh. "You don't have to say the rest of it, about how I'm a fucking idiot, just say --"

"Daniel." I let it roll off my tongue, the way I did sometimes when I was alone and caught myself daydreaming about the curve of his neck or the shape of his hands, the way I, embarrassed, interrupted myself. "Daniel," I said again, and his eyes closed and this time when he sighed it was as though I'd given him a pearl of very great price. "Daniel," I told him, wishing he understood the language I was trying to speak.

"Mmmm," he said, and I felt the vibration through the hand I'd laid on his cheek, on his jaw. "If you could hear the way that sounded to me..." He covered my hand with his, and when he rubbed his cheek against my hand, I felt my heart start again - this time, hammering in my chest.

He still didn't have the sense to keep me from touching him.

Those eyes looked up at me again - and he smiled, for the first time, just a little smile, a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and I thought to myself, how can anyone, anyone possibly be so beautiful? "I never wanted you to see that part of me. I didn't mean for you to... I'm sorry that I couldn't think of anything else to do."

"Don't. Don't apologize." I let my hand fall away before it curled into a fist. "Don't."

He still didn't get why that pissed me off. "I won't, I didn't mean to - I mean - I'm sorry if I -"

"DON'T APOLOGIZE! I MEAN IT! DON'T!" I grabbed him by the sweater, feeling it stretch in my hands, and gathered it almost around his throat. I could kill him in just half a minute, I thought wildly, and he'll never know, he'll never have to know --

"Jack! What the hell!" He put his hands over mine, tried to pull mine off but I had them clenched in an absolutely granite grip and tightened my hold. There was a flash in his gentle blue eyes of genuine fear, and I felt so suddenly, horribly sick to my stomach I almost shoved him away from me as I let go, the crumpled sweater falling back against his chest.

"Don't you know I can't stop thinking about --" I couldn't look at him any more, I had to confess, but I would confess to the wall because I am a coward, a stinking coward. I pounded both fists into the wall, leaned on them to hold me up so I wouldn't even be tempted to try to look at him.

No, yes, I was going to look at him. And not confess.

"This is where it ends, Daniel," I told him, growling again as I turned back and I meant to put one hand against his face again, that's all I meant to do, but I reached for him and he didn't flinch away because he's so stupid, so stupid, he leaned into my hand, and though I'd thought I was furious with him before it was nothing compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud of fury I could feel rising in my chest right now because he trusted me, so I put up the other hand and held his head between them as if I could crack his skull in two if he didn't pay attention to me.

"This is where it stops. RIGHT here, RIGHT now. How many times have I tried to let you make your own decisions, pretended you could -- Well, no more. No more beaming on to enemy ships I am trying to blow up, no more running off into alternate universes, no more waiting till the last second to go through the Stargate when I order you to leave a planet - NO MORE. That's IT. Do you HEAR me?"

I shook him a little, and his hands came up over mine, but he didn't fight to get away.

"No more of this! No more just standing there taking it! Fight back, dammit! Fight me, if you have to! Don't you ever again --"

Don't let anyone hurt you, I wanted to say. Least of all me.

Hell, there were a million things I didn't ever want him to do again. I couldn't even list them all, but I was sure I didn't want him to do them.

"I can't promise that, Jack," he said, and his voice was low and gentle and husky as if we were having a candlelight dinner, as if I wasn't leaving yet more handprints on his face.

"You're going to, by God, or I'll --"

His eyes searched mine. "Or you'll what? Yell at me? Shoot me?" His voice got a little deeper. "Hit me?"

I let go of him as if his skin had burned me, stood there shaking, realizing what I'd just been doing, how close it was to --

"Jack." He was reading me as intently as if I were an ancient text, a carved tablet on his dissecting table. And once again, God damn him, instead of running away, he stepped closer. "Jack," he whispered, "do you really want to hit me?"

Oh no.

I had to run, feeling like I wouldn't make it, sliding into the bathroom just in time, thank God I always left the seat up. I didn't think I'd had much in my stomach but it took me for ever to throw up, and then I just knelt there by the toilet, feeling my face cold and clammy and my hands shaking as I pressed them to my forehead, trying to get my guts to go back to their regular jobs.

And of course, he'd followed me, grabbed a washcloth from the shower and run it under warm water. He wiped off my face before I could stop him, handed me a cup of water from the sink.

There was nothing I could do to get away from him.

He was going to follow me to the grave.

Over this. In here. Today. Why couldn't I always trust him to stick so close?

Might as well tell him the truth, so he'd realize why I was the one who had to go.

"No," I gasped when I caught my breath again. I took the cup of water and rinsed the sour taste out of my mouth, spit into the toilet. He flushed it.

Nothing in the world tastes as clean and simple as Colorado water. I drank some of it down. Couldn't postpone standing forever.

"No," I said again when I'd managed to lever myself upright between the toilet and the sink. I couldn't look at him, but I had to tell him. "I don't want to hit you, Daniel. Oh, I've considered giving you a good whack upside the head from time to time, but I don't want to hit you. I've never wanted to hit you. And now my head is full of pictures of --"

Daniel's lips, dry and bleeding, sinking down over my cock while I held so tight to his hair that he couldn't have moved.

Daniel's back, a smooth curve bent away from me while I scraped myself into his body, my fingernails digging into his hips.

Daniel's beautiful blue eyes - one bruised and almost swollen shut, but I could still see that magic blue iris - rolling up in his head as he passed out, suffocating from the noose I held in my hand even as his come shot all over the bed.

I could never describe those so that he would know just how horrible they were to me, and I couldn't try.

"--me hurting you."

He nodded as if he understood. "But it wasn't you, Jack. I know that."

"Me hurting you, and..." Holy mother of God, I couldn't say, I couldn't. But he wouldn't stop till he understood. He never did. That much hadn't changed about him. "Me hurting you," I ground out between my teeth, in a voice that was as much strangled animal as strangled man,

"...and getting off on it."

He didn't hear me, didn't get it, didn't see how much it cost me to say it. He was shaking his head. "Didn't happen --"

"I remember seeing it with my own eyes, feeling it with my own skin." Coming with my own cock, even when I couldn't bear to --

"Not you, Jack."

"The hell it wasn't. Look!"

With just a push to the shoulder he was facing the mirror, the big five-foot mirror over the sink. He could see me now, standing behind him, looming behind his shoulder, and his brow crinked again as he looked at me looking grimly at him.

"Look at yourself, Daniel. One of the sets of teethmarks on your lips is mine."

He was still looking at me. I put my hands out, slid them under the sweater so I could pull it off him without catching on any of the bandages.

"LOOK!"

I practically yelled in his ear as I showed him how my hand fitted the pattern of fingernail marks on one of his upper arms.

"My fingernails, Daniel. I probably still have your blood underneath my fingernails."

Now my hands were shaking as I skimmed them over the bruise on his side, the bruised rib that corresponded with my shin, the way I'd been taught how to kick in training.

Along his jaw there was a pattern of three small oval bruises.

I brushed his jawline with the knuckles of my closed fist. The shape wasn't right, because I was behind him, raising my left fist instead of in front of him hitting him with my right. But the spacing was correct. The bruises were spaced just like the knuckles of... "My fist."

But he didn't move, didn't even jump, until he felt one of my tears splashing on the bare skin of his shoulder.

And then he just kept looking at me, my reflection in the mirror.

"Look at you, Daniel," I murmured, and pointed in the mirror. "Look at yourself."

He did, and looked just as puzzled.

Before I even thought about what I was going to say next I'd let it out. "I'd loved looking at you so much."

"I'm --" He must have been going to say he was sorry, because he stopped himself at the glare in my eyes. Instead he said, his tone just as curious as his expression, "What do you see when you look at me?"

Perfection, carved out of milk, I thought to myself.

Impossible brilliance, impossible sweetness.

Impossibleness.

Anything I could tell him would be too simple.

I cleared my throat. And he leaned back against me, and all that once-smooth skin, interrupted with bandages, bruises and stitches, was suddenly against my chest, burning through my shirt.

Still trusting me.

Melting my anger away.

I'd needed that anger.

"If you could see what I see, Daniel," I rasped, "you wouldn't do the things you do."

"Huh." His eyes narrowed, looking straight into mine in the mirror. I didn't think I could look him in the eye face to face, but this way, standing behind him, I could look into his mirror eyes.

"And what about you, Jack? Can you see yourself in the mirror?"

I shook my head.

"Look."

So I did, because it was only fair, but I just saw me - me, gray bristles starting to show where I needed a shave, dark eyes with red rims, face flushed, hair standing up all over the place, dark and silver gray hair.

"If you could see what I see," Daniel half-whispered, and I looked back into his mirror eyes, "you wouldn't ask me not to do them."

That made no sense at all, but I couldn't get my anger back, didn't really want it.

This was better, just standing here, too tired to be angry, with a Daniel too stupid to run away from me leaning back against my chest.

I sighed, after a while - I don't know how long a while - and he leaned his head back too, closing his eyes as he rested his head back on my shoulder. I wanted to touch him, but anywhere I touched him would hurt him.

"You're not hurting me," he said as if he was reading my mind.

I looked into the mirror again, but his eyes were closed, his head back against my shoulder, his long throat exposed and so very much like I had always imagined it in my fantasies, I couldn't help myself.

I wanted to touch him.

He already knew it.

Why not admit it to myself?

Looking down at the hollows and surfaces of his neck, his shoulder, I could see exactly the view I'd seen before, when someone else was looking through my eyes.

Which was why I shouldn't look.

But I couldn't help myself.

That's the problem, I told myself bitterly, that I can never seem to help myself when it comes to looking at this.

But this moment was no different.

"Jack, it won't hurt me if you -"

I looked in the mirror again and he was watching me, his eyes narrow slits of sky blue, watching me through his eyelashes, through his glasses.

I nodded.

And kissed the base of that perfect throat, where it joined those broad, smooth shoulders.

He made a noise - a soft, quiet, urgent, sweet, dirty noise I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams - and tilted his head a little.

Towards the side.

To give me better access to his throat.

I was afraid even to press my lips against him, against the bruises at his throat. I just skimmed lightly over them, letting my breath warm his skin, trying to touch my lips to him without touching him, letting my mouth travel up along the column of that strong, muscular neck until I could breathe in the scent of his skin behind his ear, the soft spot.

I touched it with the tip of my tongue.

The air shuddered out of him and his eyes flew open with the surprise, and then he gasped his breath back in again, one, two quick breaths.

"Doesn't hurt at all," he whispered, and closed his eyes again.

I don't know how long we stood there, him leaning back against me, me afraid to even put my arms around him but holding him up, breathing in Daniel through my nose, my mouth, making the skin of that little spot moist with my breath.

And for the first time, I considered that it might, just might be okay that I hadn't died. It might be okay if Daniel wanted me to do this. I would do this forever, if it meant that there might be something we could remember of each other besides the filthy, ugly pain.

I could do this.

---

I could almost have fallen asleep, leaning back against Jack, his breath hot against my neck.

I'd never felt more...

...safe.

When he moved again, I felt the tip of his nose stroking against the outer curve of my ear, couldn't have been more than a quarter inch of skin in contact with skin, and the electric sensation of it hit me deep in the belly, and I realized suddenly that I was hard, and getting harder.

This couldn't be real, I thought to myself.

Nothing this sweet happens outside of dreams.

I let my head rock on his shoulder, and his right hand came around to hold me, support me, resting below the cuts, below the bruised rib, against the skin that was just above the waistband.

His hard, muscular arm.

I licked my lips and watched him in the mirror. He wasn't looking in the mirror himself any more. He was looking at my neck, my shoulders, tracing tiny kisses along the edge of my hair, and his face was hungry, he was concentrating.

"Jack," I managed to mutter. If this was a dream, it should go my way.

"Hmm?" I could feel his voice rumbling in his chest, in my back.

"You can... go farther."

I felt his nose, his lips, his chin as he stroked his face against the back of my head, far away from the concussion's lump, down at the place where my short hair left my neck bare - the hair I'd cut. I could feel him tremble as he drew in a couple of breaths, the cool breeze a shock on my skin where he'd just made it damp.

"Daniel," he choked out, "I don't think I can..."

This is where the dream ends and I wake up, I thought to myself.

"... I don't think I can stand it if I hurt you again," he rasped into my ear, so softly.

He must have felt the thudding of my heart when he said that; he could have seen the flush of red that spread down my face onto my chest, if he'd looked in the mirror. But he didn't. He was concentrating elsewhere.

So I could look at him as much as I wanted.

My Jack.

"You're not hurting me," I promised him, and covered the hand he had rested against my stomach with my own. I reached behind me and curved my other hand behind his neck, pulling him closer. I couldn't tell him he could never hurt me; he wouldn't believe me.

But oh, it was true.

Still he was hesitating. I could feel his breath heavier against my neck but he seemed frozen in indecision.

"Jack," and I had to fight to keep my voice from breaking, I didn't want to whimper, I didn't want him to think I was begging, even as I begged, "Jack... please."

The groan I felt as much as heard admitted surrender, and I held on tighter to his neck, anticipating.

I almost forgot to breathe.

I thought he might be willing to touch my chest, even my arms. I thought he might brush his fingers across my nipples and I was waiting to feel what the calluses would feel like. I had no idea why he was doing this but that was the extent of what I could imagine him doing.

Instead, he slid his hand lower and his fingertips brushed beneath my waistband, following the trail of fine hair that led down from my belly button, shocking me.

Just the lightest brush of that skin, and I would have done anything for him.

"D'niel," he murmured into my hair.

His fingers undid the button of my jeans, and slow, so slow, brushed another inch farther down.

If it took forever, I was willing to wait.

It took almost that long, and I loved every second of it.

Slowly, so slowly, he inched down the zipper, pushed down the elastic of the shorts, crept his hand inside to stroke along...

Aaaaah.

The little noises I couldn't keep from making seemed to encourage him. Every time I made a little "unh" noise, he stroked infinitesimally more firmly, until finally his strong fingers were wrapped around me and I couldn't think any more.

But if I could have thought anything, it would have been that this was heaven.

"Tell me I'm not hurting you," he rumbled.

You're not hurting me, I wanted to tell him again and again till he believed me. You're loving me. Don't stop.

"Don't stop," I managed to say coherently, in what I hoped was English.

I wanted him to be able to joke, to look into my eyes in the mirror and show me the gleam in his, to chuckle so I could feel the way it rumbled inside him inside me.

But he was so serious, so intent, studying the parts of me that he could reach, could kiss as if I were a brand new alphabet.

"Hey," I finally said when the pleasure had reached a point so exquisite I thought I might suddenly be made of glass, and he looked up, surprised, and caught my eyes in the mirror. Those dark, dark eyes.

"See how much you're not hurting me?" I whispered and came, looking into his reflected eyes, letting him see everything I was feeling and how good, how indescribably good it felt.

I was shaking as if I might fall forward, and he brought up his other arm, careful to keep it below the stitches, and wrapped it around me the way he'd had the first one, soft against the soft skin of my lower belly, the hairs on his arm brushing my skin and mixing with the hairs there that led down.

There was no way I could have fallen.

And when I could breathe again, I let my eyelids finally close, taking a deep breath, pressing myself back against him so that I could see if...

Yes, he was hard, I could feel it through his jeans, he was being oh so careful not to press himself against me, must have hit him like a brick when I pressed my ass into him.

"You okay?" he asked, maneuvering himself so I couldn't feel his cock against me any more.

"Kiss me," I said, in my best attempt at an ordering-soldiers-around voice.

"I can't..."

His eyes were dark, lost in shadows, but I was feeling as greedy as I'd ever felt.

"Please, Jack," I said, switching tacks as quick as lightning, because I didn't want him to come to his senses before he did what I'd told him to do. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew I wanted it to go on.

And because he was still hesitating, I turned in his arms, and looped mine behind his head.

"Please," I said again, running my fingers through his hair, memorizing the feel of the short stubbly strands in case I never got to do this again, running my fingertips along the angle of his jaw and brushing my thumbs against his earlobes, and finally pressing the tiniest of kisses to the hollow at the base of his throat where I could see his pulse racing.

I licked my lips, and I saw his eyes go to where my tongue slid over them, and wondered what he saw.

"Pl--"

But he caught me halfway through and finally captured my lower lip between his, as delicately as if he had a strawberry in his teeth and didn't want to crush it, tasting, touching, sweeping, brushing, somehow devouring me without ever pressing or pulling my damaged lips.

For once, I couldn't think.

He even seemed to remember the stubble on his chin, refusing to let it rub me and yet rocking his cheek against mine as he kissed my eyelids,

my cut cheekbone,

my chin before returning to my mouth which was already hungry for another taste of him.

And then I knew another reason why he hadn't wanted to do this.

It was impossible to stop.

I quietly lost my mind as he kissed me, forgot about all the stitches and bruises, forgot that I had ever been anything but a warm cloud of pleasure with lips for Jack to kiss and a body for Jack to touch.

My Jack.

Mine.

He seemed to forget time too, until I managed to hook my fingers in his waistband, pull him closer toward me, undo the button on his jeans as I tried to press the length of him against my bare belly. He was only a couple of inches taller than me, but I wanted to feel his hottest skin there, where his hands had been so soft against me. His hands.

I had him, his silky smooth cock wrapped in my hand, and he gasped as I wrapped my fingers around him, my palm over the tip of him and back.

My left hand, because the splint on my right was making that hand a little awkward.

And then that wasn't enough either, and I felt my knees bending, slid toward the floor.

And quick as a cobra, his hands were under my arms, steely like cables and keeping me on my feet.

"That is not going to happen, Daniel," he told me in something closer to his own voice.

I looked him in the eyes.

"I'm not kidding," he insisted, and I slid my hands up, under his shirt, over his chest, through the curls there to slide along his shoulders. I scraped my fingernails lightly across them. He shivered. I took advantage of the moment to tug upward on his shirt, pull it over his head and off him without undoing the buttons.

And there was the sum total of Roman sculpture, embodied in those shoulders.

I must have made some sort of a noise, and I saw him swallow. But,

"No, Daniel."

I held his eyes while I slid my left hand back into his pants, rubbed him again. He was trembling, I could feel it.

"The best way to get rid of the pictures in your head," I told him, grateful that some part of my brain was working enough to provide me with complete English sentences I could whisper against his throat, his temples, his ears, "is to replace them with new pictures."

"... Your lips," he said, as if I'd dragged the words out of him with an iron hook, and I realized what was bothering him.

"So they are," and I bent a little so that I could brush them over one of his nipples. My lips still worked, after all.

I wanted him to get the visual as much as the feel, whether his nipples were sensitive or not.

He got it.

When I slid downwards again, he didn't stop me, though as I looked up I could see the muscles jumping in his cheeks where his jaw was clenched. No more relaxed Jack. Someone who didn't know him so well might have thought he was relaxed, the s-curve of his body with his weight just off-center. But I knew he was coiled, a tight spring.

Still, I had to do it.

I couldn't have the obstruction of his jeans in my way; I tugged them down and he let me slide them off his legs and over his bare feet.

And though I could have spent any number of reverential moments, I wanted him over the brink before he could think again, so I popped the soft head into my mouth and sucked before he had a chance to come up with another protest.

He moaned, and it was a loud moan.

"Doesn't that feel okay?" I asked him, only letting go for a second before I worked my tongue around to the bottom of the shaft, licking it all over, licking it hard underneath from the base to the tip, getting it wet so I could slide my lips over it without resistance.

"Aaaahh," was all he could say back and he braced his hands behind me on the sink so he didn't topple forward. I knew he would never put his hands in my hair while I had him here like this, never.

I was careful of my cut lips, knowing that if they cracked again, Jack would never forgive himself, not wanting to do that to him.

And then, when I was just beginning to get into a rhythm, when I had the taste of him all over my tongue,

it hit me.

The soft gray-brown curls at the base, or the skin, or his balls, which I hadn't even touched --

I don't know what it was, but some part of his heated skin suddenly smelled like --

I'm sure it was the soap he usually used, probably used it every day in the shower --

Probably had for years --

But it didn't smell like my Jack.

It smelled like him.

I shoved at his thighs, suddenly shaking myself, dying to get him as far away from me as possible.

"Daniel! Daniel!"

He pulled me up under my arms again, pulled me against him, and there was nothing in between us because he was very soft, very quickly, and there was no one else there, just my Jack, holding me, terrified, looking like he might do--

I had no idea what he might do if I didn't pull myself together.

"Sor--" One look at his eyes reminded me not to. "I'm okay. Just a -- just a weird minute there -- I'll be okay in a second. Honest. Just --"

And I pulled him into my arms, wrapping myself around him, squeezing him tight, and muttering "Tighter is okay" when he held me as if he thought I might break in his arms.

He did hold me tighter.

"That's enough of that," he said in his colonel's voice, which I knew right then was a big fat lie.

I still had him, and I still wanted him. Just... maybe... not right this...

"Shower, Jack," I told him.

"What, now?" He was still talking into my hair, as if he didn't want his mouth to get too far from me.

"Right now. Wait." I let go, went around him and into the shower stall right behind him.

Just like I figured, there was one bar of soap. There was also a mostly-empty bottle of body wash, which I grabbed too, just to be sure.

I took them into the kitchen, tossed them into the bin, and grabbed the bottle of dish detergent.

When I looked around, Jack had followed me, stark naked into his kitchen. He was looking, for some reason, at my feet. I still had my socks and boots on. And unbuttoned jeans.

"Now," and I didn't mean to sound so grim, but I grabbed Jack's hand and pulled him after me back into the bathroom.

He didn't say anything.

"Got a clean washcloth?" I asked him as I unlaced my boots and pulled them off, along with my socks, threw them somewhere, anywhere.

He fetched one out of a cabinet as I tossed the one that had been in the shower into the hamper.

"Water," I said, motioning to the stall. He turned it on and adjusted the temperature while I slid out of my jeans and boxers.

When he turned around again I was naked, too, and the look in his eyes could have distracted me if I hadn't had a pretty clear focus. I nodded, so he'd think I knew what I was doing, and pushed him into the shower stall.

"You shouldn't get your stitches wet," he protested, not very firmly for a colonel, I thought, as I followed him in.

It was a tight fit with two big men inside it, but we had some room.

I poured the dish detergent onto the clean washcloth.

It smelled good. I held the label up to my eyes to read it, realized I had my glasses on in the shower, and laughed. They were already steamed over.

"Hold these," I told him, taking them off and putting them in his hand before I proceeded to scrub him all over. I read the label. Lavender. Huh. Nice dish soap.

"Is this for people skin?" he said nervously as I finished with his chest, armpits and arms and turned him around to reach his back.

"It is tonight," I said in as light a tone as I could manage, working the washcloth down over --

Oh my. Yes, that was the very nice ass I had often seen covered up under those baggy BDUs and corduroys.

"Why don't you ever dress so anyone can see this?" I asked him in a very different tone as I rubbed a lot more gently and more thoroughly.

"Holy..." But I never found out what holy thing Jack was thinking of. He braced his hands on the walls of the shower stall in front of us and I snuggled closer, nestling myself between his cheeks, trying to keep myself soapy only below the waist to the front - I had told Janet I would try to keep the stitches dry - while I reached around and scrubbed him, not quite so gently and VERY thoroughly, all along the length of a cock that was hardening up again, letting the soap suds up through the hair there, all around his balls and across his thighs.

"Don't rinse it, let the soap sit," I told him, and I don't think he'd figured it out before, but he figured it out then, and then he wasn't quite so quickly on his way to rock hard again.

He looked back over his shoulder at me, those eyes burning into me like molten iron.

"You won't believe me, but you don't look like him," I told him, because with him looking at me like that I couldn't say anything else. "Not at all. And you don't sound like him. You don't feel like him, not here -" I wiggled my fingers at him "- or here," and I ran one of the fingers across my bottom lip and licked the tip for good measure.

He swallowed.

But he knew.

He'd smelled like him.

He nodded, and turned around to face me.

And then, despite the stitches, despite his soapy skin, he put his arms around me, really wrapped them around me, and crushed me to his chest.

I didn't notice anything hurting me.

"You should have shot me, Danny," he whispered into my ear, suddenly licking and nuzzling it as if he had to have one more taste of me.

"Couldn't," was all I could say back, and I wrapped my arms around his waist, holding on tight.

"I should have shot me, too," he went on confessing.

"That would have been stupid," I told him, stretching to get my mouth higher so I could say it right into his ear, make sure heard me. "Plus," I added, "you didn't have a gun."

And he did hear me, and oh, miracle of miracles, there was almost a quirk of a smile, right around the corner of his mouth, and I was so glad to see it I had to kiss it.

"I ought to make you go home," he said again, his hands stroking the back of my neck.

"Uh, ... not going," I informed him, which made him snort.

"Do you want to sleep in my bed?" he asked me, and my heart felt lighter, much lighter, and I wondered if I was actually floating.

"Absolutely," I told him.

He took down the handheld shower and rinsed me off fast, making sure I had no more suds on me. "Grab a towel and dry off quick," he told me, "and head on in. Borrow anything you want to sleep in. I'll be along."

And I must have been more tired than I thought - or it was later than I thought, since I had completely lost all track of time, had no idea if it had been hours, minutes or days since I'd come into the house - because I wandered back to Jack's bedroom, as dry as I could get myself gently, and slid between the sheets before I even thought that I might want to wear something like pajamas just to keep the bandages from rubbing against the sheets. By the time I laid down my head, it had occurred to me. Grumbling, I made myself get up, riffle through one of Jack's drawers till I came up with an old T-shirt and pair of sweats.

But when I put them on, they smelled of the same soap.

So I stripped them off again and got into bed, suddenly cold despite the warm shower, and fell asleep shivering within minutes. The sheets, which I felt sure Jack did not change all that often, smelled like Jack's sweat and fabric softener. They smelled delicious.

So I never knew how long Jack took, or what he thought when he came in and found the clothes dumped on the floor.

And it wasn't till I woke up, some ten hours later, that I saw all the open drawers and figured out that he'd taken everything in them to the washing machine. When I went out to the kitchen, following an instinct, I could see I was right. There was already a pile of clean laundry, not folded, just heaped on the dryer, and a pile on the floor of stuff not yet done.

And an empty bottle of dish detergent on the washing machine.

I wasn't that blind without my glasses.

---

Daniel wandered into the kitchen in my bathrobe, blinking. I had hated to wake him but I thought ten hours was long enough for a recent concussion, and I hadn't even had to go back in the room to wake him up.

Just brew some coffee.

I'd just wanted him awake.

"You should go back to bed," I told him, arms folded over my chest as I leaned against the counter experimentally guarding the coffeemaker.

"Nyuh," he said, opening cabinets looking for a mug.

"You are ruining the official best part of the morning, where I come into the bedroom with a cup of coffee and get back in bed with you while you drink it."

THAT opened his eyes.

He turned and looked at me, and I realized he'd been afraid, afraid that we were going to pretend it hadn't happened. Or that maybe it hadn't.

Silly Daniel.

The pretending would come later.

Of course, I was already back to lying to him, pretending I'd been in the bed with him at all.

"Go back to bed," I said again.

"That's funny, Jack, that thing you're doing where you pretend to give, uh," and he waggled his fingers in the air, "orders and stuff like that, as if I'm going to listen to you. That's really funny."

He'd located a mug and was advancing on the coffee maker, so I handed him his glasses.

"Oh, thanks," he said absently, but that distracted him from the coffee for only a bare second, so I moved and let him have that, too.

"You can have toast, scrambled eggs, or toast and scrambled eggs," I told him while I put a pan on the stove. I'd already sliced some bread.

"Mmmm, coffee," he said, ignoring me entirely as he sat at my table, wrapping his hands around the mug.

Whatever.

I put the bread in the toaster, got out the eggs. I could never be bothered to wash a bowl, I just cracked them into the pan.

"Do you have any opinions about --"

I'd been going to ask, about how your scrambled eggs get done, but I'd turned around and looked at him and completely lost my train of thought.

He sat with both his elbows on the table, eyes closed, breathing in the fragrance of the coffee, and rubbing the rim of the coffee mug against his lower lip.

While I watched him, he took another sip of the coffee, gave a soundless sigh that I could see, then licked the last drops of coffee off his lips, and went back to the way he'd been sitting before, holding the cup so that as he absently moved his head back and forth, just a little, he stroked his lower lip against the cup's rim, now damp with coffee.

"For crying out loud, Daniel," I managed to get out, sounding probably more than half-strangled.

Had he always done that? Had I just never noticed before?

Jesus, was he going to do that in every meeting we had from now on?

Now that my safe little fantasies were out of the bag, they seemed hellbent on haunting me.

That's why you don't let them out of the bag, you fucking moron, I told myself as I looked back at the eggs, which were threatening to become an omelette without my interference.

I considered working my way from numb towards depressed.

I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before. I spent a lot of time wandering in and out of the bedroom, watching Daniel sleep.

He was as twitchy asleep as he was awake, starting on his back, rolling around, tucking his feet over one another when he was cold, flinging off the covers when he was hot. He was a long movie even when asleep, was Daniel.

I'd fallen asleep in a chair at one point, watching him.

When I heard the dryer or the washer stop, my brain, set to wake me when it registered the low buzz, did its combat alarm thing and woke me up, and I put in a new load of laundry, till I ran out of stinky soap.

And in between, I moved the chair and looked at Daniel sleeping from another angle.

It seemed funny to me that I didn't want to capture the way he looked, didn't want a camera or even to paint him, and don't point out that I can't paint because you probably can't either but believe me, looking at Daniel sleeping might make you want to. I didn't. I just wanted to sit there, looking at him, for as long as... long.

Even when I fell asleep, I could see the curves and hollows and straight lines of his face, his shoulders, his skin behind my eyelids.

Even covered with healing cuts, contusions and bruises, he was simply one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

I'd actually taken an aesthetics class in college, one of those classes you take because you're curious about it and where you find out too late that they don't actually talk about the real material, just material about the real material.

I'd read books and articles and did pretty well on my exams, but the real question went unaddressed the whole semester. Why are some things beautiful?

Just looking at Daniel, you could see why the question had to be asked.

There was no reason on God's green earth why his face, the particular way his eyes were shaped, the ridiculous uptilt of his nose, or the way his head joined his neck should be so freaking beautiful.

But there they were. I defy you to deny it.

It was as inexplicable to me as quarks and declensions and far, far more mysterious. The stuff Carter and Daniel studied had reasons, methods. Beauty has none of that stuff.

It just is.

Even with the hell beaten out of him, Daniel was far, far too beautiful to understand.

And I had hours to myself to look at him.

It was almost too much, already much more than I deserved.

If I crawled into the bed with him, I'd be pretty much begging fate to come down on me the way I deserved.

So I figured I better not.

I figured, my job was to sit here and memorize Daniel, if I could. After all, that's really what I was hungry for. Images of Daniel to replace the... other ones.

I thought of Daniel's eyes meeting mine in the mirror as he came, pulsing in my hand.

Oh, you were right about new pictures, Doctor Jackson.

And now here was another one, Daniel nuzzling that coffee mug as if it was...

"Eggs," I announced, retrieving the bread from the toaster where it had long since popped, flipping it onto the plate with the scrambled eggs and putting it in front of him.

If he wanted his toast buttered he'd have to do it himself.

Oh hell.

I also retrieved the butter dish from the counter, a fork, and a knife, and almost dropped them in front of him too.

He squinted up at me, letting me know his eyes weren't really focusing yet even though he did have his glasses on, and I figured the coffee hadn't kicked in yet.

I went to sit in the living room.

I have a chair in there that I've aimed so I can look out the window, watch the trees and not think. It's not that I like trees. That's why I aim it that way. Nothing causes me to have no thoughts like trees.

Today it wasn't working.

I closed my eyes and settled down into the couch cushions.

I really needed not to think.

Because I'd had hours of thinking, and among all the things I'd already thought about way too much, one thing was burningly crystal clear.

It hit me around four a.m., when everything's quiet and you can hear yourself breathe, hear Daniel breathe, if you're sitting in a chair watching him sleep, and there's a moment where you can't hide from what you already know.

He really hadn't heard a damn word I'd said.

Oh, I knew he heard me, but he wasn't paying attention, or listening, or whatever you want to call it. He wasn't going to change his spots.

And if there's one thing you learn as you get older, it's that you can't change other people. You can't ever make them do what you want them to do. You can knock them out and throw them over your shoulder, but you can't make them walk on their own two feet in the direction you're pointing unless they're willing.

Or unless you threaten to shoot them.

I couldn't make him take care of himself.

And it really wouldn't help matters if I threatened to shoot him.

And in one of those ironic coincidences, I realized right then, not touching him, him not even really there, but far away in sleep, I realized that he was going to get himself killed.

Let me tell you something else I've learned. An officer trusts his instincts.

I'd ignored my instincts twice. I'd felt like it was all about to go kablooie, and it did. The first time, I hadn't been in command, and as it happened, my commander bought the farm.

The second time, a man under my command was killed.

I never ignored my instincts again.

That doesn't mean I was never wrong, or that I never managed to get anyone else killed - God, I wish that were true.

It just means that when the hairs go up on the back of my neck, I believe my hunches.

Some guys develop superstitions, some guys pray a lot, some guys keep their mouths shut.

But they trust their instincts, or they tend not to come back.

My instincts were telling me that Daniel was going to going to get himself killed if I couldn't get him to look out for himself.

The older you get, the less you bounce back from that kind of thing.

Knowing it would happen, I felt pretty fatalistic about it. I couldn't protect him every minute of the day. And if he didn't help me, I couldn't always keep him safe. And he wasn't going to help me.

There was no way I could make him.

---

I shifted a little when Daniel wandered out from the kitchen, still in my bathrobe, looking much more alert after his breakfast and his coffee. Of course.

He surveyed the living room situation, took one of my hands, and pulled me up out of my comfy tree-watching chair.

Instead, apparently it suited His Majesty to have me sitting on the couch, where he pushed me.

He then lay down on the rest of the couch, and slid his feet into my lap.

Sighing, he took off his glasses and tossed them on the coffee table, draping a forearm over his eyes. Jeez, eating breakfast must have been a lot of work.

"Yes, Your Majesty?" I inquired, but he just waved a hand, as if he weren't entertaining inquiries at this time.

So I dropped my hands onto his feet.

They were long, with surprisingly delicate toes. The bones in his ankles felt like peculiar ceremonial artefacts from some indecipherable ancient civilization.

I snorted to myself, thinking that I'd been hanging around Daniel too much.

He didn't object when I stroked my hands along the top of his feet, so I picked one up in my hands, digging my thumbs into the arch, figuring that if he were ticklish he'd kick me in the chest, which would be clear enough.

He didn't seem to mind.

And I was happy to pretend inside this little bubble of happiness, figuring that whenever I finally lost him, I'd need more to think about than that I should have found a way to stop him.

---

Usually Jack gave me a lot of shit for not waking up more quickly, but he must have been feeling indulgent today. Coffee -- good coffee, that I didn't even have to make myself -- breakfast, and a footrub.

If this was a dream, it was a gooood one.

I didn't want to break the spell, but after a while, I realized that if I didn't say something, we could easily go hours - days, maybe - without anything getting said.

"Uh..."

He looked over at me. Good start, I thought.

"... I'm on medical leave."

He nodded, though I would have been happier if he'd greeted this piece of non-news with a little more sarcasm.

"I don't really want to go work at the Pentagon."

Again, nothing, not even a shrug. All he said was, "I don't think you should."

"...So will you call General Hammond and take back your resignation?"

He looked at me, and I had a rush of impressions - that his eyes were hollow, that he was old, much older than he looked, that he was unutterably sad.

"I don't know how that would work," he said.

Dammit, he knew exactly how that would work. He'd pick up the phone and say into the banana-shaped piece, "Please reconsider my resignation, General, because I sure have." How hard could it be?

I waited to feel irritated, but the feeling didn't come.

Jack just kept rubbing my feet.

There was no downside to that.

Except that it was making it harder for me to think about anything but Jack's hands, hands that I'd been stealing glances at for years, hands that fascinated me even before I knew they could do things like this to my feet.

And the rest of me.

It really wasn't hard to explain, I thought, draping my arm back over my eyes and sinking into the couch cushions, wiggling a little to better settle myself as Jack's fingers smoothed and stretched and dug into the soft parts of my feet.

I'd seen it happen with a lot of smart people, not that I'm so smart... Okay, I'm pretty smart. And I've met a lot of freakishly smart people, smarter by far than me, if truth were to be told.

For instance, think about, oh, a man with a Nobel prize in physics. He's the world's foremost expert on positronics or whatever those people do. He's so smart he's even got physics groupies following him around, and if you don't think there's such a thing as physics groupies, you haven't spent enough time in academia.

What, or who, rather, is that man going to go for?

Without knowing anything else about his sexual tastes or preferences I can give you one simple fact - or rather, not a fact, just a theory with a high degree of probability: he's going to go for someone who is a world-class expert in something he's not.

Half the time, it doesn't really matter what it is. People think those men are shallow if they marry a supermodel, but in reality it's the exact same situation as if they marry another Nobel-prizewinner in economics. They're as absolutely dazzled by someone who can spend five thousand dollars a month on their looks and two hours applying makeup as they are by someone who can explain anomalous behaviors in foreign stock markets.

It's the fascination of someone doing whatever they can't do. It's the fascination of the expert.

Well, individual tastes vary, of course.

Now, I am not suggesting that I am a superstar - for one thing, superstars don't get laughed out of the profession - but I have a certain notoriety in some circles, and there aren't a lot of people who've done what I've done. Not that anyone knows how important my work turned out to be. But I have the same interest in experts who are what I am not.

I know what I like to fantasize about. And I have a rich fantasy life, truth be told. I think about sex a lot - unless I can distract myself by thinking about coffee or verb conjugations instead - see, even that word, conjugation, comes from the same root as conjugal, to join - never mind. What I mean is, I fantasize a lot. About everyone. All the time. It doesn't mean all that much. At least I hope it doesn't, or I'll start to be really worried about the one dream I had about General Hammond and a swingset that I really don't want to discuss, thanks.

Now, Janet's very attractive because she's a medical doctor. They're always sexy to Ph.D.s. They're the real doctors - they can do real things, like heal people.

And Sam is attractive - ooooohhh yes, Sam is extremely sexy - because while I can read about up, down, strange and charmed particles, Sam actually understands them, and as near as I can tell, can teach them to sit up, roll over, and dance the watusi.

And Teal'c is attractive, in a completely terrifying way, because he's simply physically overpowering. He still looks and acts like a guy who would make a really great First Prime of Apophis, even though on top of that and beyond that he's so much more, including just about the most understanding person I've ever met.

But Jack is sexy because -

Jack is sexy because -

All right, I guess not all those academics would be as turned on by Nobel economists as they would supermodels. Sometimes, as individual tastes vary, it becomes apparent that people's baser instincts kick in as well and combine with the basic fascination of the person who is what you aren't. Sometimes a person is hot because they are, in fact, well... hot.

And when I find a man attractive, he's, again, what I'm not: lithe and graceful and ruthlessly masculine and... well, Jack-ish.

Jack just gives off this air of "I am the real deal, don't mess with me". It's pretty clear I'm not the only person who thinks so. I mean, alien women seem to be able to scent him at a hundred paces and I know he knows. They can tell it as soon as they see him. This is the real thing, I can practically see them thinking, and the ones who sense it don't just want to sleep with him, they want to marry him.

So that's part of why Jack is sexy. Also... I thought of those shoulders, that ass, in the shower last night, wet and covered with lavender-smelling soap, and I must have made some sort of little squeaking noise because I could feel Jack looking at me, but he didn't say anything and kept rubbing my feet.

But Jack is also sexy because he can plan and carry out an assault, because he knows in his head how many ammo magazines his company has at any given moment, because he can't draw basic vector diagrams (at least I don't think he can - I might be wrong) but he can instinctively calculate the trajectory of a bullet accounting for gravity and wind interference over a hundred-yard distance and hit his target right between the eyes.

I'm the one who has to constantly keep reminding him that the target is a person that he probably shouldn't shoot because I'm the one who has to keep reminding myself that, just because it absolutely floors me every time he does it, doesn't mean he should do it all the time.

If we were in high school, it would be more understandable. He'd be the big, cool guy athlete and I'd be a nerdy nobody and it would make sense for me to have this hero-worship thing for him, this constant desire to please him, and this thing about his hands.

But we're not in high school, and I constantly have to fight it, because dammit, a lot of the time I think Jack is wrong.

In fact, I've pretty much gotten to the point where when I feel the urge to do whatever Jack wants me to do, I stop and think about it, because I have to figure out - manually, if you will, or any other word that is the opposite of automatically - whether my instinct to go along with Jack is because of my desire to please him, to get him to approve of me and like me, or because I actually agree with him.

Most of the time, when I stop and think, I don't. Agree with him, that is.

I don't know why that is. Maybe that's part of the attraction, too. Maybe it's because the basic worldview that defines the perceptions and understanding of a world-class archaeologist and linguist - oh, all right, I never said I was all that modest - are fundamentally incommensurable with the perceptions and understanding of a world-class military officer.

And I'd spent years trying to make up my mind about incommensurability.

I'd originally gotten into linguistics because I didn't believe in the problem of incommensurability. It's a big problem in the theory of translation. A lot of people think that a completely accurate translation is impossible, particularly between two very distantly related or non-related languages, because of the way language shapes our perception and because of the way culture informs linguistic understanding. In many African languages, the argument goes, they use the same word for the colors purple and brown. If we translate a poem about a brown house, how do we know it's not a purple house? And that's just the tiniest example of this whole big thorny philosophical problem.

But I didn't believe in incommensurability. I always felt there was a chance. Given enough time, given a sufficiently accurate understanding of the language - particularly its irregularities - one person could communicate completely with another person, and ought to try.

Incommensurability should only be a problem for the lazy and the stupid.

And yet...

Maybe it was just another example of the way in which I'm not actually as bright as I usually think I am, but it was just occuring to me that the most important relationship in my life was with someone whose entire worldview might very well be incommensurable with my own. Maybe that was the attraction of the person who's exactly what you're not.

And maybe that was why just having him rub my feet was making me hard and achy again.

Peculiar.

"Whatcha thinkin' about, Daniel?" Jack said casually, stroking my toes with his thumb.

I took my arm off my eyes, squinted at him. "Incommensurability."

"Aaaaaand wake me when you're done," he waved his hand at me as if fending off the word, laid it on top of my feet again, and leaned back into the couch cushions to close his eyes.

There was also the fact that he was funny.

"You really are funny, Jack."

He opened his eyes again. "Oh, are we going to talk about me? 'Cause that I can get into."

"I was thinking about you while you were rubbing my feet, but now you've stopped," I pointed out, wiggling my toes. Comfy, cozy, safe... yes, a very good dream...

"I've been rubbing your feet for ... Well, I don't know, but a long time. Unless you intend to get me a new job at the SGC - Daniel's personal footrubber - I don't really think I need all that much practice."

Smug bastard. He knew he'd given me a hard-on.

Not that it was all that difficult to miss in a bathrobe.

"Now, I could see that. I think that might even work, since you've handed in your resignation and all," I said, and stretched for him so that the robe gapped and showed him my belly muscles. I knew he saw, because I saw him swallow. Some of us can actually pick up skills, at least a few skills, outside our primary area of expertise. "I can see you as the professional footrubber for the translation and archeological department."

"The whole department?" And he looked into my eyes with those coal-dark ones as he rumbled in a low voice, "Or just you?"

No, there was no doubt about it. He was trying to get me hot. And it was working.

"Well, if I can get General Hammond to take my recommendation, of course it would be for just me. Budget situations being what they are, however..."

"And do you really think I should let them pay me to rub the feet of a bunch of people I don't even like, Daniel?"

Whoa. All the funny had just gone out of the conversation. He just kept looking at me, his hands laying on my feet as if he were waiting.

"Jack." I didn't want to talk about this. "Don't bring that up now."

"When would be a good time for you, Daniel? 'Cause if you ask me what I'm thinking about - I notice you didn't - that's what I keep coming back to."

I didn't say anything.

He sighed. "I can't figure out how to convince you that-"

"No, I wouldn't let money determine who you had to touch, Jack. That's what you want me to say, isn't it? That I know that money's not that important? You'd say that, like a person who's always had some."

"I've been short of money plenty of times in my life."

"But never had none." Why did he want to talk about this? I wanted his hands on me. I wanted to have a different conversation. "Money solves a lot of problems, Jack. It doesn't just buy you food, clothes and a roof over your head. It opens doors, it makes the impossible possible. It lets you determine who you are."

"Daniel, I've known you for years, and I never thought your interest in money was all that serious."

"Because I don't need it any more. Although, I must add, I should be making more than I'm making," I couldn't help reminding him. "I've gotten what I wanted. When money could get me what I wanted, I needed it. Money can't help me any more." It couldn't bring Shau're back. "For instance, it wouldn't really get me this footrub, would it?"

The corner of his mouth quirked. "No."

"So I don't need it any more, do I?"

He shook his head. "No."

"And when I did --"

"And when you did, you should have had the basic self-respect it requires to find a way to get it without selling your body."

I didn't even stop to think, but I must have gotten myself up off the couch and several steps away, because when his voice stopped me, I was on my way to the door.

Hadn't even noticed myself moving.

"I'm sorry, Daniel," he said in his softest voice. "I had to say it, at least once."

I stopped with my weight still resting on the foot closest to the door. "I'm not going to justify myself, Jack. Not to you, not to anyone." Least of all to you, I thought, startling myself, wondering what I was so angry about. I'd made my peace with me years ago. He had nothing to do with it.

"You're a big boy, Daniel. You do what you want. But someone should have told you. Since no one, apparently, did, I'm telling you now."

I could feel his body heat behind me. I hadn't heard him get up off the couch.

He could still move so silently, for a guy with bad knees.

If a physicist goes for a supermodel, is there a reason?

Why do I go for a silently-moving, trained killer?

There must be a reason.

"I'm not trying to make you leave," he went on in a tone that by itself could make me stay. "I don't want you to leave yet. But I had to say something. I don't think you know what - I can't explain to you how much it would mean to me if I could be sure you'd worry about yourself a little more when we're out in the field." He cleared his throat. "If you would hold yourself a little less cheaply."

"And what about you?" I turned and glared at him. "Do I get to say how much I wish you wouldn't be the last one in and the first one out, or point out how many battle wounds you've taken in the last five years? Huh?"

"Daniel, that's my job. That's what I'm trained for. Whether you believe it or not, I don't do it because I don't care what happens to me. I do it because that's what I do best. I'm a trained soldier. That's a little different from being a hooker on the sadism market, letting people rape me for money."

Now THAT was a sucker punch. And he hadn't even touched me.

"Nice one, Jack," I gasped, even bending over myself a little. My solar plexus actually felt paralyzed.

"Don't, Daniel, don't," he said, moving as if he wanted to put his arms around me, but I put up a hand and held him off, kept backing away.

And then, something in his face gave way and, horrifyingly enough, I thought he might cry again.

"I didn't mean to say that. Don't go right after I said that."

And because I dropped my hand, he did put his arms around me, and his touch was everywhere, his lips were everywhere, the bathrobe was open and his hands were all over me and he was kissing me so fast I didn't have time to catch my breath after all.

And this was a much needier kiss. I could taste a certain bit of desperation in it.

"I just can't wrap my head around it, Daniel," he whispered into my mouth. "And I don't really want to. I feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall with you, and eventually, my head is going to split open and then there's going to be this big mess of Jack brains and --"

"Huh," I said against his mouth, "I feel that way all the time."

"I don't think it's the same."

"Well, I'm not sure it's different."

His chuckle sounded a little defeated, but he shook his head as he muttered, "Must be a problem of incommensurability."

And that was the second time in as many minutes that he took my breath away.

Oooooohh boy....

"Say that again," I told him, and grabbed his wrists, holding him still.

"What? Incommensurability?"

"You utter bastard," I muttered, pulling him against me so I could feel his body rubbing against mine, even through the denim. I didn't let him pull away. "You knew what it meant when I said it."

"Never said I didn't," he replied levelly, relaxing a little, figuring he'd kept me from walking out the door. Mission objective achieved.

It was absolutely, incandescently sexy.

And yes, despite all my intentions, he'd changed my mind about staying.

"You said that on purpose," I accused him, pushing my hands under the hem of his shirt to slide them up around his back.

"I didn't want you to go yet," but he was still very gentle with me, barely touching me.

And this was why my fantasies couldn't ever really come true, not the way I'd dreamed them up.

Because now he was never going to think of me as anything but... well, breakable at best.

At worst, damaged.

When there he was, balanced on the balls of his feet, confident, dangerous, everything little boys were supposed to learn not to lust after. Too damn near perfect.

"If I stay, I want something." I didn't have a whole lot of faith in seductive techniques that didn't require cowering, but this was the moment to try one.

"I'm shocked and surprised," he muttered, but I saw his half-smile.

I grabbed his ears and pulled him down a little so I could whisper into one of them, figuring my breath might help my case, while I stood on tiptoes so I could roll my hips against his belly, let him feel my hard-on against the softer skin there above the jeans.

"I want to suck you off," I whispered in what I hoped was a seductive voice.

"No," he said in the voice that meant I'm-giving-orders-here that was really starting to irritate me, but I felt him shudder, heard him suck in his breath.

"I want to show you that I know the difference between a dirty job I don't do anymore and --" And what? No time to think. "Let me."

And for the last weapon in my arsenal...

I ducked down again so he had to look in my eyes. I knew what my eyes looked like without the glasses. I dropped my lashes to look at up at him through them.

And slid my hand down his pants for a very direct, difficult to ignore squeeze.

He was already hard.

"I said no."

And despite my best efforts, he actually backed away from me. I could see it cost him something to pull himself together when I'd been doing my best to take him apart.

"Dammit, Daniel," and now his voice was raspy, "I said no. I can't make you do anything, but there are a still a couple of things I can prevent you from doing, and that's one of them."

When I took a step back towards him his eyes glittered and he actually managed to say to me --

"Unless you're planning to force me."

My head snapped back as if, again, he'd landed a blow.

He was always a better fighter than I was.

I was way out of my depth.

But I still wanted him, and I knew he wanted me. Whatever was going on, it was going on, and I wanted it to go on.

He might hate himself for wanting me, but I could still see it.

And he knew I knew it.

"Then what?" I almost shouted, but kept it down to some waving of the hands. "What, then? What could you possibly want to keep me here for? Apology accepted. Can I go now?"

"I'm not ready for you to go. I don't want you to go."

"Well, yippee for you. I told you what I want. You won't listen. How astonishing. Wait, I have to make a note."

He stared at me for a moment as if I'd suddenly gone insane. Maybe he thought I had. He's seen it before.

"What? What is it I'm supposed to be staying for? You want me to wax your car? Wash your windows? What?"

"I don't want you to do anything," he said, his tone still indicating that I might in fact be completely nuts. "I just want you to -- "

Then he went back to the couch, grabbed some pillows.

He came back to me, dropped them on the floor.

And he sank down on his knees. In front of me.

And, I have to admit, all that I could think of to say was, "... What?"

"Hold still and shut up," he finished.

"What?" I said again. Not keeping up with the conversation.

"Replacing the old images of you, remember?" he said, glancing up at me.

"Jack, you can't," was all I could think to say. Now my brain was honestly spinning, I felt more concussed than I had after I'd hit the wall. I couldn't think, could barely breathe, and there was Jack, my Jack, commando Jack, on his knees in front of me on the floor calmly sliding his hands beneath the robe, big, hot hands sliding everywhere over my bare skin.

"Oh please, Daniel. Surely I don't need two Ph.D.'s to do this," he said conversationally as he pushed back the robe, leaving me bare. I slid it off my shoulders to help him and it fell, ignored, to the floor.

"This... is the most bizarre thing that's ever happened to me," I murmured, fearing my legs weren't going to hold me up as he ran his hands up over my bare thighs.

"It is not," he said, and then for a second, face to - well, looking straight at my very hard dick straining towards him, he looked up at me.

Here was an angle I never expected to see him from. The angles of that face were bred to look down at people, from the top of a tall column of a body, or from a throne, maybe. Not up, like this.

And he said, "Uh, Daniel... I'm not really sure how to do this."

Oh god help me.

Uncertain Jack was even sexier than blowing-things-up Jack.

Maybe there was something wrong with me after all.

"Uh... Well..." I managed to choke through a mouth suddenly gone very dry indeed, "...I'm not really an expert, but I do find that a sort of do-unto-others rule works as well as in any other interaction..."

"Hmm."

I could see him figuring out where to put his hands, the angle from which he could wrap one around my cock - which then felt like it was on fire, hot from his hand - and bracing the other one around my leg.

"Daniel -"

"Yes, Jack?" Even to myself I sounded strangled, and he hadn't even touched me with his mouth yet.

"You'll tell me if I do anything wrong, right?"

"Yes, Jack." I ran my fingers through his hair.

"Or even just anything... not good."

"Yes, Jack." I couldn't keep up the volume, and my voice faded away as I said, "I promise."

He made a sort of a sound I couldn't identify - was that a laugh or something else? - and I could feel his breath hot against the tip of my cock.

"That you'll promise. Jesus."

And he opened his lips and licked the end of my dick, very gently, while he stroked me in his tight hand.

"OOOHH my god," I couldn't help crying out, and rested my hands on his shoulders just because otherwise I couldn't stay upright.

And when he finally closed his mouth over me, I couldn't make any noise at all.

Whatever happened next, I lost track of time, place, even where my body ended and his began.

I got lost in Jack's exploration of me, watching, feeling him decide what to try next, how hard to suck me, how much of me he could fit inside his mouth, how fast he could move his lips up and down me, how not to scrape me with his teeth.

When he licked me, hard, underneath, from the base to the tip, I felt, for some reason, tears gathering in the corners of my eyes.

He'd learned that from me. Last night. Not before.

And I could not stay quiet.

I moaned, I gasped, I cried out - his name, curses in Arabic, in German, in English - all very good languages to curse in - endearments in Japanese that he probably didn't understand, encouragements with no words at all that he absolutely did.

And every time I felt like I was getting close, I tried to relax, and he must have felt me, and he changed what he was doing.

And the whole time, the little wet, slurping, sucking noises he was making sounded like a whole new heaven of pleasure that I had never imagined I could visit, and even the sounds stroked against my nerve endings until I --

I was so weak I couldn't possibly be standing up on my own power. That had to be his hands still holding me up.

He would feel me start to shake, and then he would move - start licking another spot harder, slow down his hands.

And then at one point he had me deep in his throat - he must have paid attention at some point when someone had done that to him, and I was astonished again - , and he swallowed.

I practically screamed,

but I didn't come.

I was panting when he took his mouth off me.

"Uh, Daniel," and he sounded a little breathless himself, as he should be, since he was doing all the work, "what am I doing wrong?"

"Jesus, nothing, nothing, I swear," I got out between gasps.

"You're not coming."

"I'm, uh, kind of trying not to," I admitted, gritting my teeth. Even his breath against me was the softest kind of hot... "I don't want this to stop."

"But Daniel," and I could tell he was trying to sound reasonable, not complaining, "my knees can't take much more of this."

"Uh oh," and I was concerned, I was, but for the moment I was more than a little wrapped up in a sexual tension I had never felt before in my entire life.

"Tell me how to make you come," he said, and kissed the tip of my cock where it showed from the top of his hand, as he still gripped it.

Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god... and I knew, as long as I lived and probably long after, that I would remember, and the memory would be able to make me instantly hard, forever. Tell me how to make you come...

The great Jack O'Neill, asking for instructions.

On that.

My brain was scattered throughout the galaxy, but I managed to think of something to say.

"Well," and I had to clear my throat or I'd never make myself understood - it was as if the excess of blood and lust surging through my body had closed up my throat, which seemed odd, as if my body had thought, why do you really need to talk anyway? - "... if you do that thing you just did, once or twice more, I think I might actually die from pleasure."

He slid me back into his mouth even as he said again, "Hmm," and the vibration set up a whole new series of shocks to my system that I was really beginning to wonder if I could handle.

And then he did it again -

a swallow, and that hot, wet squeeze -

and I groaned because I knew I couldn't make this last any longer, -

and then his long, hard fingers suddenly cupped my balls, very gently, caressed them, -

and he did it again -

and he was so obviously Jack, my Jack, learning how to suck my dick, learning how to drive me absolutely insane with pleasure I didn't even think I could stand,

that I couldn't keep myself from exploding any more.

I knew I screamed something, knew I almost fell onto him, every muscle in my stomach clenching, contracting as I came harder than I had ever come before in my life, harder than I could have imagined it was possible to come.

I knew that was Jack's mouth, sucking, licking, and swallowing as I came, and that made it even better.

And I knew that I hadn't shown Jack a damn thing.

He was showing me.

---

Daniel almost fell into my arms; I guess his knees wouldn't hold him up any more.

I knew the feeling, and ended up leaning back against the couch, somehow holding a big, solid Daniel in my arms who was gasping for breath, leaning against my chest, my legs going thisaway, his going thataway.

And all I could think was, Oh.

That was much, much more than I'd thought it could be.

Not that I'd really thought about it. The key, I think, in live battle situations was not to think, but to react. That's why the government has filled my brain with all these combat simulations, all this experience. Follow the plan, until the plan is screwed, then form a new plan, immediately, without break.

Making love to Daniel was kind of like that.

A tactical maneuver that came to you in the heat of battle that you just had to hope would get you where you wanted to go.

And yet, at the same time, not like that at all.

Because after all, there was only me on my side.

I was pretty sure.

But I had to make sure.

"Hmff," he said into my neck. "If I'd known that would be like that..."

"You'd have promised me anything?" I kept my tone light, Jack-joking.

"Oh yeah," he sighed, and even that was the sexiest sound I'd ever heard.

"So promise me now," I murmured into his ear. I had a tactical advantage. I had to press it. "Promise me you'll look out for yourself."

He stiffened and pulled back to look at me, and I knew when I saw his eyes the advantage had been no advantage at all.

"When you prove to me you've asked Sam and Teal'c the same thing," he said, also struggling to keep his tone light, "I'll promise you that."

"Dammit, Daniel," I couldn't keep my irritation from showing, though I think it looked like plain irritation and not like the apocalypse-scale fury it really was.

"Actually, no, I take that back. You'll also need to promise the same thing. To me." Those blue eyes fastened on mine and I couldn't look away. "To look out for yourself."

"That's not the same thing and you know it."

"Because I'm not a soldier?" He sighed as he pulled away, and it wasn't the sexy, satisfied sigh now. "Jack," he said as he rubbed his eyes a little, "I'm doing my best."

"Your best is fine. At being a soldier."

"You mean, at playing at being a soldier."

"Dammit, Daniel, just say it!" I could hear my voice going up. I wanted to shake him. "Just say it!"

"If I say it, I'll mean it. You know me well enough to know that. So no, I won't."

I'll be able to live on it if I just hear you say it, I wanted to tell him. I can fool myself into believing it if you just try to make me believe it. Just try.

"Can you just try?" I whispered, and brushed my hand through his hair as if he were a little boy not doing what he was told.

"I always try."

"You DO NOT!" Nope, still angry, I was.

"You know, Jack, I don't get what upsets you. I really don't. You're a soldier. You fight. I've seen you win, and I've seen you lose. I've seen you face death and keep struggling, and I've seen you face death and accept it. What is it about me that you find so different from you?"

You mean aside from the fact that you're going to leave me and that you're going to break my heart?

"'Cause I'll tell you what looks different to me. You're completely comfortable as long as you're in control. Winning, losing, you're good with all of it as long as you keep control. That's not the way I am, Jack."

Huh? What was this about control? That wasn't the difference at all.

"Look. I don't mind it when you fight. We need you to fight." I need you to fight, I didn't say. "If you lose in a fight, you lose in a fight. At least you fought. But Daniel, you don't always fight."

He was looking truly puzzled, with his tongue absently licking his lips and the crink in his brow and without his glasses his eyes were huge and blue and... I was hard pressed to stay on topic.

"I do fight."

"Yeah? Is that what you were doing on that mother ship? Fighting?"

"YES! What do you THINK I was doing?"

"Getting hurt. Holding still while they hurt you. They didn't even have to restrain you, Daniel. That didn't look like fighting to me."

"I... was... fighting." Now his teeth were gritted, and though we were still inches apart, sitting on the floor, there was a thick, thick wall between us. "I had a plan. You might not like my plan, that's your prerogative, but I had it. I followed it, and it was successful. We got you out, and we regained control of the mother ship, and we eliminated one of two Goa'uld targets. That's an acceptable outcome."

"And this?" I didn't touch him, just pointed at some of the stitches along his ribs.

"Battle injuries. Shall we catalog yours?"

"Daniel, that wasn't a battle!"

"YES, IT WAS!"

"And when you did that before? In college, or whatever? Was it a battle then?"

"YES!"

He convinced me more than any of Frasier's charts that he wasn't seriously hurt when he sprang up off the floor and started pacing like a pissed-off panther. Well, a panther would be more graceful; Danny wasn't graceful. He clomped up and down, and if he'd had shoes on I could have heard the stomping. Stomping, naked Daniel.

"It was a different kind of battle, but yes," he gritted at me. "A battle for what I wanted. Actually," and he didn't look at me as he kept pacing, "not so different from the ship."

"Wanted what?"

"To dig, to find out, to get a chance to learn," he muttered.

"I mean, on the ship."

He looked at me, still sitting on the floor, back against the couch, legs sprawled out in front of me, and seemed to consider it.

"Well, obviously, you," he said as if we were discussing the price of tea in China.

"Me?" I couldn't help pointing at myself. "What? Like this?"

"No, this is just... well, it's whatever you want it to be. A happy accident. A bonus."

A bonus? I sank a little inside. Like a couple of extra hundred bucks in your paycheck kind of bonus? Like a CrackerJack prize kind of bonus?

Bonus didn't begin to cover the taste of Daniel in my mouth.

But I squashed the disappointment.

"Why me, then?"

Daniel sighed again, and this third sigh was very different, almost like the noise someone makes right before they tell you "Checkmate."

"Don't try the thick act with me, Jack."

"I'm serious. There are any number of able military officers on this planet. To the best of my knowledge, there's only one archaeologist specializing in ancient Egypt who also knows spoken Goa'uld. For that matter, there's only one Nobel-quality physicist specializing in stargate mechanics, and one ex-jaffa defector. I'm the least valuable person on the team. That's as it should be. That's why it's my job to make sure the rest of you get home every time."

He was studying me, and this time the chevrony chink in his brow became parallel lines as his eyebrows climbed up with disbelief.

"You really don't get it, do you?"

"Get what?"

He was staring at me, studying me, and it felt kind of uncomfortable, just sitting while he stared at me like that.

Call me a hypocrite if you like, but when I'd done my staring, he was asleep.

What the hell? Was he counting the hairs in my eyebrows? What?

"What the hell are you looking at?" I finally asked him, making his eyes come back to mine.

---

Jack really didn't get it.

I hadn't realized it before.

He didn't see what I saw when he looked at himself. I had long ago memorized the sun freckle on his neck, which bent gracefully when he twisted his head, the shape of his jaw, his tiny ears.

What was I looking at?

A Roman statue of a noble barbarian warlord, cheekbones sharp as bird's wings,

a hawk, an eagle,

"...Victory," I told him.

He closed one eye and squinched up the other as if by squinting at me he could figure out what the hell I was talking about.

"And what victory is this that we're talking about?" he asked carefully.

"Well, not over me," because he was giving me that wary look again. I waved my hands again and kept pacing. I couldn't explain to him what I barely admitted to myself.

I needed him at the SGC to win. The fight against the Goa'uld.

Because I didn't just want them defeated.

I needed it.

And somehow, instinctually, like all those alien women who homed in on Jack, I knew he was the real thing. I knew if I could get him on my side, he'd be mine forever. He'd stick.

If I could get him on my side, he'd fight on long after I was dead. And he'd win. I knew he would.

I was counting on it.

When had it become a war? When had it become so important to me?

When had I decided that death was all that any of them deserved?

When had I forgotten about the hosts?

I noticed my hands were shaking.

"Which fight is this, Daniel?" he asked again, softly.

I had to sit on the couch, rested my elbows against my knees.

"Is this the fight you were fighting on the ship?"

"No. Yes."

"Fighting for me?"

"So you could keep fighting them. I'd planned to rescue you. And I'd gone back to get you... and to kill her."

Sarah, so dear to me once, so fragile and lovely and brilliant.

I'd wanted her so, so dead.

I stared at the floor.

And I'd tried to kill her. Oh, I could claim I'd given her the gut wound to disable her, but I'd wanted her dead.

Because it wasn't Sarah. Osiris had taken her from me long ago, like Shau're had been taken, and Skaara. I'd tried to get her back once, and I couldn't. I'd failed. And then Jack had been taken from me the same way.

I wanted all the snakes very, very dead.

"That doesn't sound like you," Jack said softly.

And I recalled the way I'd thought, how carefully I'd planned both their deaths, how desperately I'd clung to my plan, improvising and revising all along the way until I could get the weapons into my hands, and the absolute determination with which I'd stabbed Sarah in the stomach.

That had been Sarah's stomach. Not Osiris'. Sarah's.

It had felt very much like the way I'd felt when I'd wiped out that tank of immature Goa'uld with a P90, so very, very long ago.

Satisfying.

"Oh god," I whispered, to myself, "what did I do?"

I'd had her blood on my hands.

And I hadn't thought about her once, couldn't think of her as Sarah. Just Osiris.

And had barely remembered in time that Jack was Jack.

Was I not enough of a soldier... or too much of one?

And my mind flashed back to me destroying Moscow, me in the Harcesis' dream... a version of me that I could only defeat by not allowing it to fight, and suddenly I wondered who the hell I was.

"I think... I think, actually, that I was thinking sort of... like you," I said very quietly, letting out very quietly what was shocking me to my core inside.

"Like me."

"Yes. I wasn't, wasn't very much like myself, I'm afraid."

"Daniel, I hate to tell you this, but I would never have done what you did."

I laughed, that hopeless laugh that I can't help when I feel the whole world sliding away from me. "Not quite the way I did it, but yes, I think you would have."

Would he? Would Jack have stabbed Sarah in the gut that way?

No. Jack would have shot her, cleanly, with the P90 or the zat. Three times, to dissolve her.

Because Jack might want to save Sarah, but he wouldn't let that get in the way of taking out Osiris if Osiris needed to be taken out.

That's why Jack would win and I would lose.

Unless I became even more like Jack.

And if I did, how much would there be left of me?

Pathetic as I was, I was all I had ever had. And I was still a bit unwilling to let all of me go.

"You're right," I told him. "You wouldn't have done what I did. You'd have gotten two targets instead of one."

"Or maybe none. And maybe two lost hostages instead of one."

I shook my head. "Maybe."

"When the elimination of a target is the same as losing a hostage, there are no good choices for anyone to make."

We sat for a while, him still on the floor, me with my head hanging down.

Until finally I said, "Jack, I don't feel so good."

He was up off the floor before I'd even finished. "You want to go to --"

"No. I just want a pain pill. They're in my pocket. Get me some water?"

"Sure. You hang on."

And as he disappeared into the kitchen, I realized that that was maybe my one other skill. Hanging on.

---

I'd only dozed off a little, but somehow Jack had managed to pack pillows around me, giving me something to turn on to if I wanted them, something to pull against my stitches if I needed them.

I hadn't. He knew how I slept - on my back, hands under my head.

Or at least, that was how I'd dozed off, lying on his bed, waiting for the pain pill to kick in, feeling at least as beaten and sore on the inside as I was on the outside, thinking over and over, what did I do? What did I do?

Until the drugs made me drowsy enough to stop thinking, if only for a little while. So I could dream about Jack. Much better dreams.

When I woke up, Jack was sitting in an armchair he'd pulled up next to the bed, holding a book he'd been reading, maybe, or just pretending to read, looking at me.

I was pitifully, pathetically grateful that he was still there.

It helped me think maybe I was still here too. The real me. Not some bloodsoaked nightmare version of me. Daniel Jackson. A good man. A gentle person. The kind of person who wanted to reason things through, not rip people apart with his bare hands.

I had a sense memory of the pillows pushing up against me on all sides, and suddenly realized what I hadn't before.

"You were never in the bed last night," I told him.

He didn't say anything, just looked at me.

"You were that scared of me?" Because I was that scared of me, and I desperately, desperately wanted him not to be scared of me. Wanted him to be my same old Jack.

He still didn't say anything.

Didn't he know I couldn't remember he was my Jack and not the other Jack if he didn't sound like himself?

"Say something," as I pushed myself upright, peered at him from just a foot or two away. He hadn't gone far from me while I was sleeping. I was pretty sure that was my Jack, the real Jack, sitting there looking so eminently lickable.

Don't think about Sarah, I thought to myself. Think about Jack. He's worth it. He was worth it.

"I'm waiting for you to go poof," he muttered, sounding exactly like Jack, thank God.

"What kind of poof?" I asked him, standing up.

"There are so many," and he waved a hand while I took the step. "Where I wake up from a dream, from virtual reality, from some Asgard device. Maybe I'm a robot. Maybe you're an alien."

He was worth it, and he was here. And I might never have him here like this again.

I slid one knee along the outside of his thigh, then did the same with the other, trapping his thighs between my legs, settling onto his lap.

Hah, I thought as I put my hands around the back of his neck. Some of us still have good knees.

"Maybe I am," I said agreeably. "A horny, hungry alien." Starving for Jack.

Using my hands, I pulled myself along his lap, dragging myself along his legs, to fit tight up against his belly. I had him effectively pinned.

"That sounds like a bad porno movie I would rent with Teal'c," he managed to say into my ear, but his breath was getting more ragged. I slid my crotch along his. We both started breathing a little harder. "Horny Hungry Aliens," he tried to joke, but we both jolted at the sound of his voice, sounding so much like sex.

"You rent porno movies with Teal'c?" I unbuttoned his shirt - why had he bothered to put it back on? Couldn't he tell I liked it better off? - while I shoved up against him again.

"Teal'c is, uh, very curious about Earth," Jack told me, his head falling back against the chair so I could kiss and lick and nuzzle his throat. "Do you always wake up from a nap this way? I've never seen you wake up from a nap this way." I let my hands roam all over that solid chest, fuzzy with soft Jack hair, curly and gray and an indescribable sensation against my skin and real, so real. I flattened against him.

"I'm hungry," I said, right before I nibbled on his shoulder, and I think I was just sleepy enough, or maybe high enough, to forget about the rest of the inhibitions that usually impeded my clumsy seduction technique.

I'd already admitted plenty to Jack. Might as well let him have it all. I backed up enough to look him in the eye.

"I want you," I told him, staring into those inky dark eyes from inches away. I flicked my tongue against his lips, then kissed him, not letting him be so gentle, drinking him up with my mouth the way he'd drunk me up, stroking the inside surfaces of his mouth with my tongue because I wanted to taste them. Against his mouth I said, "I want you all over me, I want the taste of you in my mouth, I want to feel you sticky all over my skin, I want the smell of you on my hands so it'll never wash off." I ground my dick against his, and even through his useless clothes I could feel him throb in return, whether he wanted to or not.

I knew my voice didn't get sexy and low like his when I was turned on, but this was Jack, and hopefully he knew me well enough to know that the papery-soft voice was me not wanting to argue, me giving in - in this case, me giving in to a bad case of honesty.

"Daniel, don't make me have to stop you again," and he really sounded like he couldn't decide whether it was an order or a sob.

"Why must you stop me? You're always stopping me."

"I never manage to stop you."

"Well, that's complete bullshit."

"It's hard to stop you. You never admit you've lost the battle. You keep coming back for more until you win."

"Oh please. I've lost plenty of battles with you."

Even while we were having this conversation I clenched my thighs. I saw him swallow.

"Name two," he managed to say, then as I started to slide my good hand down his stomach, he grabbed my wrist and held on, seriously held on. "Daniel, I can't."

"Oh please," I said again. Not clever. I was trying to keep going. He really had my hand trapped. My muscles were tensing trying to go forward.

His were tensing holding me back.

"I know damn well you can." He was still hard. I could feel it. His blood surging against mine. "No one is that straight, Jack. Or that much of a control freak."

"Apparently, I'm neither." He closed his eyes as I nudged my crotch forward again, just a tiny bit, but he kept hold on my wrist. Sweat popped out on his forehead and I felt the strain in my ribs as I tried to move my hand up, down, anywhere. But he had me immobilized.

As usual.

God DAMN it.

"Aggh!" I shouted in frustration and brought my other hand, my right hand, thumping down on his shoulder. Then I said it again, differently, "Aggh," in pain, because that had hurt, dammit. I'd forgot the splint.

Startled, Jack let my hand go.

Just as I wanted to strangle him with it.

Perfect.

"Control freak," I said again, and swung off him.

He was breathing as if he'd run a quick mile. I wanted to slug him and I wanted to cry. I sucked at seduction. I'd given it everything I had and gotten nowhere.

Humiliation. Beyond pain and anger there was humiliation. I couldn't believe I'd let him push me to this point. When I couldn't, apparently, push him anywhere at all.

---

Daniel was pushing me over the edge, and I had no idea why he was pushing so hard.

Well, I had a few ideas, but I was afraid to confirm them.

"Control freak," I managed to say as I tried to slow my heartrate. "If I was a control freak, I'd fucking lock you up in chains before I let you do some of the half-assed pinheaded things you decide to do. Before I'd let you give in and give in and give in until I let you do them."

"Give in until... What the hell does that mean?"

"You heard me. That's your patented strategy. You let everyone kick you around till you get to do exactly what you intended to do in the first place."

He was standing over me, a torn and bruised Greek god, and I could see the muscles in his neck and shoulders flex as he half-reached out his hands, maybe to throttle me. That'd be easier to deal with.

He said, in a soft voice that was surprisingly threatening, "Are you calling me passive aggressive?"

"Hell no. Passive aggressives look UP to you. Even your passive is pretty fucking aggressive."

"Everything I know about aggressive, Jack, I learned from you. I don't know if that makes you a good teacher or a shitty one."

"I'd give you a B+ on the aggressive." I thought about his crotch grinding into mine. "Maybe an A-. Apparently what I forgot to cover was mission objectives."

"I have mission objectives, Jack. You just never like them."

"It's not about not liking them," and suddenly his eyes were on me like blue lasers. Shit. Shit. Don't give too much away.

Like he couldn't already tell I wanted to lick him all over like a lollipop.

"It's about reachable goals. Missions that achieve strategic objectives."

"Uh huh." He had his arms folded over his chest, legs wide and braced, and he looked ready to do battle, even covered with bandages and naked.

That... was a Daniel I had an even harder time resisting.

"STRATEGIC objectives fit into long term goals. Goals that work towards the greater good."

"I frequently have strategic objectives."

"Which suck."

"Thank you, Jack, for that cogent analysis. JE-sus. Can you HEAR yourself? No, Daniel. I don't want to hear it, Daniel. Keep it to yourself, Daniel. You suck, Daniel." His eyes blazed as he raked them up and down me and I felt suddenly much, much nakeder than I was. I had to fight to keep myself from buttoning my shirt back up. "Well apparently, Jack, I don't."

Make all the innuendos you want, Daniel, I thought to myself. "I have every reason to question your judgement when it comes to setting strategic objectives."

"Because?"

Because you're a fucking MORON. "Because I don't think you think ahead."

"I don't think AHEAD? How many times have we destroyed or abandoned some artifact that might help us defeat the Goa'uld because you're in too much of a hurry, or because the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, or maybe because you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?"

"See, you saying that just confirms what I mean. You don't understand my mission objectives."

"You don't fucking EXPLAIN them."

"Commanding officers don't explain. It's not a committee."

"If you explained them even once in a while, I'd have some clue what the hell you're thinking!"

"If I had stopped to explain them more often, you'd be DEAD!"

And there we were, toe to toe, shouting at each other. The air fairly crackled around us and I suddenly realized it had always been like this. Nothing about our relationship was new. It had always been there, right below the surface.

The last few days hadn't changed anything.

The last week, the mission on the mother ship, hadn't changed anything either.

This was what we were to each other.

Abso-fucking-lutely inexplicable.

"Okay, I'll explain this," I said, keeping my voice as low and level as I could. "I don't trust your judgement. I've got good reason not to trust it."

"Judgement concerning?"

"Your own safety."

"This is SO not about my safety, Jack."

"Yes, Daniel, it is." I gritted my teeth but kept my voice quiet. "You want me. I heard you. You know damn well I want you."

"You've HAD me."

"Shut the hell up."

His jaw snapped shut but his eyes, I swear, shot fire at me.

I continued, "So let's put aside for a second this little bubble of reality that we're in, let's forget for a second that, if I come back to the SGC like you say you want, this can't happen again, can't have happened in the first place, if you get my drift."

"Regulations," he sneered at me, and I wanted to slap him.

Well, maybe that was a healthy sign. I certainly didn't want to treat him like china any more.

"NOT regulations," and I linked my hands behind my head, rubbed my hair so I wouldn't make fists. "Because that's the way it works, Daniel. That's the way command works. You're just going to have to take my word on this one, because you don't understand and apparently I'm too dumb to explain it to you."

"Better to say that after you've at tried at least once."

See? That's what I meant. Pushing and pushing and pushing.

"Daniel, I can't kiss three different people goodnight every night."

That at least shut him up. I could see him thinking about it. I went on.

"Like I said, putting that aside for a second, try, just try, to put yourself in my shoes for a minute. I have to worry about you, Daniel, that's my job. But give me a break.

Not only are you willing to let yourself be raped and tortured to fulfill an unauthorized and, I might add, ill-conceived search and rescue mission, you somehow managed to keep hidden from a VERY thorough security check previous experiences that may render you unsuitable for combat. Congratulations, by the way."

"Unsuitable for...?"

"Earth needs soldiers, Daniel. Not kamikazes."

"Jack, you've known me for, what, five years now? Six, if you count when we first met? Are you just now telling me that you don't think you trust me to watch your back?"

He still stood there like he was balancing on the deck of a ship but his eyes were filling, oh God help me, with tears.

And immediately I could see him, writhing on the floor at my feet, screaming, tears streaming out of his eyes, while I twisted one of his fingers beyond the breaking point, ordering him to hold still.

Oh god. This was what I couldn't handle. This was why I couldn't go back to the SGC.

"I trust you to watch my back, Daniel. I don't trust you to watch yours."

"I'm listening, but I don't get what --"

"I don't think I can --" Oh god, the tears in his eyes, I could hear him screaming in my head, I couldn't stand it, "--I don't think I can always live with the consequences of your actions."

He was trying to get it. He was. His brow was crinked into a tight frown and he was thinking. "So I'm unsuitable for combat because I can survive --"

"--You may be unsuitable for combat under my command," I interrupted him heavily, "because I may not be able to survive your decisions."

Like right now, I wanted to tell him, when I can't decide what's killing me more: what I did to you, the fact that I couldn't stop myself, the fact that you don't seem to have the basic good sense to hold it against me, or the fact that you could have died, and if you'd died, I'd be dealing with this alone, no Daniel to hold, to fight with, or to lie to.

You did that to me, Daniel, I wanted to say. All of it.

We were locked, eye to eye, for a long time, and maybe he saw some of the explanations in my eyes. I sure hope he did, because I didn't know how to say them.

"Okay," he finally said, in that conversational tone he used to talk about the weather, "but you already have. Survived my decisions."

"Tell me you won't do it again."

"Tell me you won't get captured again."

A brick wall. A fucking brick wall.

"Are you as bored with this fight as I am?" I asked him.

"Uh, no, not yet, because I have no idea what you're going to do."

"What do you want me to do?" I felt like throwing up my arms, giving in, like I always did. Did I really have a choice? "TELL me what to do, Daniel. 'Cause you're so good at that."

"Tell me you'll come back to the SGC."

"In return for services rendered?"

And this time, he really recoiled, as if I had slapped him, hard, across the face. I'd seen him get slapped often enough. I knew what it looked like. It looked just like that.

"Is that what you think?" he whispered, and this time his arms weren't braced, his legs weren't braced. He stood there, naked, trembling, his lower lip trembling, and now, the tears were overflowing.

Oh god no.

"Is there a reason I shouldn't think that?" I said instead. "You've been quite clear about what you're willing to do to achieve your mission objectives, which apparently include me, fighting the Goa'uld. Isn't that what you said? You're telling me you'd let yourself be raped for pocket money, but you wouldn't get off an old friend just to save the world?"

I felt it as I said it, felt something break inside, something sharp and cold under my ribs.

And I saw, as I said it, something break in him, too.

All the fire went out of him, and what was left was deadly ice.

"You have no idea, no idea what I'm thinking, even when I tell you, in plain and simple English," and his voice was curt, cutting, snipped off the end of each word. "And all this time I thought the dumb act was just an act."

"I do listen," I told him carefully. "I never said I always understood. I am trying."

"No, you're not."

I went to say something else but he raised a hand, cutting me off. "Where's my clothes?" he said in the same clipped voice.

"Uh... I'll get them."

Honestly, he was scaring me. His eyes looked dead, deader than they'd ever looked, deader than when he'd handed the Goa'uld the noose...

For the first time I wondered what I'd done.

I brought him his pants, his underwear, his shirt, his shoes, his socks. He'd scattered himself all over my house.

I'd kept tight hold on my clothes the whole time.

It didn't feel right.

When I came back, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his hands. He looked up at me as I walked through the door. He was crying, really crying.

Not the way I'd cried, not with snot and noise, just silently crying, letting the tears run down off his face, splashing onto his arms, his knees, the floor.

Daniel used to not cry this way.

It was as if he didn't want me to hear him cry.

And then I knew what I'd done.

I'd really hurt him.

And it wasn't that hard to understand.

He wouldn't easily forgive when someone really hurt him.

And when I walked toward him with the clothes, for the first time he did lean away.

Apparently, what I couldn't do with fists, I could do with words.

And this time, I didn't feel sick to my stomach. I felt terrified. Stone cold terrified. A sensation I almost never had.

This was the real Daniel, a damaged Daniel but the real one nonetheless, who'd come here to tell me something, and who was going to leave feeling that I hadn't heard a word he'd said.

I knew how that felt. I felt the same way.

I looked at him, from the bristles of thick brown hair standing up on the top of his head down the sideburns, meant to disguise the elegant sweeping curve of the jaw, meant to make him look harder, more masculine than he used to. The short hair he'd cut because he was different now.

More, he claimed, like me.

Did he hate being more like me?

I looked at his eyelashes, spiked with tears, and the open mouth with the lush lips. The dimples were deeper, I realized, and there were sun wrinkles around the eyes.

The shoulders, broader, the chest, heavier.

The hands, also elegant, never delicate, which had always had dirt under the nails and smelled of caffeine. Hands that were so good, now, at reloading a P90.

And he looked at me, standing next to him, and even as his lips were open and soft like his lips always were, the eyes were hard, diamond hard, and cut into me.

And I realized, the tears were about frustration, about anger, as much as about hurt.

And I realized, for a moment, what the Goa'uld had seen that I hadn't seen at all.

Daniel had changed, quite a lot, while my picture of him had stood still.

He was tough.

He'd always been tough, but it was showing now, easy to see, maybe, for anyone who wasn't me.

He was still a scientist, still a nerd. But he was also a big, tough soldier.

I'd made him into one.

And then I never noticed.

And now I was telling him that he couldn't cut it. That he wasn't good enough.

Not to fight with me. Not even to touch me.

That I couldn't stand up to whatever he dished out.

No wonder he didn't want me to hear him crying.

He probably wanted me to drop dead.

He put out his hands for his clothes. Instead of giving them I dropped them on the floor, sat on the bed beside him.

"I was wrong," I said.

"I know," he said.

We sat there for a while, me wondering how to fix what I'd done.

"I didn't mean it," I said experimentally, finally, I don't know how much later.

"Yes you did," he said tonelessly.

"I mean -- "

"Why not? That's your job, right? Analyzing tactical situations, trying to figure out what's going on? It's as plausible a scenario as any other, isn't it, given what you now know about me? Even a retired whore knows how to whore, after all."

I winced.

"Now that I think about it," and he still sounded cold and dead, not like my Danny at all, like some older, tireder man, "when you say it that way, it doesn't even sound that bad, does it? There are a lot tougher ways to save the world. You may have even overlooked the advantages of having a professional on the team. For instance, I can tell you, if you want the enemy to come faster, you've got to suck harder. Just a tip." He shrugged, still looking at his hands. "I mean, if a blowjob could save the world, you'd do it."

"No, I wouldn't."

"Oh come on," and he made that little bitter laughing noise that he only made at the worst of times. "You've proven that you can."

"No, I don't think I could. I don't have that kind of toughness."

He was staring at his fingers. I wanted to stare at his fingers too. He said, "Jack, you have every kind of toughness there is."

"You know I don't, Daniel. After yesterday... you REALLY know I don't. I couldn't... Well, who can say what they'd do unless it really comes down to it. But I don't think I could. I think I'd uncork a few grenades and go down shooting before I'd be able to do that. And if there was a chance in hell that anyone might find out about it - say, Carter, or Teal'c, or, for instance, my commanding officer - then it'd be a gun in my mouth before you could even say 'tactical surrender'."

He was twisting his fingers now, tangling them up with each other, as if he were trying to unravel an imaginary knot.

He was quiet again for a while.

But then he asked, as I knew he would --

"Then why...?"

"Same reason as I've done everything else since you came here, Daniel. Because I wanted to, and I couldn't stop myself."

Now his hands were locked together, as if he held something tight inside them.

"Then, if you don't mind my asking another question," he said as politely as if we were having tea with the queen of England, "why, exactly, is it that you get what you want but I don't get what I want?"

"That's simple. Because I'm scared of what you want." I sighed, rubbed my hands against my thighs before clasping them again. "I told you, I'm not that tough."

"Not tough enough for what, exactly?"

"Not tough enough to get past the pictures in my head, for one thing. Not tough enough to forgive you for putting them there, apparently." Might as well say it out loud. "Not tough enough to trust you not to let anything like that happen again."

"You don't trust me."

"With my life, absolutely. Not to let me hurt you... no. Not right now, anyway."

He seemed to consider that for a while.

"Well," he finally said, wiping openly at his eyes with his hands, drying his tears from his face, and looking at me, looking at me again, at last, with reddened eyes that were still blue perfection, "I must tell you that you're a fucking idiot."

"Probably." Because I was sure he was right, even though I didn't know what exactly we were talking about. "Uh... about?"

"I told you I don't like pain. Osiris didn't believe me either." That made me wince. "I'm clear as crystal about it. I don't like pain. I have no interest in you hurting me."

"Okay." I nodded as if I understood. "You'll have to forgive me for misunderstanding. I thought, when you offered to suck my dick with lips that almost needed to be sewn back together a few days ago, that maybe you weren't giving enough weight to how it might possibly hurt you."

"Well, you were wrong. I know how tough it is for you to see me like this. I wouldn't make you hurt me again." And I knew he was going to do it, but I couldn't stop him. He looked at me and said it. "I'm sorry for putting you in that position."

It was okay that he'd said it. He didn't owe it to me. He didn't owe me a goddamn thing. He didn't owe me half what I owed him. But I was glad he knew it, was glad he was sorry, and didn't loathe myself for being glad quite as much as I thought I would.

"Thanks." My hands were shaking. I wondered what their problem was. "I'm sorry I -"

He was shaking his head 'no'. I knew what he meant.

"I'm sorry I couldn't stop him from doing that to you," I told my hands. I'm so, so, so, so sorry, I thought in my head, so very sorry - I tried so hard, and it wasn't hard enough, and it should have been, it really should have been -

"I know."

"But you weren't mad at me because of that."

"No."

"You were mad at me because I thought you were willing to trade yourself for me to come back to the SGC."

"And?"

I felt like he was prompting me in a quiz. I didn't want to get it wrong.

"Help me, Daniel."

How many times had he said that to me, in the early years? "Help me, Jack." I could still hear it echoing in my head every time he disappeared around a curve ahead of me. It could still make me break out in a cold sweat.

He didn't ask me that any more. He hadn't asked me for years.

I guessed it was time for me to ask him.

"Help me make it better, Daniel. I want to."

He sighed. I wanted to gather him up in my arms, but that wouldn't work twice. I had no ground left to stand on. If he didn't help me, I didn't know how I would fix this with him.

But that's what he did. Helped me fix things. When I asked him.

I could almost hear him thinking about it.

Maybe it was habit, maybe it was some type of forgiveness when he gave in and said,

"You humiliated me."

My eyes closed. "I know."

"No, not then. That wasn't you. We settled that. You humiliated me. Just a little while ago. Maybe you didn't notice, but that was me putting myself on the line there, Jack. And you threw it back in my face."

"When you --"

"When I told you how much I wanted you."

Oh.

Oh.

He was looking at his hands, which waved around as if he had no control over them while he spoke.

"I don't really know how to s-s-seduce someone, when I really want them," and his voice was at odds with the hard cold expression of his face. Why had I thought the Goa'uld might break him, I suddenly wondered. This was breakable Danny. "I was being honest." And it must be tougher for him than I'd thought, even though he did it all the time. "And you didn't even --"

He pulled himself back behind the blue eyes, and there was battle-scarred Daniel again, older, tireder, more bitter with me. "Anyway, the hell with you," he said.

Jesus, I thought to myself parenthetically, we are really, really bad for each other.

"I didn't understand." My breath whooshed out of me. "I guess I'm really not all that bright."

His breath whooshed out too. It was almost like a little piece of a laugh.

"Tell me how to make it right."

"You could, I don't know, trust me for a change."

I couldn't. He was covered in the evidence of why I couldn't. But I nodded.

"I must be pretty thick, Daniel, but I guess I didn't see it. Your lips are split, you have a broken finger on your right hand, you can't really use your left, and you have stitches in your ass, for pete's sake. Am I missing something?"

He glanced at me, sliding a look sideways at me, and something sparked in the look. Was that icy cold dead Daniel thawing a little bit?

Please God, Please God, Please God.

"I'm not too proud to turn down a pity fuck," said cold, dead Daniel, and he looked at me with eyes carved out of hot blue ice.

My brain was clicking over but I didn't get it. Stitches. Wouldn't let me hurt him. What was I missing?

I saw him see me get it.

Oh.

And I don't know what my face looked like, but he said, "Or maybe I am," and picked up his pants as he stood.

"Wait, wait!"

"Never mind, Jack. You asked, I'm telling you. Don't worry, the moment's gone."

"I SAID WAIT, GODDAMMIT!"

Then we were both standing, him with his knuckles white as he gripped the clothes, me with one hand locked on his wrist, one hand locked around the back of his neck - a wrestling hold, an immobilization hold.

Not a good idea, I thought to myself, as he looked down at my hand wrapped around his wrist then back up at me.

His voice was icy soft as he said, "You want to fight, Jack? I don't feel like it. You want me to fuck you, get in the bed."

Maybe we stood there for hours, I'll never know, his eyes locked on mine the way those steel cables lock on fighter planes landing on aircraft carriers - a violent pull, that you hope to God won't give but seems like it'd have to.

I should have thought something, should have seen my life flashing before my eyes, should have run cold or hot or something, something, anything.

I was a blank, a tall dark blank standing there holding Daniel by the neck, by the wrist. No one breathed, no one moved, for hours.

That's the way it must have been.

I wondered, surgically clinical, what I was going to do.

Trust him.

That's what he'd asked me for.

He'd asked me to trust him.

It was all he'd asked me for since he'd shown up at the house.

That, and a drink of water. I think.

Trust him.

He wanted me to trust him.

I couldn't trust him to take care of himself.

But he wanted me to trust him.

That's what he wanted.

I had no thoughts.

If I had, I'd probably have wondered if I was having a heart attack.

I let go his neck.

I let go his wrist.

When I backed up, I felt the bed hit me behind the shins, the knees.

I dropped onto it, and my fingers unlaced first one boot, then the other, pushed them off the bed, because boots don't belong on the bed.

And I slid up, bending my knees to sit tailor-fashion, on the bed.

On the bed.

And Daniel was looking at me, open-mouthed, at least as astonished as I was, staring at me, probably wondering, just like I was wondering, what the hell I was doing.

He walked out.

It was a bluff, I thought to myself, my brain racing around and around in my head. It was a bluff after all, and I called it. He'd come to his senses just as I'd lost mine. How typical of us that was.

And as I was wondering how long I would sit there, he came back in.

He'd been in the bathroom.

He tossed a jar of something and a towel onto the bed.

He looked at me sitting on the bed. His expression was unreadable. Blank, too.

And he was wearing his glasses.

He must have reached some sort of decision, because I saw him bend, saw him give in to something, and then his knee hit the bed.

"I wanted my glasses," he said calmly as he climbed onto the bed and sat, cross-legged, next to me.

My eyes darted back and forth between his face, his glasses, and the jar he'd tossed on the bed.

His face was still blank.

"You only have Vaseline," he said, taking one of my hands, and I swear I felt myself jump a mile.

He must have noticed but he didn't say anything. That might have been a smile that came and went, but if so, it was faster than a bullet.

"That's kind of messy, but it'll do," he informed me as he started rubbing one thumb across my palm, the palm of the hand he'd taken, when he climbed into the bed with me.

Couldn't he hear my heart beating?

Maybe he could. "Look, Jack, I'm not going to hold you to it if you've changed your mind," he told me, even as his eyes burned down my throat to where the shirt gapped and my chest hair was showing. "I'd like to say that I wouldn't be able to go through with it if you just keep looking like a frightened rabbit."

Frightened rabbit? Huh? Who the hell did he think he was talking to?

His eyes came back to mine and burned with sin.

Oh. I swallowed. Me. That's who he was talking to.

"I'm not a... frightened rabbit," I said thickly. He'd started to move his fingertips out from the center of my palm, massaging my hand, and then the feeling of his fingers sliding through my fingers was almost too evocative to bear. And he kept sliding them because he knew it.

"For a big butch colonel you're doing a fine imitation," and he could make fun of me if he wanted, I didn't want to fight any more.

"If anything I'm a, uh, frightened moose. Or elk. Something with big antlers."

Yep, that was definitely a smile that was coming and going.

Freaking me the hell out.

"Let me get the covers off," he said, and I let him pull them out from under me, but I refused to get off the bed. If I did, I'd break the pact. Or run.

When he looked at me sitting on the bare sheet I felt like I was dinner.

"Why don't you just lie back," he said, eyes still on mine, "and try to relax for a minute."

So I did, lying back on the bed I'd somehow gotten into for some reason I couldn't explain, and draped an arm over my eyes, leaving Daniel to his pursuit of touching, smoothing, and scraping his fingernails over every molecule of my hand.

Despite everything, it made my shoulders unclench.

Eventually, when I looked at him again, I saw he was still looking at me. Not with the same intensity, though. He was looking at me with his lips slightly parted, and the brows were pulled together so I could see he was thinking, really thinking. If his head had been transparent I could have seen the gears clicking.

Once he got three crates of fragments of clay tablets that SG-9 had sent him from their survey that they thought were sufficiently important to bump up to Dr. Jackson. He had that same look on his face as they crowbarred the tops off all three crates. He'd sat there, for damn near an hour, just staring at the top layer of what was in them, contemplating, deciding, he later told me, where would be the most efficient place to start and what he thought he would likely have to do after that, then after that, then after that...

Apparently, I realized, I was a project in the preliminary stages.

I was fine with that.

It was a while before his eyes lost that glazed over look, focused on mine, and I noticed, as he crawled over me - interesting - and rubbed the other hand, that there was one of those quick ghosts of a smile that kept coming and going on his face, as if he kept thinking of something that made him smile but suppressed it, or as if he couldn't stop himself from smiling but he didn't want me to see it.

"What the hell are you grinning about?" I asked him, probably more gruffly than I intended to, but dammit, it was unnerving enough, being in this bed, with a jar right within reach - a jar --

"Because I know... stuff," he said vaguely.

"What stuff?"

And he must have figured that I was as relaxed as I was gonna get, because he suddenly swung one of his legs over my legs again, just like he had in the chair, but now I wasn't sitting up in a chair, I was lying on the bed, and he had my thighs trapped between his legs as he knelt over me, all milky beautiful soapstone Daniel, never mind about the wounds, and then he was sliding my shirt off my arms, pushing it under me, pulling it out so that I'd be bare to his touch.

"I know a lot of things, actually," he said as he threw my shirt away. "I know if I wait too long, you'll freak yourself out. I know if I don't go slow, you'll pop like warm champagne, because you've been hard half a dozen times these last two days and haven't got off once. Unless you kept yourself company while I was sleeping last night," he added in a matter of fact way that made me feel guilty about all my late night voyeurism even though I'd done no such thing.

And Daniel spread my arms, interlacing his fingers through mine as he lowered himself over me, sliding himself up my chest to bite me, not too gently, not too hard, right at the base of the throat. I could feel the blood in my body concentrating.

"And I know that you'll never let this happen again," he murmured into my collarbone, licking, sucking, and nipping at the skin and the hollows there, watching the cords of muscles in my arms as I stretched and pushed at his hands holding my arms apart. "So I know I won't be able to do all the things I want to do to you, there won't be enough time." Those lips, those luscious, luscious lips made wet warm trails behind my ear. The glass and metal of his glasses scraped against my cheek, my neck, smooth and cold, and I shivered as he said into my ear, not whispering, as if it weren't a secret, "But I am going to fuck you, Jack. And you'll remember that."

Christ Almighty.

He pulled back so I could see his face. He was watching mine. I don't know what I looked like, but he seemed to like what he saw there.

"You want to know what I see?" and he was off doing that mind-reading trick of his. "You look hot. You look like you want me. You look like you don't even know which way is up any more."

He finally let go my hands, because he wanted to slide his down my stomach.

"That's what I want to see," he told me in that quiet voice. And when he raked his fingernails down my belly, his fingers heading for my waistband, it was like someone had stabbed me with an electric shock.

His hands pressed and smoothed all around my dick but never touched it, pressed and smoothed the hollows and ridges of my hips, my bones, through the old cotton I was wearing.

But then, apparently, the cotton had to go.

I let him undress the rest of me without helping, because he didn't look like he wanted any help.

And then when I was naked, he sat there next to me, his eyes running all over me, and just the way he was looking at me was...

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Even to my own ears my voice was strained, husky, deep.

"Like what?"

I had one knee bent and he was leaning his chest against it, and rubbing his bottom lip back and and forth, thoughtfully, meditatively, against my knee while his eyes roamed up and down my body, stopping for long glances at my rapidly increasingly hard-on.

"Like I was... coffee."

He laughed a little, a real laugh, and this time the little electric explosions he made in me were in the vicinity of my heart.

"You are like coffee, Jack," he said, torn between watching my eyes and watching my dick get hard for him. "Dark and sweet and, unh, very arousing," and I could tell from the noise he made and the way his eyes slid shut for a moment that he was touching himself. He stroked his cheek against my bony, scarred up knee as if I was a silk pillow. "I would say you're salty where coffee can be bitter. Bad coffee, anyway. Good coffee's not bitter. You don't taste bitter." And that pink tongue darted out to taste my skin. I felt my cock jerk. "Maybe you taste like coffee with cream. Kona coffee. Turkish coffee, the strong sweet kind they serve in tiny cups. And you smell, mmm... If they could bottle the smell of spicy flowers and a Jack ready for sex, they could make a billion dollars."

Please God, let him keep loving the smell of me, I thought to myself, which was the first moment I realized I didn't want him to stop.

He didn't look like he had any intention of stopping.

Instead, he had those blue eyes fixed on my crotch, and he kept licking his lips. They were dark pink and wet now and they just looked like messy, wet sex. I didn't need sound for this movie. But he just kept talking.

"If we had the time," he said as if he was telling me a story, "I would lick this gorgeous cock all over until it was shiny, until you were begging me, begging me to finish it. And then I would slide you right down my throat and suck you so hard you'd see stars. You'd come before you even knew you were going to, and you'd shoot fast and I'd drink you up."

I groaned. He was trying to kill me. And he wasn't even touching me.

I reached for myself but he intercepted my hand with one of his, wrapped his fingers again through mine.

And he brought the captured hand to his mouth, rubbed my knuckles against his open, slick lips, and then, when my hand opened instinctively to touch him, moved his mouth around my index finger and sucked it.

I groaned again. I didn't plan to. He made me.

His tongue slid around my finger, tasting it, flicking it, licking it, and then he sucked again as he slid my finger out of his mouth.

"Why..." I had been going to say something, what was it? I couldn't remember. The sight of my hand sliding wet out of his mouth was messing with my memory. What was it. Oh yes. "Why, uh, why don't we have the time?"

He chuckled. I could feel it in the leg I had against his chest. God, all that smooth warm chest.

"Because I'd want to do it again," he explained patiently. "You'd probably fall asleep, and then I'd have the time to watch the way the muscles move in your legs, in your back when you roll over, and I'd want you again so badly that I'd stay right there with you till you woke up, and then I'd suck you again, whether you thought you were ready or not. Much more slowly."

I swallowed. He was making my mouth water.

"It'd be a couple of days before I was tired of having you come in my mouth, I think." He looked down again, rubbing that bottom lip against my knee, looking at my cock jerking toward him. "Or years," he said as if hypnotized, and I realized he hadn't meant to say that.

"Are you trying to talk me into coming?" I needed to look away from him, but couldn't make myself.

He zoomed in on my eyes. "Do you think I could?"

He sounded boyish, interested, amused.

Goddammit, he might be able to.

"Never mind. Don't distract me," he said, the crink between his brows coming back.

"Don't distract YOU?" I choked out.

"Shh, shh," he said as his hands started to push me and pull me and he slid his body, that firm smooth body, up against my back.

I heard him lay his glasses down and the small sound of the metal frames hitting the bedside table seemed just as intimate as all the things he'd been talking about doing, all the things he was doing.

I could feel his cock dragging against my leg, against my ass, and I knew what it looked like, flushed red, the blood showing through his lighter skin, thick glossy reddish brown hair nested around the base, around the tight heavy balls packed below. Even his cock looked like something you'd photograph for a very expensive, very filthy magazine. I remembered seeing it in my hand, in the mirror.

I looked down at myself. The purplish shaft, curved a little to the right, uneven balls below, one higher than the other, jerking as my dick jerked because he felt so good sliding up against me, and gray hair, God, time was cruel, silver gray hairs through the plain dark brown, and the gray hairs didn't even curl as tightly, as though the gray hairs were tired.

"You're crazy," I muttered as he built up some pillows under my shoulder so he could wrap an arm around my chest, underneath me, even as he snuggled up to my back.

"How so?" he asked as if we were having an argument in the debriefing room, except that his breath was bursting hard and fast against my back, against my shoulder as he got me where he wanted me.

"I'm old, Daniel," I sighed as I felt his nipples brushing against my back, his hand sliding down over my hip and under my thigh to lift my leg so he could slide his hard muscled lightly furred leg between mine. His fingernails scraped again, along the back of my thigh, just below the curve of my ass, and I bucked. I'd never known I had nerve endings there.

"Funny, you don't look all that old to me," and he licked the back of my neck, making my back arch. "Hey, look at all the muscles that flex when you do that," he muttered into my neck.

"I'm too old for someone as gorgeous as you to want like this," I managed to say, even though his thigh was stroking along mine and his arm was wrapped around me holding me tight and his free hand brushed through the hair on my chest to stroke my nipples.

"Sorry, Jack, that's not going to work." He was touching me everywhere. When I pointed my toes, his foot was next to mine, rubbing against mine. He was everywhere. "I'm not stopping to have a fight with you. You're beautiful. Artists have spent lifetimes trying to approximate you in stone."

I don't know why that sounded so good to me - I wasn't even sure what it meant - but I liked it.

"Haven't you ever noticed, people who come sniffing after me aren't actually interested in me. They like it best when I'm out of my mind."

No, I hadn't noticed, and it was tough to think about it right now, when my dick was begging for attention and he was touching me everywhere, everywhere but there.

"The ones who come after you, Jack, they want you. Hot and funny and laid-back and dangerous all at the same time. And very, very beautiful. Turn your head."

I turned my head toward him a little and his tongue investigated my ear. I shuddered. It was hard and soft and wet and warm and the way it stroked and touched and then backed away so that I could feel his hot breath was unbearably good.

"You're the real deal," he whispered into the ear he'd just taken possession of, and kissed the back of my neck. "Now hand me the Vaseline."

I didn't even think. I reached out and snagged it, handed it to him.

He needed both hands to open the jar, and since one arm was around and below me, that meant he opened it right in front of me.

I should have been frightened, nervous at least.

And suddenly, I was.

He must have felt me tense.

"Yes, I am going to use this so I can get inside you," and the way he said it I could tell he meant it.

I couldn't tell if he was trying to frighten me or reassure me.

Maybe he was just reporting the facts.

In case I wasn't noticing.

I was.

He glopped quite a bit of the stuff on his fingers, which disappeared out of sight.

"You can move this, just, uh, not too far away," and his voice was whispery again, the way it got when he was most emphatic, most determined I should hear him, the way he sounded, usually, right before I yelled at him.

He was so in charge of me.

And those long, strong Daniel fingers slid down between the cheeks of my ass, slid lubricated by cool gel that warmed quickly and felt like it was melting into me, and they slid, and circled, and then Daniel's voice said "Relax," and he pressed one of those fingers inside me.

"Feels odd, I know," and his voice seemed to come from everywhere, behind me, against me, all around me as Daniel's finger slid into me past the knuckle.

"It doesn't hurt, does it?" and he sounded concerned even as he slid out and pushed back in with two fingers, stretching me, filling me very oddly full.

"N-no," I managed to choke out. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel good, either. It felt odd.

"Just hang on," he said, and I thought that was an odd thing to say to a man who had someone else's fingers in his ass.

"Christ, Jack, it's so hot in here, hot and slick." He was moving his hand, moving his fingers, stretching, exploring, pushing, and I was frozen in place, trying to relax, all the little explosions that had been travelling up and down my body before now on pause, in suspended animation, wondering what the hell was going to happen next.

And then it happened.

He touched something, brushed something, and a dark, hot, almost painful burst of pleasure spread through my body like someone had detonated a grenade in there.

"THAT'S it," and he sounded very pleased with himself as he moved his fingers again and I moaned out loud and ground my ass against his hand.

"Hang on," he said again and slid his fingers out of me. I could feel him shifting behind me, rubbing the rest of the stuff along himself, and I felt empty and aching, not nervous at all.

"See, I knew you were letting me do this because you felt guilty and you figured I deserved to hurt you back."

He moved his leg, tangled between mine, to open me up more and I felt the smooth blunt head sliding along between the cheeks.

"Or just because you were so hard up and achy that even the idea of something up your ass sounded good to you. Even if it did hurt."

Was there anything he didn't know?

And did he ever shut up?

"And you were right, Jack. It is going to hurt. But just for a minute. If you trust me."

And before I had time to get nervous again at all about Daniel shoving his dick in my ass, he PUSHED

and the head popped inside me

and it did hurt, it did, and I couldn't help clenching, and that hurt more, but Daniel said

"Relax, Jack, relax,"

and I wanted to do what he told me, so I tried, I really did, but it hurt, and it hurt more when he started to slide that whole massive solid cock of his inside my ass, which apparently was smaller than it should be, because this couldn't possibly be the way this was supposed to work, but he did keep sliding and keep sliding, until finally I felt his groin nestled up against the cheeks of my ass, his stomach against my skin, his chest against the length of my back, and his arms wrapped around my chest while his face rocked back and forth against my shoulders.

"Oh Jesus, Jack, Jesus," he was breathing against me, and I could hear him panting. "You're so tight..."

I felt so full of Daniel, so surrounded by Daniel, that there wasn't even room in me for air to talk, but somehow I managed to gasp out a couple of words, "Too tight?"

"Just relax, just relax, I promise..."

"Are you... all in me?"

"I'm all in you," and I could feel him shudder against me, all around me, inside of me as he said it. "It's glorious, you're glorious..."

And some small part of my brain thought, who says "glorious" when they're fucking someone?

But he was pressed up all around me, and I could feel the vibrations of his voice through his chest, into my back, and that was pretty fucking glorious.

The arm he had under me, wrapped around me, reached out and grabbed my hand, wrapped his fingers around mine as he pulled it closer to my chest. He wanted to hold my hand while he had his cock inside me.

He was still Daniel. Still sweet as sugar.

And that helped me relax.

"I'm going to move a little, Jack," Daniel gasped. "It might hurt a little, but I'm going to go slow, okay? Very slow."

And it did hurt, an achy, stretching hurt, but the sounds Daniel made as he slid himself slowly out of me, very slowly, and then pushed back inside me, were a world of good in themselves.

Anything that could make Daniel sound like that...

And the second time it was better, it didn't hurt, it was still an odd, slow, filling sensation, a filling sensation that made me feel more hollow instead of less, that started up another kind of wanting, deep inside me where I'd never felt it before.

"Okay?" he said as he stroked himself out of me and into me again.

"Okay," I whispered, and squeezed his hand.

"Hang on," he told me again, and I did, hanging on to his hand, pressing back into his body, because whatever he intended to do, I wanted it done, too.

And still slowly, very slowly, the muscles in his belly and thighs flexed against me as he pulled himself smoothly back and forth, sliding back and forth, until he unexpectedly moaned, very loudly, right in my ear, and I could feel him clench me in his arms. I was shaking.

"It's too good, Jack, and I'm not finding..."

"It's good, Daniel, it's good," I reassured him, because the feel of him flexing against me, around me, fucking me, was very good indeed. He was sweating now, and I was sweating too, as if this was very hard work, but it was easy, very easy.

But he slid down against me, moving, adjusting, and then when he pushed himself into me again...

That grenade went off again, and I bucked, hard, against him.

"Finally," he sighed as if I'd just declared world peace.

He didn't pick up the pace, he kept fucking me slow, but now the hard, slick part of Daniel that was inside me pressed up against something good, something very very good, every time he pushed inside me, and it made me moan, and writhe, and push myself back against him.

It wasn't good.

It was incredible.

And my cock started to throb, reminding me it was there, reminding me how badly I needed to touch it, and I reached for myself blindly, eyes shut as I pushed back onto Daniel pushing into me.

But "Nuh uh" he said and, quick as a snake, grabbed my free hand with his free hand, pulling it back against me too, wrapping me tight in a Daniel blanket that was all over me, inside me, fucking me senseless into a pleasure I could barely stand.

And I know I made protesting sounds, just sounds, because the only words I could think of were "Please, please, please."

And now Daniel was rocking against me, harder, faster, biting my neck, biting my shoulder, and typical of Daniel, he still seemed to be able to talk, because what he grunted was "Told you. Wanted you. Needed you. Told you. Knew it would be like this."

And I struggled to get my hand back, to touch myself, because if I didn't, I might break down and cry, it felt so good, so close, but not quite there.

His arms and chest flexed, and the muscles in them were hard against me as he held me tight, refusing to let go, making me hold still.

"Nuh uh," he said again, though I could tell by the way he fought for breath that he was close, very close. "Hold still."

And I don't know why, but I did, I kept my hands where they were, and he let go one, moved his free hand, stroking it hard down my chest, down my jerking belly, pulling me back against him, tighter.

"'Cause the person who gets to do this," his voice hissed in my ear, along my neck, "will be me."

And then he closed that strong hand around my swollen, struggling cock, and I screamed, plunging forward into that warm soft grip, plunging backward against that invading aching pleasure, my whole body burning with an ecstasy that stopped my heart, stopped my breath.

"Come for me, Jack."

And even as he told me to, I did, feeling myself explode, hearing myself cry out, listening to Daniel's voice as he whispered into my hair, his hand pumping at me, his cock fucking me, and I came so hard I thought I might die and I was happy, so happy, tears streaming down my face while I shouted his name while I came and came all over the bed we were in together.

And Daniel's voice never stopped while I felt him shove against me and jerk inside me and burst with hot come, shooting it into me, and I was glad I wasn't the only one who couldn't make it last forever, who crumbled under the weight of ecstasy like a paper doll.

And then we were both gasping for breath, clinging, sweaty, to one another, the aftershocks of two heart-stopping orgasms making us tremble and grip one another as if we were saving each other from earthquakes.

Finally Daniel was quiet. He just clung to me, slippery against me, fighting for breath just like I was.

We had run out of things to tell each other.

When he started to get soft, he moved, a little, away from me, and as he slid out of me I made a little sound of protest.

And he made a little sound of sympathy, as if he understood.

But just in case he didn't, I hauled on his arms, pulling him against my back, slick and messy and perfect, and I said fiercely, hoarsely, all I could think of to say.

"I don't want to lose you, Daniel."

And he, still breathing hard, squeezed me tight against him, just as tight against him as I had been when he'd been inside of me, and told me, "Don't be stupid, Jack. You can't lose me."

And I let him clean us off a little with the towel, let him throw it on the floor, wrap himself around me, and pull the covers up from where he'd tossed them and drape them over us, and I breathed in the scent of the two of us, and what we'd done, and I fell asleep, finally, not looking at Daniel but holding on to him as tightly as I could.

---

It was not even remotely possible that Daniel could have gotten out of the bed without waking me.

Twenty years of special forces training didn't just disappear down the drain overnight because I was tired and completely worn out.

Why not? a little voice said inside my head as I realized I was alone in the bed and snapped back to consciousness. Forty-odd years of acting straight went right out the window as soon as Daniel offered to fuck you.

Shut up, I told the little voice, checking the other rooms in the house. Was he gone?

You're right, the little voice said, it was sometime before that, sometime after you touched his face but before you touched his dick.

He could not, could not have left this building without my knowing about it, I told myself in disbelief. No matter how tired I was.

Or how bonelessly relaxed from an orgasm that could have killed a weaker man, I admitted to myself.

He couldn't be gone, I told myself even as the search went faster, and I started looking in rooms I'd already looked in, looking in the shower, stopped myself forcibly from looking in closets or under the bed.

He wasn't here.

He'd walked out the door sometime when I was asleep.

He'd shown up, ripped out my brain, taken my heart hostage and fucked me, and then he'd left.

He was a ruthless bastard.

I started the search again, this time for clues.

They weren't hard to find.

There was a sticky note on the front door, probably slapped there just as he was leaving. I guessed I wasn't quite forgiven for the things I'd said.

It said, "Do what you want about the SGC."

And under that he'd written in smaller print, "No Charge."

Yep, that was a hit to the solar plexus.

"Nice one, Daniel," I told him, but he wasn't there to hear.

---

It took me a couple of days just to be able to start thinking.

I didn't want to think about him. Daniel, my Daniel, the one who'd been here in the house, was for feeling, not thinking about.

But Daniel, the one on my team, the one back at SGC, had to be thought about.

It wasn't hard to imagine all kinds of reasons why he'd come here. He'd come to work things out with his old friend, someone with whom he'd just gone through a horrifying ordeal. Because of whom he'd just gone through a horrifying ordeal.

And, I now knew, he was the kind of person who seemed to be able to make terrifyingly clear distinctions between what happened to him and how he felt about what happened to him.

It'd be easy to figure that he'd come here to get comfort from the person who'd hurt him. Happens all the time, they write books about it. But I didn't want to think that of Daniel, and I couldn't take thinking it of me, and I was exhausted thinking of all the things that I wasn't, or should have been.

So I had to assume that he'd come here to work things out, so I could go on working on SG-1, just like he'd said. He'd come prepared to sacrifice his own place on the team to get me back; that's how serious he was about it.

And unfortunately, the horrifying ordeal we'd both been through had involved crossing a lot of lines, a lot of boundaries, boundaries about sex and pain and a bunch of other stuff, so that apparently, a lot of the normal walls that were between us had melted away at the first opportunity.

And you gave them that first opportunity, the little voice inside my head that I was hating said to me, but I ignored it.

Fine, so I'd always had a thing for Daniel. Fine, so I let it get the upper hand with me. Fine, so I'd needed some things too, things Daniel was willing to let me have. I shouldn't have, but I took them. I was only human after all. I'd never been the one to start the rumors that I wasn't.

I was no galactic hero, that was for damn sure.

And Daniel was...

Oh forget it. I wanted to forgive myself. I'd had years to learn how. It still wasn't my best thing. I could try. But usually forgetting was easier.

That was it, then. This time, I had to do it that way.

If I went back to SG-1, I'd have to forget, now, not just what I'd done when the snake in my head had been running the show, but what I'd done here, in my own house, with Daniel.

And Daniel had forgiven me for the first part, which he shouldn't have done, which I wouldn't have asked him to do.

But I had no idea what he thought about the second part.

And, since I couldn't bring myself to ask him, I'd probably never know.

I'd never before had such a monumental burst of weakness. I wasn't just angry at myself, I was appalled. I bitched loudly about the pain of battle wounds and the inconvenience of paperwork so that when it came to the important things no one would notice me locking down on myself, giving myself no options, allowing for no weakness where none could be allowed.

And instead of keeping control of myself, not just because that was my job, not just because that was the way it had to be done, but because of what I'd just put him through, years of innocent little wonderings and fantasies about Daniel Jackson had just crashed into the real world and become something much different.

Maybe the doc and Hammond had been right. Maybe I needed more time to get a grip on myself.

Maybe it was just that I'd had trouble handling everything I'd learned all at once, I tried to reassure myself. About Daniel's past, about what Daniel had done to rescue me, about how sure I was that I was going to lose him.

About how much I didn't want to lose him.

Don't be stupid, Jack. You can't lose me.

When I went into the kitchen two days later, I found the yellow coffee mug he'd drunk from, the one he'd rubbed his lips against, when he'd sat here just being all the things I wanted so badly.

You're the real deal, he'd whispered into my ear, which had been damp from his tongue. The moment I had given up being jealous of the coffee mug.

The real what, I wondered. All I was, was an Air Force colonel. A good one. Admittedly. I blew things up, I took things out, I took people down.

I fought.

That's what he'd wanted me for, he told me. To fight. To win.

That's what made me worth anything for him.

That's what made him want me.

If he had wanted me.

No, there was no way I could beat myself up over that one. He'd wanted me. He'd told me so. I was through with not hearing him, even if I disagreed with him. And that, he'd practically had to bleed to get me to hear.

He had wanted me.

And maybe... if I were willing to entertain the the thought...

I couldn't stop thinking about when he was inside me. No point in pulling punches about it. I didn't even dance around the words in my head. It had been way too direct for that.

When he'd had his cock deep inside me, his hand on mine, taking exactly what he said he wanted, what I'd heard was...

Well, to be honest, I'd heard strings.

Violins, violas, cellos, basses, yes, all the strings, with a full orchestra, and voices, swelling sounds that were glorious the way Daniel had said it was glorious to be inside me.

Crazy bastard, I told myself, running a thumb over the handle of the coffee mug.

Good thing Daniel isn't here for you to tell him that, I told myself.

I meant me, I told myself.

Then I squinched my eyes shut.

When -- when it had gotten to that point, when Daniel was coming, when he had me locked in his arms, in his hands, what he'd said, what he'd been muttering into my hair, I was sure, even though it had been hard to hear over the strings and the choruses of alleluias, had been

My Jack. Mine. Mine. My Jack. Mine.

I was sure I'd heard it, ghostly hoarse as it had been, sounding pulled out of him by the force of his coming, by the force of us holding on.

I knew it. I knew that's what he'd said. I could hear it in my ears. That's what he'd said, right before...

Don't be stupid, Jack. You can't lose me.

If only he wouldn't forget. That's what he said. I would hold him to it. It was like a promise, right?

So maybe... Maybe, if I wanted to at least try to be optimistic about this, maybe...

Maybe he would try. Just a bit harder. To look out for himself.

It had felt, and sounded, an awful lot as if he were making love to me.

And if he loved me, maybe it would be tougher for him to die on me.

My hands, divorced from the rest of me, squeezed the hard yellow mug.

Yeah sure, I told myself. That's not the guy you are. You are not the guy for whom people cling to life.

You are the guy who wins the war and loses everything else. You know this story. You are the guy everyone leaves.

Before I could stop myself I'd whipped that mug at the wall. It made a satisfying crunch as it shattered. The pieces scattered everywhere.

Oh yeah. That was the guy I was.

I was the guy who broke things.

---

There was really only one choice to make, it just took me a while to make it.

Took me a while to get my brain back to where I was used to it being. Tamped down here, lazy slouch there, relax, make jokes, get the Doctor to sign my clean bill of zen masterhood when I finally showed up at her door.

George was as good about ripping up my resignation as I could have wanted him to be, and a hell of a lot faster.

It'd be easy, I figured. Back in the mountain, wearing BDUs, handling crises, doing Jack type stuff. It was good stuff. And I knew how to do it. I knew how valuable I was, how worthwhile I was, while I was doing it.

That's what people liked me to be. Colonel Jack O'Neill, reporting for duty, sir.

And put the way you raped Daniel in the back of your mind, along with burnt dead babies, children with assault rifles, and land mine victims, OK? Good man. Get back to work.

I went straight to the debriefing room because George had told me he'd have SG-1 there to discuss a possible new mission.

And I pretended not to look at Daniel, who sat looking stunned while Carter leaped up and hugged me, and Teal'c stood and bowed, and George didn't stand, just grinned, and gestured me to a seat.

And I pretended to be normally pleased when Daniel said, "Yeah, Jack, it's good to have you back," as though that weren't the only part of this moment that I'd remember when it was over.

And I spun my pen and pretended to listen, which was also normal for me, while Carter gave us a little talk about naquada mines and what she'd discovered about how to locate the ore, which was normal for everyone, so normal that it was hard to believe how not normal it would be for the rest of the billions of people on Earth who weren't part of SG-1.

And I didn't really have time to pay attention to the part of my brain that was trying to tell me that it wasn't what had happened on the mother ship that I was going to have trouble getting past if I wanted things to be the way they were.

Don't be stupid, Jack. You can't lose me.

God, don't let him forget. He had to have meant it. He had to.

It was Daniel making love to me that was going to be hard to get past.

---

I think I'd been pretending to myself that Jack was on an away mission somewhere.

None of us talked about his resignation. We didn't talk about the mother ship, either. And we certainly didn't talk about Osiris.

We talked about other things, research things, in my case, and showed up for work every day as if we didn't wonder whether or not we still had a commanding officer.

Or supervisory officer. Not that it mattered.

As if we didn't wonder if we still had Jack.

Teal'c was stoic about the whole thing. I think he was more certain than anyone that Jack would come back. He has this whole thing where he understands Jack better than Sam or me, something about things they've done, "damn distasteful things", as Jack once said, that Sam and me don't get.

At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

And Sam was tense but her way of showing it was to work, and she showed up in my office every hour or so to tell me what she'd discovered, which was either her way of externalizing her research results or her way of checking up on me, I'm not sure which.

We'd gotten into a rhythm, showing up at work every day, seeing each other in the hallways and in the mess hall, chatting about things as if we weren't wondering if Jack was going to come back.

So that when he walked into that debriefing room, it was a shock, more than a shock, to realize how much we'd all been pretending. Not just me.

But now they could stop.

And I had to keep pretending.

Seeing him walk into the room, same old Jack, looking just like he always looked, sounding just like he always sounded, didn't just surprise me, it shocked me.

How could he be so much the same, after...

And then it hit me. He'd been the same old Jack after the mother ship, after the Goa'uld. At least, he had been to me. I'd been worried about how he'd see me. But to me, he had been still the same Jack. I'd wanted him to be able to think of me as the same old Daniel.

Now he wasn't.

And I wasn't the same Daniel, either.

But he looked the same. As if he could be the same, just by willing himself to be the same.

I didn't know if I could do that.

---

I didn't remember anything about the meeting, except a tense silence when I suddenly realized General Hammond was talking to me. Since I hadn't been listening, I said something stupid, and they all stopped looking at me.

Surely they'd cut me some slack.

I went back to my office and considered how I might barricade myself in there, and for how long.

I'd been crazy to withdraw my request for reassignment to the Pentagon. I didn't belong here. I shouldn't be here.

Janet was right, all the times she kept telling us we needed rest, needed down time to recuperate after something apocalyptic. The General was right. People didn't make the same decisions when they were rattled. They didn't make sane decisions.

They didn't spend forty-eight hours begging to suck a straight man's dick.

Looking back now I couldn't figure out why I'd felt so utterly cut adrift, so panicked. Everyone's mission reports were sufficiently circumspect. I'd forgotten that, given half a chance, the social status quo will reassert itself after even the sharpest of upheavals. Against all odds, my secrets about my past were still my secrets. Sam and Jack both had to have some problems with that, especially if I was, as Jack said, kind of a poor security risk because of them.

Or whatever he'd said.

I could believe I'd gone to Jack's house, could believe I'd persuaded him to come back to the SGC. If I'd had anything to do with it. I had no idea.

But I couldn't believe the way I'd reacted, how I'd leaped upon him at the simplest of touches...

Well, no, I couldn't entirely say that, could I?

If I were going to be honest with myself, I couldn't help remembering the moment in front of the mirror --

oh god how could i even think about that here at the base--

when for no readily apparent reason Jack had kissed me. He'd kissed my neck. I was sure of it. I wasn't misremembering.

And then when I'd asked him to go farther, he'd...

No, I wasn't crazy. It had been his idea. Something about the whole situation, or the moment, or something he needed...

It really had felt as though Jack was making love to me.

I couldn't trust my instincts on that. Not any more. I had good instincts about people, about reading people, I thought I did. But this one, I couldn't peg at 100% sure. Just no way.

I was too rattled, all my gauges were off, I was completely uncalibrated over... over everything.

Janet said I had a right to be, and she should know. Nobody stitched me up like Janet. Nobody took better care of me after I'd been infected with alien viruses, had my brain implanted with alien devices, or gotten addicted to alien technology, than Janet.

Except Jack.

Jesus, why had it surprised me when Jack hadn't caved immediately to my demands to let me treat him like my own personal amusement park? Where had I gotten the idea that I had to make him give in, had to have him before I could leave him alone?

What was it that I had needed so badly to take from him?

Jack tried to look out for me.

And even when I resented it -- because I didn't need it -- it was reassuring to know that he was there doing it. Trying to look out for me.

And now, even though I'd told him I'd wanted him back at the SGC, I was also the one person who'd made it harder for him to come back.

I could tell he hadn't been looking at me, not really looking at me, in the debriefing room.

Maybe he'd never really look at me again.

---

I didn't know how long I'd been sitting at my desk, considering burrowing under it, when the knock came at the door.

And I don't know why it surprised me when I opened it and it was him.

He was standing there, in base uniform, one thumb hooked in his belt, with that off-center, one-hip-cocked stance, and he looked like the biggest, most macho military guy on this planet or any other planet in the galaxy.

Jesus Christ, I thought to myself, I fucked John Wayne. I could feel my knees starting to shake.

"Hey, Jack," I said as if I weren't suddenly horrifyingly nervous, as if I weren't wondering if my voice would actually crack. "Come on in."

He stayed standing there, and his eyes burned into me and held me still when I would have fidgeted away from the door. Actually held me still. I couldn't have moved.

"Just wanted to make sure you hadn't changed your mind. About having me back."

How could he stand there, so calm, in the hallway, asking me that?

"This is where you need to be," I managed to stutter.

I had to have been insane. There was no other reason for it. It could not, could not have been me in a sane state that had said those things and done those things to Jack O'Neill.

Why not? I asked myself. It was you who tried to kill Sarah.

That wasn't me eith... I told myself.

Yes it had been.

I wished the little voice away. For the moment.

"Long as you're sure," and his voice dragged out the last word as if it meant something.

It must have meant something, but had no idea what.

"Just so you know..." and he had me fixed again with those dark eyes, no hint of Jack humor in them, not the way I liked to see them, but the way they certainly seemed to be around me of late, "... just so you know, I'm going to hold you to what you said."

What? What? What had I said? What? What was this, now?

And my brain, helpful brain, played back for me:

"...if I come back to the SGC like you say you want, this can't happen again, can't have happened in the first place, if you get my drift."

"Oh yes." I nodded as though it had something to do with weapons, or chewing gum, or some other reasonable thing to be discussing. "Of course. Not to worry. I won't forget."

"I'm counting on you not to."

And then I swear, I swear, he looked at my lips, which were open, and which I had probably just licked because I was nervous. And in a completely different tone, in a voice which had nothing to do with Colonel Jack O'Neill, legendary commander of SG-1, in a voice that reminded me suddenly, sharply, of Jack shaking in my arms, he said, "Don't forget."

And then he left me standing there, open-mouthed, wondering who he was, and who I was, and what the universe expected of us.

I turned slowly, walking back into my books, my artifacts, leaving the door open, wishing for coffee, all the time my brain completely adrift.

And realized I should have asked for more downtime.

Because now I had to figure out how to act knowing that Jack had come back to the SGC just like I'd wanted him to, to keep being Jack the way I'd asked him to.

Knowing that I wished, just now had realized that I'd wished, for something else entirely.

It's wishes that you can't help making. You can stop falling in love. You can make yourself stop. It hurts worse than hell, but you can do it. You can make yourself do whatever has to be done. But there's no way to stop yourself from making wishes, especially when you keep them hidden from yourself, way down deep inside where they're safe from the light of day, safe from assassination.

And my wishes, I realized, had a lot to hide from me.

I sat at my desk, playing over in my head things Jack had said, things I'd known at the time he hadn't wanted to have to say but had said anyway because he knew no one else would say them. They still made me angry.

"They didn't even have to restrain you, Daniel. That didn't look like fighting to me."

I learned to fight because you wanted me to. To fight your way. Hurting other people. And killing them.

"You're telling me you'd let yourself be raped for pocket money, but you wouldn't get off an old friend just to save the world?"

I can't even tell if I care about the world any more.

"I'm scared of what you want."

I'm scared of what I want too, Jack, I told him in my head now that he was no longer here, now that there was no danger, no danger of my saying it to him in person.

I'm losing track of what I'm willing to do, and for what reasons.

But I know I'd do anything for you, silent-killer-Jack, trained-sniper-Jack, showing-up-at-the-SGC-looking-like-Daniel-hadn't-fucked-him Jack.

My Jack. Mine.