Title: Another World
Author: Am-Chau Yarkona (amchau@popullus.net)
Written as part of The Let's Get Daniel Jackson Laid Ficathon, for nostalgia_lj
Pairing: Jack/Daniel
Rating: R
With: angst. Without: bizarre kinky sex games.
Betaed by: Raven
Stepping in to the SGC is always like stepping into another world, and that—even to someone who's quite used to the change—means a shift of emotional gear-stick. When things at the SGC have been in havoc for a couple of days, stepping out is an escape or a release, meaning time to relax, time to spend with Daniel without worrying about whether someone's trying to kill them. Over the years, it's come to mean time to indulge, time to sleep with Daniel, maybe even have sex.
Of course, there are times when he steps out of the SGC on business, and then it's not quite the same feeling.
Today, he's not stepping out at all, he's stepping in. The thing is, walking to the SGC today is an escape. With the concrete corridors around him and his rank nestled like a rifle butt on his shoulder, he can put aside the things he's worried about and concentrate on what matters.
Jack hopes—prays—that he can in fact concentrate. If he's thinking about what Daniel said and he makes a mistake, he'll never forgive himself.
* * *
With the barest nod to Jack as they pass in the corridor, Daniel hurries to his office. There's a folder of papers—mostly pictures—showing the inscriptions the MALP found on the latest planet, and he has to see them as soon as possible. Translations in the high-speed world of the SGC are a tricky thing, requiring delicacy and hard work, both rather faster than they teach in universities.
He hopes Jack isn't upset. He left rather abruptly last night, citing the need to get some sleep before their return to work in the morning, but Daniel suspects the conversation had been rather upsetting him.
It's not a script Daniel recognises, and without a language to work from it's going to be next to impossible to translate. He has a go, anyway, though, looking for patterns in the indistinct shapes-- did they really have to get the MALP out so fast it couldn't wait for noon rather than photographing carvings in the dim dawn?-- and trying to relate them to something meaningful.
He hopes the atmosphere's breathable. He wants to meet the natives, because that'll give him a chance.
Jack doesn't really like meeting natives. Changing patterns on spec are well enough, but there are social customs he takes time to adjust to. Daniel wonders if the things they'd talked about last night weren't pushing that sort of boundary-- the line Jack refused to cross.
But how could you know where a man's lines were, without asking, without pushing to see what reaction you got? Daniel sighed, turning back to the soothing patterns of the recurring possible-fish symbol he'd noticed in the script.
Possible-fish. It could be a letter, or a stylised pictogram, or a logogram, or just a squiggle.
Whatever it was, it looked like a fish to Daniel, and bigger than anything he'd ever seen Jack bring home from one of his fishing trips.
When he'd agreed to join the USAF, he'd thought his chances of meeting someone to fall in love with were very small. Soldier-women were rare, and wouldn't want an archaeologist for a boyfriend; and bi or not, men in the Air force wouldn't be prepared to risk losing their careers.
Then he'd met Sha're, and for a while he'd thought he'd live out the rest of his life in wedded bliss.
Then... stuff had happened.
He'd wept on Jack's shoulder one night, and perhaps that had been the turning point, or perhaps it had been buried somewhere deep in their evolving friendship, mismatched though they were. A few drunken fumbles had turned into a drunken night together, after which he'd feared everything lost. Instead, though, it lead to moderately-sober fumbling, which lead to... other things.
To Daniel's mind, nice but vanilla things, and in a fit of honesty, he'd said as much to Jack.
Who had left in something of a hurry.
The next one along could be a flower, five petals in a round. It cropped up after the possible-fish twice, and once before it, but never on its own. Probably a language feature, but whether phonology or grammar Daniel couldn't tell at this stage.
He cursed Jack O'Neill for a bastard with an inability to communicate effectively, and started making notes to present to General Hammond.
* * *
Sometimes, Daniel muses, the SGC isn't a place, it's a conduit. On one side is Earth, with all the mess and joy (and occasional danger) that implies; and on the other side is the rest of the universe, with all the mess and danger and rare joy that brings with it.
The planet is murky-dim, all the time; apparently some sort of meteor strike years ago raised a dust cloud, killing the inhabitants. Sam rattled on about this teaching us things about how the dinosaurs may have died for a couple of hours while they were out there, while Daniel slowly resigned himself to never hearing the language spoken. Any buildings were wooden and had rooted away; all that remained were heaps of stone, some of them engraved.
He wanted to launch a full-scale dig, find out who the people were, where they came from, what sort of beakers and burials and brains they had, but there was no technology and no useful minerals, and with a sinking sense of certainty he knew he'd probably never return.
He took what notes he could, using them to block out the clear sharp images of Jack's face from the night before, shining a bright torch on the inscriptions and seeing in the real rock possible-fish, flower-shape, steam-curl, and yet failing to make them give up their shroud of untranslatability.
The ground was dead, the plants gone in lack of light, and Sam said the atmosphere was disintegrating, the chemical balances shifting in some way.
Daniel thought he knew how the planet might feel, stripped of its comfortable plant-life and its atmosphere. The atmosphere in his apartment had turned sour like that.
"You never tie me up," he'd joked when Jack had asked if he'd enjoyed the sex, thinking half-seriously that it would be fun to let Jack do just that, but Jack had tensed and asked in an odd voice whether he'd ever done that for real.
"Once or twice," Daniel had shrugged, trying to pass it off. He had, too, but it wasn't like he couldn't live without. At college, there'd been a boyfriend who liked to have his feet restrained while he was being fucked—something about not wanting to wrap his legs around his lovers' back—and Sha're, once introduced to the idea, had enjoyed the feeling of control, not just of being on top.
The tumbling rocks startled him, and he leapt backwards.
"For God's sake pay attention, Daniel," Jack snapped at him. "Just because a rock's got squiggles on doesn't mean it can't pin you to ground and crush your ribcage."
"Um, yeah," Daniel agreed, shaken with the mixed images of Jack and rope and rocks and being pinned down. "Sorry."
He moved back towards the rocks, intending to see if their movement had revealed any new inscriptions, but Jack—glancing around to see that Sam and Teal'c were out of earshot—pulled him back. "Be careful, Danny," he said, softly but menacingly. "If you get hurt, I'll let 'Ferocious' Frazer have her way with you, and then I'll kill you slowly with my bare hands."
Daniel wanted to ask if that was meant to be a declaration of love, but the rules of their relationship strictly forbade any such word when they were off-world.
"I promise not to die again," Daniel said lightly, and pulled his arm out of Jack's grip.
* * *
Passing through the SGC didn't remove the immediacy of their brief altercation on PX-whatever. The Stargate carried them home, the SGC stripped them of their reports and their opinions and their uniforms, and then spat them out into the noon sunshine of a Colorado spring.
"Want to come over this evening?" Daniel risked, when they'd left Sam behind in her lab and Teal'c in his candlelit room.
"Okay," Jack nodded, hopping into his truck. "I'll bring beer."
"Okay," Daniel said, almost ashamed to be unable to summon more eloquent words, but knowing that if he could they wouldn't be what Jack wanted to hear.
* * *
"What you said the other night," Jack says, when they've drunk beer and are leaning on each other on the couch. He doesn't take his eyes away from the television, where brightly coloured people play hockey or soccer or Daniel doesn't know what else.
"Yeah," Daniel says, guardedly, not wanting to reopen old wounds.
"You're… I mean… you don't mind that we don't… because…" Jack begins, realises he's not making sense, and takes a deep breath. "'Cos if you don't mind I think we won't because frankly you being a man is more than enough for me to cope with," he says, rushing the words out like a task force to an emergency, and takes another long mouthful of beer.
"That's fine," Daniel says. He thinks he might be smiling, which is probably a bad plan, because Jack doesn't like it when people notice that he's uncomfortable.
He's definitely smiling. Jack's thumping his shoulder. "You…" Jack growls.
Daniel kisses him before he gets any further; almost everything is muffled under the over-arching flavour of cheap beer, even the warmth, but at least it shuts Jack up.
Under him, he feels Jack relax, though when he ends the kiss and opens his eyes, only inches from Jack's face, he realises that Jack still hasn't taken his eyes away from the game.
"Jack," he says, and tries to make it clear that the warning tone is a fake. "If you want to keep our happy little vanilla friends-with-sex-benefits arrangement going, it might help if sometimes you stopped watching hockey when I want sex."
"It's not hockey," Jack tells him, grinning, his eyes still annoyingly on the screen.
"I don't care," Daniel says. He knows the door is locked and they're alone, so he reaches over and delves down under the waistband of Jack's pants. Jack's grin broadens. He doesn't look at Daniel, though.
Daniel knows full well that Jack is trying to wind him up, but he feels like playing along tonight. There will be chances for revenge, and maybe not so far in the future, either.
The hand that's reached Jack's pants starts to undo his fly, while Daniel sends the other one hunting for the lube that he carefully concealed somewhere earlier this evening. Probably under the mass of American Archeology Journal back-numbers… yes, he's got it.
He always knew there would be advantages to being mildly ambidextrous.
Watching Jack's face—waiting for the moment when Jack stopped reacting to the movements in front of his eyes and started reacting to the movements in his pants—Daniel began to jerk him off, gently at first (fingers outside the cotton boxers) then harder (slipping inside, pulling them down, and the first hint Daniel had that his actions were being paid attention to was the way Jack's hips bucked up to assist with that operation), then lube and a firm grip and Daniel timed his movements carefully to the sounds the television produced, pulling extra hard when the crowd cheered, and slowing when there was a moment of tense silence.
He could see Jack getting closer and closer—his eyes were nearly shut, he was starting to concentrate on Daniel's hand—the commentator said there were only seconds to go, the ball moved, Daniel rubbed upwards the way he knew Jack liked, the crowd went wild, and Jack cried out as he came.
A minute's panting, head tipped back and eyes closed, probably listening to the beginning of the post-game round-up, and then Jack opened his eyes to Daniel's smugly grinning face.
"You horrible man," Jack said, smiling and half-laughing and frowning, "that final goal was against my team! Now I'll always get a hard-on when they lose."
Daniel shrugged. "Doesn't bother me," he said, and Jack pulled him down to smother that irritating grin in a kiss.
"It will when you find yourself associating sex with, oh, mis-stored artefacts or something," Jack threatened.
Daniel just laughed, thrust his hips against Jack to remind him that he was to repay the favour, and kissed him again.