Strange Interlude

by ELG

Chapter 4: Paradise Lost

It had taken days of back-breaking work cutting down palm trees with stone axes, making ropes from lianas and binding the stripped trunks together to make a raft that would have done Crusoe proud. Although neither of them had ever built a boat before, O'Neill had a bone-deep practicality that had always left him able to construct tree-houses, go-karts – his sisters had regretted the loss of their doll prams it was true, but he had let them have the occasional go in the kart to make amends – and sleds, with pretty much any materials that came to hand. Daniel was not a naturally practical person, but he had a lot of book-learning about different native crafts and as an archaeologist he was extremely dexterous. If O'Neill could chop down a tree faster, Daniel could twist rope with a speed and efficiency O'Neill could only admire. Wishing vainly for oil drums for better buoyancy, O'Neill hoped the palm trees would turn out to be as light as the balsa wood in which Thor Heyerdahl had apparently crossed the sea from South America to Polynesia, a feat Daniel had told him about rather too often for his taste. He'd insisted they made the raft big, twelve feet by eighteen with a mast in the center. Daniel had told him size wasn't everything and O'Neill had said 'Oh no…?' with a brief break to dispute the point.

Afterwards, as they washed off the sand, they continued the discussion in between kisses. Daniel was all for them constructing a 'wa'a kaulua', something that sounded more like a cocktail than a mode of transportation to O'Neill but which Daniel insisted was a double-hulled canoe, saying it would be more light and flexible in the water than the raft, which was, in any case, reaching the size of a small country and please could they stop adding to it now? O'Neill had pointed out that even though the raft seemed huge on the beach, that still only left six feet from the mast and whoever might be sitting underneath it to the sea.

When Daniel said 'So…?' with that cute little frown putting a dent between his eyebrows, O'Neill kissed the end of his nose and said that in this case Daniel had to realize that sea equaled sharks and he was afraid they might also realize how damned edible Daniel was. Daniel gave him a totally goopy look then, all sweet and embarrassed because O'Neill had kissed him and paid him a compliment. He got more hot and bothered with flirting than he did with sex. O'Neill wanting to have sex with him clearly didn't seem that odd to Daniel. Just something macho men did when there was no women around, presumably, especially macho men who were imminently going to die if they couldn't get away from the shadow of the volcano. It blotted out the fear and fried the pleasure circuits for a few minutes for both of them. But O'Neill kissing him on the nose, or kissing his eyelids, or putting his arms around him and nuzzling into his hair, that turned the same athletic bronzed confident guy who had earlier been eagerly wrapping his impossibly long legs around O'Neill on the beach and pretty much vacuuming O'Neill's lungs out of his chest, into a shy, clumsy schoolkid being asked out on his first date. He would sit next to O'Neill on the sand shooting him sideways looks from under his eyelashes that O'Neill wasn't meant to see, trying to work him out and coming away baffled every time.

O'Neill had spelled it out for him in those all-important three little words, and he knew Daniel believed him. Daniel knew that he loved him. He'd known that for years. They loved one another the way family members did, there hadn't been doubts for a long time about what it would do to the other if one of them died. And now Daniel knew he desired him too. O'Neill had certainly given ample demonstration of just how desirable he found him in the way he couldn't go longer than a couple of hours without having to kiss him or touch him or much, much more. But he thought the anthropologist in Daniel might have been having too much input into the debate currently going on in Daniel's over-active mind. Probably telling him it was a warrior thing, or an all-male society thing, or a temporary thing, what men did when they were stranded somewhere and there was this much love and trust between them, a make do and mend mentality for those women-free days. It was a little difficult to prove you really wanted to make a commitment when for all you knew you were going to spend the rest of your lives on a world where there wasn't another human soul. It probably didn't carry quite the same conviction when you told the love of your life he was the only guy for you when the only serious competition around came from the monkeys.

Thinking of the monkeys, O'Neill really wished Daniel would stop worrying about them. It was true that that small troupe of golden-furred long tailed black-faced creatures were pretty endearing. After years of only having one another to interact with and observe, O'Neill and Daniel were clearly the monkeys' idea of the best show in town, and O'Neill was hardly even inhibited now by the way they always seemed to have a furry voyeur watching them every time they got sweaty and excitable together. Some of the babies were fearless and one had taken half a banana-type thing out of Daniel's hand only a few days before. O'Neill had watched Daniel gazing at the baby monkey the way women looked at kittens and said, "No."

Daniel looked at the baby monkey, looked at the grumbling volcano then looked back at Jack with that wistful, begging expression on his face that had always turned O'Neill to mush, even from the days back on Abydos. "Daniel, be practical," he begged, barely stopping himself from making the sign of the cross to ward off the big blue eyes. "If we take any monkeys on the raft with us, quite apart from the fact they would drown when the first wave came along, we would end up eating them, or the sharks would end up eating them. They have to take their chance here. They survived before when the thing blew. They'll survive again."

Daniel was still gazing at the monkey, smiling because it was cute, but with his eyes full of sorrow because it was probably going to die soon. He dabbled his fingers in the sand and the baby rushed him, touching his fingers and then running away whooping with a mixture of triumph and fear.

"Don't get fond of them," O'Neill ordered.

"Okay," Daniel said but he was still watching the baby and when it rushed him the second time, it grabbed at his t-shirt and held on then gave him a gentle love-bite on the neck before rushing away again.

"Daniel…." O'Neill begged.

Daniel looked at him reproachfully. "They could be the last of a species that has died out everywhere else on this world."

O'Neill threw up his hands. "Daniel, I am trying to save our lives here! Neither of us is a sailor and the swell out there is pretty damned scary. Not to mention the sharks."

At the mention of 'sharks' Daniel got that faraway look in his eyes again and O'Neill sighed in defeat. The trouble with Daniel having missed out on so much popular culture was that he sometimes came at things from entirely the wrong angle. While O'Neill was hearing John Carpenter music and seeing body parts washed up on the beach, Daniel was remembering the tale of Ducky-Wacko or whatever he was called, the Fijian sea god.

"Just because they're carnivores doesn't mean they're going to eat us. Dogs are carnivores. We're carnivores. Well, omnivores through evolution but in the days of us being hunter-gatherers we would have been classified as carnivores – "

"Sharks are bad and they eat you, and that's all you need to know about them, except what they look like so you can hit them with an oar."

"Actually, in ancient Hawaiian folklore, some shark gods were worshipped as protectors of a certain district. Like Ka'ahupahau and Kahiuka, who were a sister and brother who were born human but later transformed into sharks. They lived in a cave at the entrance to Pearl Harbor and watched over the people of Ewa, guarding and protecting them from man-eating sharks. The man-eating sharks tried to blame her for their own crimes but without success. Haven't you ever heard the proverb 'Ha'ahewa no niuhi ia Ka'ahupahau'?"

O'Neill rolled his eyes at him in disbelief. "Yeah, we say that all the time in Minnesota. It's right up there with 'Everything tastes better with cheese'."

Daniel gave him one of this best martyred sighs. "It means 'the man-eating sharks blamed Ka'ahupahau', meaning, evil-doers blame the person who safeguards the rights of others."

"And that's relevant to us not ending up dinner for a Great White how exactly?"

Daniel was saved having to answer by the baby monkey finishing its half a banana thing and coming sneaking back to grab the second half. For a few seconds, Daniel and the monkey wrestled for it and then Daniel let the fruit go and the baby grabbed it triumphantly, going whooping up the beach to show its prize to its less courageous older brothers and sisters. Daniel watched it go, looking stricken.

"We can't take them with us." O'Neill used his full-bird colonel voice. "And that's final." He felt victorious for about two seconds as he saw Daniel take in that he was not going to be budged on this so there was no point in arguing with him, then when he saw the defeated slump of Daniel's shoulders felt like a bully and a heel. He reached out and stroked his hair helplessly. "I'm scared enough about trying to keep you alive."

Daniel reached out and touched his face. "I know. I'm sorry. I just wish…." O'Neill kissed him and he melted into the kiss, rubbing his face against the man's stubble, seeming to like the beard the man was half-heartedly growing despite still taking the time to shave each morning himself. O'Neill kissed him again, deeper this time, and then Daniel was on his back on the beach and he was kissing him over and over, fierce and tender at the same time, stealing another few breathless moments back from their fear, time just for them and nothing and no one else. He was only slightly distracted by the baby monkey coming back to pelt him with torn up bits of banana-type-fruit skin from a nearby palm tree in what was a clear sign of disapproval. O'Neill looked up at the furry creature in between pants as he hastily unbuttoned himself and said, "Everyone's a critic." Daniel pulled him back down into another kiss, which was so groin-stirringly hungry it more than made up for the mild sting of bits of peel being hurled at his bare ass. All the same he did think it was ironic that even here, on the other side of the galaxy, with no humans here except themselves, there were still sentient beings around who thought Daniel was way too good for him and O'Neill should go play with himself instead.

 

O'Neill was haunted by the thought of those sharks he'd seen following the tuna, and thinking of Daniel's lack of coordination, imagined him just slipping over the side one night while O'Neill was asleep and being snatched up by eager jaws before O'Neill had a chance to help him. He'd woken up streaming sweat after a particularly vivid nightmare, and even though it had been in the starlit hours of morning, he'd gone out onto the beach and started building a crow's nest construction around the mast. Something they could lash themselves to when tired so they couldn't slip over the sides. As the days passed and the volcano still didn't erupt, that had grown into rigging effect with a roof on it to shelter them from the sun, and the two rough-hewn oars had become smooth and perfectly shaped with sanded handles without a splinter in sight, then notches carved into them and liana bound around it for a better grip. He used the woven walls of the temporary cabin to make a roof for the shelter on the raft, insisting that it was important they kept the sun off themselves. Daniel had helped him build it. They worked together surprisingly well. Daniel didn't always have the sense to move out of the way of a tree that was about to brain him, but he was enough of an anthropologist to be good at the fiddly bits O'Neill didn't have the patience for. He was the one who'd ground out the rowlocks and then worked out the locking system that held them in place, lashed in tight between two of the raft logs.

They had built the ramp from which it would be launched, ready to roll into the tide. Daniel had regretted the mess they'd made, all those felled trees, mankind doing what it always did to untouched wildernesses. O'Neill had found the stumps just as ugly, but had told Daniel roughly that they were all going to burn away so what difference did it make? Daniel had looked at the monkeys again, watching them from the trees they had been careful not to cut down. O'Neill had said again, "We can't take them with us."

Daniel said, "I know."

But when O'Neill came back from emptying the fish trap he found two of the younger ones taking fruit from Daniel's hand again, a baby climbing up his back using tiny fistfuls of t-shirt, before tugging curiously at his hair. Their mother watched over them from a branch. She was the most nervous, the only one who hadn't yet taken fruit from Daniel's hand. Today O'Neill noticed her belly was bulging. She must be pregnant again. He thought of the lava setting the trees on fire, the monkeys screaming as they burned, and yelled at Daniel to stop fuckin' feeding them, they weren't pets. They had their own lives.

Daniel just looked him and gave the baby a piece of fruit. He had his stubborn expression on. He said, "It's just in case."

"Just in case…what?"

"There was a way to evacuate them. It would be easier to do if they were tame."

O'Neill snatched the fruit out of Daniel's hand and hurled it back into the jungle, the monkeys scampering after it, shrieking at one another as they did so. Only the baby stayed, hanging around Daniel's neck, sucking its thumb pensively as it looked at O'Neill. He sighed. "There is no way to evacuate them. They have to take their chance here."

Daniel didn't answer him, he just gave the baby another piece of fruit. O'Neill swore and made a fire, then cooked the fish in silence, knowing all the time he did it that Daniel was still resisting a reality he had already accepted. When this place went up nothing else landbound was going to make it, and all they could do was try to save themselves.

A part of him still hoped they might never have to use the raft at all, that it would become their equivalent of those boats guys kept in their yard in landlocked areas, that they spent every weekend sanding and varnishing but never actually got wet. But the volcano seemed angrier with each passing day and the local troupe of monkeys had taken to staying close to the beach now, a tight-knit family group of them who followed Daniel wherever he went, albeit from a safe distance, as if they knew he was their only hope of rescue when the explosion came.

***

O'Neill though that seeing the way Jacob hugged his daughter was another pointer to how shaken up everyone was by the loss of Doc and Colonel Green-Eyed Monster. He knew the Jacob in his universe wasn't given to displays of public affection and by the look of surprise on Major Carter's face, he figured it was the same here. That kiss he dropped into her hair wasn't meant to be seen by anyone else. Or that squeeze of her hand as he interlaced his fingers with hers. He'd been assuming the Carter in his dimension was a lot closer to her father than the Carter in this one, with them both being Tok'ra, whereas this one was only an ex-Tok'ra, but no, there was the same feeling of connection between them. That familial closeness that almost nothing else could match. What his Daniel had lost. He turned to see Daniel smiling at Jacob and Carter, happy because he knew how happy the Carter he knew would be at some affirmation that her father loved her. There was never any longing in his eyes when he watched them together, no hint of envy, he was just always so pleased for Carter. Impulsively O'Neill put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him close.

Daniel looked up at him in surprise, saying softly, "What?"

"Nothing." O'Neill saw that half-smile cross Daniel's face, pleased but a little bewildered. "You're just very sweet."

Daniel dropped his gaze at once, embarrassed and pleased, deepening his voice the way he always did when he was trying to disguise how touched he was. "You're getting sappy in your old age, Jack."

O'Neill watched Jacob slap Teal'c on the shoulder in greeting, like an uncle with a nephew of whom he was particularly proud. His nod to O'Neill was guarded. "Colonel, good to see you again."

"You too, General."

Jacob frowned as he looked at Daniel. "Doctor Jackson, I presume?"

Daniel held out a hand. "Pleased to meet you, sir."

"Good of you to help us look for our…lost lambs."

Daniel's smile was a little brittle, his eyes a little sorrowful, but nothing could have been straighter than his spine as he said softly, "Any friend of Jack's is a friend of mine."

Jacob darted a quick look at O'Neill, one that clearly demanded to know if this Daniel had been told about his relationship with the other one. O'Neill barely resisted the urge to roll his eyes at him and glower, instead giving a tight little nod of confirmation, but he was getting a little sick of being treated like the Marquis de Sade. Yes, he'd had sex with the Daniel from this dimension. At the time he hadn't thought it was any big deal. He had sex with people all the time as long as they were young and attractive, and Daniel was both of those things. He seduced a lot of people. They had all, without exception, enjoyed being seduced. He had done nice things to them in bed and they had liked it. Where was the crime? Except he knew what the crime was; it was because the person he had seduced was Daniel, and that was something you just weren't allowed to do unless you were planning to spend the rest of your life with him. Daniel was too emotionally vulnerable, too brilliant, too injured by life, too innocent, too trusting, too willing to think the best of everyone…basically just too darned special for someone as bargain basement and ordinary as himself yadda yadda…. They hadn't actually put it in those words but it had been made clear to him in sighs and looks of disapproval and half-swallowed reproaches that this was the case. Dumping Daniel, of course, just put him entirely beyond the pale. If he'd been in some regiment in Victorian India they would have been handing him the revolver and telling him to go outside and do the decent thing by now. Cheating at cards would have been as nothing beside it.

Sighing wearily he followed the others onto the tel'tak. It was another heap of junk the Tok'ra seemed to be holding together with bits of baling twine and crossed fingers; showing that some things didn't change whichever dimension you happened to be in. He'd visited a lot of universes when on that 'inter-dimensional initiative' for which at the time he had won so much praise, and in every one the Tok'ra had been making do with geriatric equipment running on re-bored crystals and hope. As he took his place in the main deck, thinking how much he hated this gold Goa'uld glyph motif they were all decorated with, it occurred to him that he probably wasn't the only one doing some soul-searching. Hammond hadn't minded him fucking someone else's archaeologist when he'd been having an affair with that other Daniel. Kawalsky had been doing enough nudging and winking to ensure that only the blind or deaf could have missed the real reason why the other dimension's 'cultural expert' was so happy to cross space and time to exchange ideas with their O'Neill. Back in those days all he'd ever got from Hammond in the way of reproach over his sex-life had been the odd shake of the head, but even that had been indulgent, a hint of pride at his track list of seductions behind the surface disapproval. It was only when the Daniel Hammond knew had fallen under O'Neill's spell that the rockets had been launched. He supposed it was an inter-dimensional variant of the same hypocrisy that made men proud if their sons could seduce other men's daughters but ready to kill the sons of other men who approached their own girls with dishonorable intent. He certainly had every intention of killing, gutting, and possibly cooking and eating any guy with a track record as shabby as his own who attempted to pay his respects to Katy in the future. There were times when double standards shouldn't just be tolerated but possibly embraced.

"You okay, Jack?"

He turned to find Daniel proffering a cup of something that smelled more enticing than it looked.

He nodded, taking it gratefully. "Yes. You okay?"

Daniel looked at him in surprise. "Do you mean the Tollan thing? It seems to be working fine."

"You okay with the whole…?" There was a look in Daniel's eyes that told him not to go there and he backed off at the last minute, waving a hand to encompass the gold-paneled gloom of the tel'tak. "You know…Dimension-crossing thing?"

Daniel sat down on one of the uncomfortable bed-type things the Tok'ra seemed to think were good enough for long journeys although they really weren't. "If I don't think about it too much."

O'Neill nodded. "Yeah, me too. All those possibilities."

"All those different versions of us playing out every different fork in the road we ever came to." Daniel screwed up his face. "It ought to be reassuring, and I suppose on one level it is, but on another level it's--"

"A fast track to a padded cell if you think about it too much?"

Nodding, Daniel absently took the drink from O'Neill's hand and sipped at it. "All those variants of us."

Carter looked around at the 'padded cell' reference, a clouded look in her eyes he couldn't quite categorize, but at that last comment from Daniel she blinked in surprise before turning away again. O'Neill felt suddenly empty with the realization that although in his world, he and Daniel were the originals, and all the others the copies, to these people, he and Daniel were just pale carbons of the ones they knew. He felt homesick for his own dimension abruptly and looped his arm through Daniel's without thinking about it. It occurred to him that when he'd found the proof of all those dead doppelgangers in the dimension where he'd first met the other Daniel, he hadn't thought of them as real, not thought of there being people waiting at home for them. A part of him had thought they'd known that they were somehow counterfeit, their lives less vivid and less valid than his own. Now, he realized it really didn't work like that. If he and Daniel died in this world, others here would shrug at the loss of them as long as their own versions were safe. He realized too there was a good reason why people should remain in their own dimension, so they never had to confront the proof of their own insignificance unless they were unwise enough to constantly gaze at the stars.

He felt very vulnerable all of a sudden. He knew it was irrational, probably the result of his own guilty conscience about the many in the past whom he had loved and left without even the benefits of emotional alimony, but it seemed too much like life to him that just as he had found someone to whom he wanted only to be faithful, that the one he loved should be taken from him. No doubt Daniel could have quoted models from Greek drama at him, blinded patricides whose children were doomed from birth, and reluctant matricides pursued by Furies, all proof that one's destiny could never truly be sidestepped, that one's sins would always have to paid for, but even without the benefits of a classical education he had learned to be suspicious of the way the world unraveled in its supposedly artless chaos. Impossible not to look for patterns in the universe even long after one had rejected a world order ruled by any god. He still wondered if there was some cosmic rule out there that stated there could only be one version of each person alive in any given universe at the same time for a reason, and that it couldn't be circumvented by any technology, even something really clever dreamed up by the Tollan. In some part of his mind, illogical though he knew it was, he was already starting to believe that the price which would end up being paid to bring the other Jack and Daniel home safely would be the lives of this Jack and Daniel. Looking at the young man next to him, blue eyes quizzical as they gazed at O'Neill with compassion and concern, he knew that fond as he was of the Daniel who had been lost, that was a price he really didn't want to have to pay.

***

O'Neill had got into the habit of thinking that their lives ended with the launching of the raft. He'd looked at the swell beyond the rocks and the waves were enormous there, great white tipped breakers like sheets of blue-green glass, and there were also those dark dorsal fins cutting a line through the water. He looked around the island and his heart lurched when he thought of leaving it. The dark wet tangle of the jungle, all those brilliant splashes of primary colors amongst the greenness: birds and flowers, and butterflies and snakes. This has been their home and a part of him had fallen in love with it. This place had given Daniel back to him, given them food and shelter and the space and time they needed to realize they were more than friends now. The mind-meltingly good sex had been another gift very gratefully received. Now he couldn't watch a lizard basking on a stone without wondering if it was going to be one of the ones to die in the coming inferno. The birds were leaving and that had given them both hope they must have somewhere to go, but birds could fly thousands of miles while he doubted he and Daniel could row that far on their homemade raft, not when neither of them were sailors.

Daniel kept reminding him about the Vikings reaching North America, the South Americans reaching Polynesia, all those great journeys undertaken and achieved by past civilizations, but it didn't really mean squat to him right now. Not when all his instincts were telling him that if they got on that raft they were never going to make it, and the rumbling volcano was telling him that if they didn't get on the raft they were dead. There was also the little detail that Daniel was so obviously telling him about all these great voyages of the past to make him feel better, not because he believed they were going to survive. Daniel had taken to looking at him with longing, to wrapping his arms around him when they slept at night, touching his hair, pressing against O'Neill's back or chest and inhaling the scent of him. If he had ever doubted it before at least he knew now that Daniel loved him, because the look in Daniel's blue eyes these days was the expression of someone who was afraid he was going to lose someone he loved and would rather die than see that happen.

He knew what that expression looked like so well, because he felt the same way. He was looking at Daniel now and all he was thinking about was how curious and kind and maddening and smart and beautiful and unique he was, how much he loved him and how if he lost him he wouldn't want to go on living.

Daniel was asleep in the cabin so he was free to look at him at leisure and had pushed open the hanging curtain of the doorway to do it better. The light carried with it the smell and sounds of the sea, a faint salt spray, a fainter dusting of sand. Daniel was lying on his back on their bed, naked, one leg a little drawn up, long dark eyelashes a thick feathering on his cheek, mouth slightly open, lower lip shining with moisture as he licked his lips in his sleep. The illness had left him thinner and finer, waist more slender than ever, but the days of working on the boat since had built up his muscle tone again in his forearms, and the fresh air and sunshine had banished his sickbed pallor and the shadows under his eyes, putting golden highlights in his hair and leaving him lightly tanned all over. He looked more appetizing than a happy meal to a starving man, but O'Neill did have to admit to a certain relief that whatever Daniel might look like lying out here naked, the man did have several PhDs and an IQ that went off the scale. Otherwise it tended to make O'Neill appear a little shallow, given that he was now dating someone in earnest who was younger than him, blonder than him, and such a total…babe.

He knelt to examine the scar tissue again, to see for himself that everything had healed. There was a shiny patch of skin on Daniel's right thigh, which he stroked gently. Then there was his appendix scar, a pale pink caterpillar on his golden skin. The wound to his hip had hardly left a mark, he had to look for that one, but the wound on his left shoulder was unmistakable, a little jagged from the uneven stitches, a pucker of pink scar tissue left when the projectile had punched its way into his flesh. He kissed that wound gently, letting his tongue stray across the tiny ridges of healed skin. Daniel stirred, murmuring something incomprehensible in his sleep. He still dreamed in the language of his dead wife. It should have made O'Neill feel excluded but it moved him in a way he couldn't articulate. Because he knew how that felt too, to lose the one woman you loved with all your heart, with no defenses, no reservations. You'd had them once and thought you'd be together forever, but now they were gone and your heart would always ache for them. What kind of a man would one be if it didn't?

"Sha're…?" Daniel jolted awake, reaching for someone who was gone. His hand touched O'Neill's arm and his eyes opened in shock.

O'Neill swallowed. "She's gone, Daniel."

Daniel blinked at him in confusion for a moment as he awakened then leaned forward to kiss him very gently on the lips, as if to make certain he was real. He stroked those long sensitive fingers down O'Neill's face, gazing into his eyes as he did so. "But you're here...?"

O'Neill smiled gently. "I'm definitely here."

As he was pulled down into a kiss O'Neill offered exactly the amount of resistance air offers to a dropped anvil. They kissed passionately and tenderly, tongues intertwining, exchanging saliva and whispers and the salty metallic flavor of themselves. As O'Neill pulled back he saw the heat rise in Daniel's eyes that he was feeling in his veins, a reflected flame, and then he was bending to mouth his neck, then lick his chest, his nipples, the faintly salt-flavored taste of his skin, so smooth and warm against his lips and tongue, his body a familiar wonder because its perfection always surpassed his memories of it. He licked lines across his belly, glistening snail trails of desire, avoiding the waking interest of his loins for the moment. Instead he kissed the inside of his thighs, that impossible softness of that skin, then the faint dusting of fair hairs upon his legs, the taut muscle of his calves, the bone of his ankles, the vulnerability of his toes. He felt Daniel tense and flex underneath him in response, every sinew rippling to the touch of O'Neill's tongue, and needed to be on top of him then, feeling skin against skin, heat against heat, want against need. Snatching up the shell of coconut milk Daniel kept beside the bed in case of night thirst, he splashed some of the sweet whiteness into the hollow of his hand, then reached between them to stroke Daniel's cock with it, the limp weight of it abruptly straining to eagerness, a pulsing column rising from the soft fuzz of hair at his loins. Even that hair was several shades lighter than O'Neill remembered it from their first kiss on the beach.

"Oh Jeez." He bent to drop featherlight kisses across the taut belly, up an imaginary line between the curve of his ribs to the hollow of his breast bone.

"What's wrong?" Daniel's voice was deeper with lust, a snatched intake of breath making his broad chest rise and fall quickly.

"I'm dating a blond." O'Neill closed his teeth on one rosy nipple, making Daniel gasp before he could voice an objection. Through an erect nub he murmured, "And you're younger than I am. That means I'm shallow and a cradlesnatcher."

"What does that make me?" Daniel returned.

"Probably a bit of an airhead. Being a blond and all."

"I'm not a blond!"

O'Neill straddled him, bending down to brush his mouth across Daniel's moist parted lips. He slicked his erection with a coconut milk wetted hand, making him gasp. "The evidence is against you." He stroked his own cock as he slipped his tongue into Daniel's open mouth and felt Daniel's fingers gently moving his aside before wrapping themselves around his member and beginning to bring it to hardness with quick sure strokes. O'Neill broke the kiss to grab air, skin beginning to prickle with new heat radiating from his wakening cock. "Think you're better at this than I am these days, do you?"

Daniel licked his lips provocatively. "Yes."

"You think you know better than thirty years of skilled practice?"

Daniel pumped his now hard cock, the coconut milk dripping over both of them. "I think I leave your thirty years of skilled practice for dead."

O'Neill swallowed hard as his member swelled eagerly in Daniel's hands. "He seems to agree with you."

He cupped the back of Daniel's head with his hand and pulled him in for a deeper kiss, their tongues intertwining again, comfortable with one another as old friends. His desire quickened at once and he kissed Daniel again, deep and slow, then tantalized his mouth with his lips, his tongue, the softest caress of his mouth before plunging in for another deep kiss. As Daniel made to reach for him he splashed the cold coconut milk across his body, making Daniel gasp with the shock of it, then, with a slow look at the supine man that let him see all the heat in his blood, O'Neill bent his head and began to lick off the milk. Daniel jerked against him and their cocks touched burnished lengths, sensitive heads brushing against one another. O'Neill moved his hips in a slow forward glide and their scrotums jostled, slippery with spilt milk, nestling against one another like a new and much more interesting form of geometry. Daniel closed his eyes, luxuriating in the sensations. As O'Neill licked one nipple clean of sticky sweetness, he had a sudden memory of himself in kindergarten trying to get the square pegs to fit into the round holes and hitting them disconsolately with the wooden mallet when they wouldn't cooperate. He snorted with laughter and Daniel opened his eyes in surprise.

"What?"

O'Neill grinned and licked him again, a sweep of the tongue across his abdomen. "You have every reason to be grateful to my kindergarten teacher."

Daniel gave him an under the eyelashes look, suspecting he was being teased. "Why?"

"She was the one who took my hammer away. Told me to work it out logically instead."

"What were you trying to learn?"

O'Neill licked him again, rubbing his stubble against Daniel's stomach to make him squirm and jolt against him, the way he always did, like a kid being tickled, although there was nothing remotely childlike about that jutting erection that stabbed O'Neill in the chest. "The way things fit together." He gave Daniel a filthy leer, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Daniel giggled. There was no other word for it. Looking so sweet and so young and so endearingly silly that O'Neill found himself looking at him with a kind of wonder, smiling because he looked so happy, but with a kind of catch in his heart too. He said gently, "I do love you, you know."

Daniel's mouth gave an embarrassed little twitch that was almost but not quite a smile. He'd looked like that when O'Neill told him that he believed in him, after Sha're's death when Daniel had been so wounded and difficult and in need of affirmation, then when the affirmation had come he'd looked as if he thought there must be a catch somewhere and, as he realized there wasn't, had been so extraordinarily touched by it. "I know."

O'Neill studied him for a moment. "Do you?"

"Yes." Daniel looked up at him quickly, trying to appear positive. But he was discomfited by the change of mood, happier wading in the shallows of their erogenous zones.

O'Neill bent and brushed his lips gently with his. "You really truly deeply madly know I love you?"

"Yes."

"For now and always and ever and ever?"

"Jack…." Daniel flashed him a quick look of protest.

"What, I'm not allowed to get mushy now?"

Daniel looked up at him from under his eyelashes. "You'll just wish you hadn't said it later."

"Because I'm such an unevolved troglodyte?"

"No. Just because you're…you."

O'Neill kissed him again. "You're a very strange man, Doctor Jackson. You'll let me do all kinds of illicit and possibly illegal things to your naked body but if I start trying to tell you how I feel about you, you get all hot and bothered and embarrassed."

"You're the one who said life isn't a chick flick."

"I was having an unevolved moment." O'Neill gazed into Daniel's eyes. "Do you love me?"

"Yes!" It came out exasperated and almost resentful. Then as O'Neill continued to gaze at him, the irritation vanished from Daniel's eyes to leave only the helpless longing. "Yes." That one was soft and wistful. "You know I do. When have you ever not known?"

Too many times to count when Daniel was pissed with him or yelling at him or going off with strange women or other men with his face. But he didn't say any of that now. Not least because none of that mattered now. O'Neill thought of all the times they'd fought and all the times they'd felt their hearts turn over as they thought the other one was hurt or lost or dead. All the times they'd been there for one another. "You know for a smart guy you're pretty dumb sometimes," he observed conversationally. "How could you ever not have known I love you? Look at all the crap I've taken from you over the years. Look at all the really idiotic things you've dragged me into because I couldn't say 'no' to you. Look at all the times you gave me gray hairs –"

"Oh, so I'm to blame for the gray hairs now?"

"You were always to blame for the gray hairs. How many did I have when I met you, do you remember? No? I'll tell you: none. As in zip, zilch, squat, zero. By the time I'd known you for three years the brown hair was just a distant memory."

Daniel rolled his eyes. "I can't believe you're blaming me for the gray hair! Did I ever get myself stuck on a sub that was about to be blown up?"

"Did I ever let a fish-guy vacuum the contents of my brain?"

"Did I ever get an alien language downloaded into my brain?"

"Did I ever end up invisible and out of phase?"

"Did I ever get myself trapped on a world with a broken Stargate…?" Daniel looked around the cabin and wrinkled his nose. "Okay, don't answer that one."

"Hah!" O'Neill kissed him again, hard. "Got you there, Jackson. You can never throw Eudora at me again."

Daniel kissed him back, long fingers furrowing through his hair, tongue wrapped around his in a tonsil-bruising, breath-taking, heart-stopping kiss to end all debate and all doubt. O'Neill felt the sticky heat of Daniel's body against his, the thump of the his heart, the eager jut of his loins. He moved his hips and their cocks stuttered against one another, another push and they were parallel as passing trains just scraping the paint from their carriage doors, and then at last they found their now-familiar rhythm, flesh colliding in a burning friction that built from the balls up, arrowpoints of pleasure, lightning jolts to the groin, faster, harder, Daniel pulling him in to a deeper kiss, a stumble in their rhythm, a bruising collision of testicles that made him yelp. Daniel snickering into his open mouth. O'Neill kissing him hard in punishment, reaching down to get them back on course then taking his weight on his arms, wondering why Daniel always bagged the easy position, then remembering before he protested that he liked it this way, Daniel there looking up at him in that 'take me, I'm yours' manner. A quickening of desire just at the thought of it, a long slow push, almost too hard, making Daniel wince, mouth open, sweat trickle, eyes glazed, at the thought of being entered, what he always thought about when they did this. O'Neill seeing the flicker of it in Daniel's blue eyes and an answering flicker in his own at the thought. Sometimes denial was hotter than the act itself. Both of them knowing what they wanted and not doing it but sharing the thought all the same. Daniel licked his lips deliberately, pupils expanded until his eyes were dark with desire. Nothing turned him on faster than the thought that Daniel trusted him that much, desired him so completely, needed him like breathing. Nothing seemed to turn Daniel on faster than the realization that he was wanted, could inspire that kind of desire yet could be loved enough that the one who wanted him would still deny himself. Not that O'Neill had been denying himself or Daniel anything very much recently but right now it felt like the right thing to do… Another slow hard push, their cocks slippery with coconut milk, heated with lust. Then quicker, shallow, cock sliding against cock, perfect friction, hips moving faster, faster, starting to sweat, to pant, to grunt in his case, to moan in Daniel's, their own passion exciting them, whispering hotly in Daniel's ear, kissing the side of his face, eager, hungry, kissing and licking at ear, cheekbone, jaw, throat. Bite.

"Yes…!"

Pleasure ripped from him. He came explosively and at the hot splash of O'Neill's come on his belly, Daniel convulsed underneath him, the movement jolting the bite into something deeper. Daniel gave a strangled cry that had nothing to do with pain and O'Neill felt him shudder and tremble under him, Daniel's warm semen spurting across his cock in a way that made it eager all over again. He opened his mouth, easing his teeth out of the soft skin of Daniel's throat and winced an apology as he tasted the blood on his tongue. Daniel was looking at him open-mouthed. "You vampire," he panted breathlessly, putting a hand up to his bleeding neck.

"You liked it," O'Neill returned accusingly.

Daniel wrinkled his nose again, looking off into the distance in the way he did when dissembling. "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't."

"You came like an avalanche!"

"You lie like a rug."

Fingers tightened on his arms and Daniel demonstrated his new muscle tone with a deft move O'Neill and Teal'c had tried and failed for years to teach him in the gym. Lying flat on his back with Daniel on top of him looking much too pleased with himself, O'Neill narrowed his eyes. "Oh great, now there's only me around to use it on, you finally learn some self defense."

"You bit me." Daniel looked down at him, a thin trickle of blood running down his neck, then moistened his mouth in a slow tantalizing flick of tongue gliding across lips. "You're a bad, bad man."

O'Neill growled as his cock twitched in response to that tongue tease, and abruptly flipped Daniel back over onto his back, straddling him purposefully. "Want me to show you how bad?"

"Want to show me you can?" Daniel darted a skeptical look between O'Neill's legs and at the breathtaking cheek of it, O'Neill felt his limp groin give another indignant twitch.

"I don't take any longer to get it up again than you do."

"Yes, you do."

"No, I don't." Another kiss for punctuation.

"You do too." Blatant passive-aggressive eyelash batting while lying around looking naked and delectable and thinking himself safe from all punishment.

O'Neill kissed him. Soundly. Daniel responded by returning his kiss with lung-sucking enthusiasm while wrapping his arms around O'Neill's neck, his legs around his body, and rubbing his groin vigorously against O'Neill's. O'Neill felt his higher brain functions retreat, his body go into an ecstatic spasm, every skin cell reveling in feeling the silky heat of Daniel's coconut-milk scented body rubbing against his, and then he was abruptly flipped over to his back again and Daniel was giving him a last teasing kiss, a flicker of tongue tip slipped between his lips, before springing to his feet with the kind of muscular athleticism that would have done credit to a man raised by apes in the jungle.

As O'Neill gaped at him from an untidy sprawl on the bed, legs akimbo, cock at half mast, panting for the breath Daniel had stolen from him, Daniel gave him a come-hither look over his shoulder that should have been illegal everywhere and then said softly, "Catch me if you can, Jack." Then he was gone. Out of the open cabin doorway, down the steps and onto the beach. Then running with sure swift paces, feet kicking little spits of sand from the beach with each loping stride, golden body gleaming in the sunlight.

O'Neill was up and running after him before he'd even thought about it, barely noticing the twinge of his knees as he took the stairs in one bound. Some things were more important even than cartilage.

The brilliance of the day was an assault upon the senses, the unbearable blueness of the sky, the dazzling brightness of the sunlight. The last few remaining gulls swooped and his balance swooped with them. Far away to his right, on the edge of the horizon line where the sea met the sky in a smudge of torn cloud, a geyser gusted into the air and he thought for a moment it was a steamer. Then a giant fin flipped after a hump of wet grayness and he knew it was a whale. He was torn between regret and wonder, the loneliness acute after that second when he had swung between two possibilities, the thought of seeing other human beings again as welcome as it was intrusive, wanting not to be alone if any harm befell either of them again, wanting this idyll of theirs to stay exactly as it was. On the other hand he'd just seen a whale. To his left the jungle climbed up the sides of the volcano like a thousand mountaineers in camo gear; glossy, green and weary and ultimately defeated. He wondered if the trees could feel the earth beginning to heat beneath their roots. If in the way that flightless birds might imagine how it would be to have working wings again, giant redwoods ever wondered how it felt to dance upon the wind like spinning leaves in fall.

Daniel was darting ahead of him, the soles of his bare feet pink against his new tan. He'd been surprisingly sensible about wearing his boots in the jungle and his soles looked vulnerable and soft, ridiculously clean. His butt though was just poetry in motion, curvy, taut, biteably firm and moving enticingly with each long-legged stride. His butt was a come-on all by itself and O'Neill increased his pace automatically at the sight of it, not even caring that his genitals were joggling unceremoniously as he ran, just tantalized by those little glimpses he was getting of Daniel's equipment.

Daniel sprinted around the south-west corner of the lagoon, a nudist streaking onto a picture postcard, and then he veered off to his left and ducked into the jungle. O'Neill followed him. He felt he was being reduced to his most basic form, his most primal attributes, a male animal chasing its mate, deaf and blind to anything save the possibility of imminent sex. The red earth was still cool here, and where last night's rainfall lay in puddles on the ground clouds of multi-colored butterflies fluttered over the surface to drink until there was barely a ripple of the water left uncovered. The air here was still a pleasant shock to his lungs, all that decomposing matter, resinous mulch, the fragrance of open flowers, the sweet salt breeze of the sea; too rich, too clear, like the bottle of Sarkatvelo the Russians had sent to General Hammond after the SGC had helped them out with that little problem in Siberia. The incessant buzz of the insects was something he hardly noticed any more, although it was always a surprise when he stepped out onto the beach again and there was only the swish-swish of the sea, the mournful crying of the gulls.

It was tricky running barefoot through the jungle, so many gnarled roots spreading knotty tendrils under a disguise of rotting leaf mulch. The monkeys were shrieking, excited by the chase. He knew without looking up at their dark jabbering faces that they were hoping Daniel would escape him. He kind of thought the lizards were on his side, though. And possibly the snake.

Daniel was a flash of pale flesh ahead of him, a flicker of calf, a gleam of dark gold as the sun slanted through the canopy, and then he was veering off again and O'Neill knew where he was making for now and slowed his pace, catching his breath, letting Daniel sprint to the place where the sound of running water was already adding a bass-line to the insect orchestra. It was days since he'd heard a parrot call. The blue and red and green brilliance of their feathers colors stolen from the jungle that he missed.

He wondered if he and Daniel were running from their lust or from each other or from the knowledge that they were going to have to leave here, that the sea was waiting for them and neither of them were sailors. He didn't believe their natural state was permanently horny; not when they had both accepted celibacy for so long with barely a mutter of protest. If romance had come to them back on base they would have proceeded cautiously, slow steps through dinner to formal caresses, passion between them would have come with a faint sense of embarrassment, a sense that they were too old for this kind of nonsense, not to mention that they knew one another far too well to start swinging from any chandeliers with the other one now. But they had thrown themselves into this relentless rutting like two teenagers on amyl nitrate. The Daniel Jackson who lived in his head and was careful of his heart turning into a permanently horny schoolboy always wanting to be sucked or fucked or kissed or stroked. And at forty-four he should have left this haze of permanent arousal far behind. If they ever saw reality again they'd be ashamed of themselves, and probably furtively proud as well, Daniel because he had finally thrown caution to the winds and let his body do his thinking for him, O'Neill just because he'd managed to get it up so many, many times.

As he rounded the corner and looked down into the clearing where the river dropped into a minifall and swirling pool before speeding on its way to the lagoon, his breath caught in his burning chest. Daniel was standing under the falls with the sunlight arcing through it turning the fine spray to a thousand tiny prisms, Daniel's chest heaving from the chase, throwing his head back to let the cooling water splash over him, washing the sweat from his naked skin. He turned to look at O'Neill over his shoulder and his smile was unexpectedly sweet, a little embarrassment in the blue eyes as he realized how come-hitherish he had just been. O'Neill smiled back, amused and good-humored, but aroused as well, very aware of his body, the sweat trickling down his spine, the way his loins were swinging between his legs, turned on by his own nakedness, by even the prickling of an insect alighting on his heated skin, even more aroused by Daniel's nakedness, and the fall of light and water running over him.

He thought he felt the earth stir beneath his feet, like a waking animal after a long dark sleep. No doubt Daniel would tell him this was where dragons came from: the sleeping fire of the volcano, the fossils of pterodactyls embedded in old granite, an interweaving of fact and fantasy in minds always hungry for myth. It would be the need for those myths that would interest the anthropologist in Daniel, and all the different forms the same story took in all those different tongues. From fire-breathing monsters to the possibility of some fount from which all languages might have sprung was always much too short a jump for a linguist. Carter would insist there had only ever been crocodiles and sea snakes and men with too much imagination. He wondered if she'd dissected childhood fairy tales with scientific vigor or if there had ever been a time when she just accepted the impossible: Rapunzel's hair and the spinning wheel on which Sleeping Beauty had pricked her finger, Cinderella and her lost glass slipper, the wily enterprise of Puss in Boots. Charlie had believed in dragons long after he'd stopped believing in Santa Claus. He'd have wanted to know if they were out there somewhere in one of the worlds beyond the 'gate. Although he would have admitted it to no one, O'Neill wasn't entirely sure he'd stopped believing in them either, that a part of him hadn't been secretly hoping that out there in the universe somewhere there might be the leathery winged monsters of his childhood nightmares, a place and time where he could duel with them at last and win.

Daniel was looking up at the volcano as O'Neill waded into the water and pushed through the flow towards him. The current was vigorous, tugging at him like a fractious toddler, but he ignored it and waded up behind Daniel, planting a kiss on the back of his neck. Daniel said quietly, "It's smoking."

"I know." O'Neill didn't look at it. He knew what it looked like, the trickle of smoke rising ominously from the flat top. There would be a crater up there but he'd chosen not to gaze into it. He didn't pick up guns in the SGC and stare into the barrels of them just for fun either. He wrapped his arms around Daniel and began to nuzzle at his neck in earnest. When Daniel still gazed up at the volcano, he began to work on his left ear, licking, nibbling, tugging at the lobeless edge with his teeth. Daniel closed his eyes then and leaned back into his embrace, a tacit compliance, a temporary end to resistance. O'Neill couldn't help wondering if he would have made a lot more headway with Daniel in the past when they were having some ideological disagreement if he'd known back then where all his hot spots were located. He inserted his tongue into his ear and began to flick it around in earnest, wrapping one arm around Daniel's waist, the other around his chest as he kissed a trail down from his ear along his cheekbone and jaw to his neck, licking at the trickle of blood, and then bit gently at the place where Daniel's neck connected to his shoulder. Daniel moaned and arched back against him, cock already rising and O'Neill realized he was getting hard again as well. Perhaps something in the water had aphrodisiac qualities or perhaps the prospect of imminent death really was the greatest turn-on of all. He could feel the current still tugging at them, a foam of white water from the waterfall spreading out around them in ripples. He bit a little harder and Daniel moaned and flexed, then he wrapped his hand around Daniel's cock and began to stroke it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the smoke was billowing up into the sky, smudging the blueness, discoloring the clouds. His mouth was full of the solid angle of Daniel's shoulder. As he licked at it, Daniel shivered, but O'Neill could feel his attention straying between what his body was feeling and that trickle of smoke over to the north-west. He bit down on Daniel's shoulder gently to capture his attention and Daniel moaned aloud, making his own body harden in response. He could feel the slippery warmth of Daniel against his body, and instinctively tightened his grip. For the moment he had him here, in his arms, as safe as he could be, but once they were at the mercy of the sea….

Daniel turned his head, needing to look at him, and O'Neill kissed him, his cheekbone, his jaw, and finally his mouth. Their tongues intertwined as the fall poured over them, light breaking through the water. Daniel turning in his grip until they were facing one another. Droplets of water beaded on Daniel's ridiculously long eyelashes, looking for all the world like tears. The mini-cliff face was angled away from them, a slope of wet rock, as inviting as a sunbed and it was instinctive to take Daniel's upper arms in his and gently walk him backwards. He guessed they would have passed those trust exercises they made people do on team-building days because Daniel just took one step and then another without breaking eye contact or even blinking. O'Neill pushed him backwards gently and, after a flicker of surprise from Daniel, the world's most stubborn and argumentative archaeologist allowed himself to be lowered gently onto a shelf of wet rock, O'Neill's hand cradling the back of his head. O'Neill wondered if perhaps Daniel's stubbornness was in direct proportion to how many clothes he was wearing at the time. Perhaps barking, "Daniel, undress!" in the middle of missions from now on would--

Except there would be no missions from now on. All these weeks of it just being him and Daniel, telling himself that this was all it would be from now on, and he had obviously never quite believed it. But this was reality now. He was never going to see Hammond or Carter or Teal'c ever again. Never going to get one of those annoying little light things shone in his eye by Doc Fraiser. He missed them with a sudden fierce regret. He and Daniel had been given this idyll and enjoyed it, but although it had been heaven as a vacation, it was a life change neither of them had signed up for. They hadn't agreed to give up Carter and Teal'c and Hammond forever. To never listen to Carter talking incomprehensible gibberish about wormholes, her face lit up with excitement as she scrawled equations on a whiteboard and invited them to join in her enthusiasm. He never had. He winced in guilt then, thinking of all the indulgent smiles he had given Daniel when he had been equally boring, because he had seemed slightly childlike to him, and his life had been so crap it was good to see him happy. But Carter had lost her mother as a teenager, and although he loved Jacob like a brother it was difficult to imagine him being too hot at communication skills. Had he ever told his motherless daughter she was still loved? That she could confide in him? Somehow he doubted it. He imagined Carter had known almost as much loneliness as Daniel had. Perhaps the least he could have done was listen to her talking about chemicals and pretended just once that he found it interesting.

And Teal'c… The man was like some brother he had found himself landed with late in life. That sense of connection on first meeting, looking into his eyes and knowing he was seeing a kindred spirit there: that they had both done terrible things, lost people irreplaceable to them and been left as walking wounded, carrying the burden of their losses and their guilt, fired with a need to make amends although they weren't even quite sure to whom. To Daniel, perhaps. Both of them had felt this need to make things up to Daniel. To keep him safe. To make sure the harm that had come to other innocents of their acquaintance didn't come to him. He'd been so busy thinking of his and Daniel's relationship, their partnership, their friendship, their romance, he'd forgotten they were still parts of a larger whole. They would be missed. Missed by people who had the comfort of familiar surroundings and the accompanying guilt. Perhaps they would have receded a little by now but there would be their offices sitting there, silent reproaches to Hammond, who must have called off the search by now, to Teal'c, who hadn't found them in a score of missions looking, to Carter, who hadn't got her sums right this time, because just for once there was no sum to do.

"Jack…?"

Daniel reached up and stroked his wet hair back from his forehead, making O'Neill realize it must have grown long enough for him to do that.

He met his eyes and wondered if Daniel already knew what he was thinking, the way he so often did. "I was thinking about Teal'c and Carter."

Daniel gave him a sad little smile. "I think of them too. There's a part of me that can't accept we're never going to see them again." He looked into the jungle, in the direction of the broken Stargate. "I hope they're okay."

"They'll be fine," he said briskly. They'd strayed into forbidden territory. It didn't make sense to think about the things one couldn't change. He wasn't going to stray into 'if only's. Never had. He had never once said 'I wish Charlie hadn't died'. It was too puerile and too obvious a phrase to get close to that aching hole in his chest where his hopes and dreams for his son's future should have been.

The spray danced over both of them, sliding from Daniel's skin in a fall of light and liquid. "I hope they've stopped searching."

"Don't you want us to be found?" He spoke a little roughly but Daniel took no offence, just looking at him directly.

"I don't want them to die looking."

He'd known that was what he meant, of course. But they'd always kept faith. It didn't matter where they were or how dark things were, it was always his job to say another option would present itself, however impossible it might seem. Daniel would work out the translation, Carter would do the math, Teal'c would find them somehow. He had faked relentless optimism so well for so long he'd evidently convinced himself because he felt panic uncoil in his breast at the silence which stretched too long and which he should have been filling with some assurance that they could still be found, that there might, even now, be a way for them to get home.

As he opened his mouth to say that they shouldn't be talking when they could be kissing, he became simultaneously aware that both their erections had withered and the ground was shaking.

As they staggered off balance, automatically clutching at one another for support, there was the sound of trees cracking, and a sound from the earth like a giant tearing itself loose. Their eyes met and they read as much fear as resolution in the other's eyes. Then they were running, splashing through the shallows, cursing their nakedness, up onto the bank, back up into the jungle they had sprinted through so carelessly minutes before, running past trees that swayed as if in fear, as if they wished they could tear up their roots and flee also. The butterflies were fluttering in panic, a cloud of them before their eyes and O'Neill thought numbly that it was all a case of biology now, those with wings or fins or opposable thumbs had options of survival, those without had none. Darwin would probably have found something about the situation obscurely satisfying, some theory proven. But as he saw a green-scaled lizard scuttle up the trunk of a tree that would burn and die when the lava flow came, O'Neill found nothing about their situation to like. And then he was digging into that layer that lived just beneath his skin. No doubt Daniel thought he was treacle there, but the truth was he was granite. That was the place he needed to find when his immediate loved ones were threatened, the place that gave him the strength to focus on the essentials and to say to hell with all the rest.

By the time they reached the beach, the monkeys were screaming at them. The tide was coming in, the contagious anger of the volcano making it thunder against the beach. Rowing was going to be hard work. They pulled on their clothes in silence, O'Neill trying to get into a state of total concentration, Daniel looking equally grim, equally absorbed. O'Neill even felt he was doing pretty good as he ran through his checklist and realized everything was ready, all the preparations paying off. The provisions of dried fish and the fresh and dried fruit, the water containers filled in readiness, the coconuts hanging from the mast. Then he saw that faint tremble of Daniel's fingers and, looking down, saw his own were equally unsteady. That was when he realized he was scared half to death.

The raft was quick to load. Despite their trembling fingers they had rehearsed this so many times, imagined it in their mind's eye, being out on the glassy calm or the unfeeling pitch and toss of the sea, trying to envisage everything they were going to need, knowing that however many times they imagined it, when they were out there it would always be different from the way they thought. They had ropes twisted and plaited in readiness to tie everything to. There were even ropes to lash themselves to the mast. Thinking of the sharks, O'Neill checked his ammunition again. He'd kept the revolver as clean as he could, given the way the sand got into everything. Daniel kept telling him he should be grateful he wasn't living in an era where he'd have to keep his powder dry. For some reason that always led to kissing. Daniel had stuffed the food into O'Neill's pack, then threaded a rope through the straps to tie it on. Although it was bulging with provisions, somehow O'Neill knew it wasn't going to be enough. He had climbed and climbed the mountain on this island and never seen anything in the distance except an endless expanse of sea. There should have been other islands, the way there usually was in volcanic chains, atolls scattered along a fault line, mountains created by swelling magma. But all he had seen was the sea.

The ground was shaking, lurching underneath them as if it was trying to shake them loose. The monkeys were still shrieking in panic and he tried not to hear it. He ran for the fish trap, not willing to admit even to himself, that he was going to fetch it, not because they needed it – they had a net – but because he could not bear to be the cause of panicked fish caught in it as the lava poured into the ocean and boiled them alive.

By the time he had released the fish and snatched up the track before sprinting back, Daniel had loaded the last container onto the raft and had the two long poles held in his hand, the ones they cut and stripped the twigs from so they had something to push off with that wouldn't risk the oars. They had turned into a pair of control freaks over the matter of the raft, perhaps because it was the last thing over which they might ever have any control. The monkeys were on the beach now, cautiously approaching the raft. Having seen it grow from one felled palm tree to the huge construction it was now, they were not afraid of it, certainly less afraid of it than they were of the strange ripples coursing through the ground beneath their feet, the steam shooting up from the mouth of the high peak of the volcano with a sound like the earth screaming, the restless anger of the sea. As he ran back down the beach, the baby monkey scrambled onto the raft and began to climb up Daniel, making soft noises demanding comfort.

"Put it down!" O'Neill demanded. When Daniel gave him a begging look, cradling it in his arms, he unhooked the tiny creature's fingers from Daniel's clothes with ruthless determination, then dumped the now screaming monkey on the beach. "It'll die if it comes with us!" he shouted at him, as if it was Daniel's fault.

The monkey was throwing a tantrum on the beach now, throwing sand at the raft then rolling over with its arms wrapped around its head, Daniel watching it as if his heart would break. The rest of the troupe were coming closer, all except the pregnant female finding them less frightening than the way the sea was stirring, the island flexing beneath them. "They'll die if they stay here." Daniel gave him a pleading look that on another day he would never have been able to withstand, but today he just cut through the rope that held the raft in place and the rollers worked as they were meant to, launching them into the sea. As the monkeys shrieked at them for this abandonment, the swell did its best to drive them back to the beach, but O'Neill snatched one of the poles from Daniel and dug it into the shallow ocean floor, pushing them forward, away from their island, the broken gate, the cabin he had built, and the monkeys screaming at them from the still-golden sands, propelling them into the uncertainty of the ocean and the salt lash of the waves.

***

The next wave was always bigger, badder, and had he mentioned wetter than the last. The surface swelled and bucked then reared up to wash straight over them with breath-stealing force, the sea like liquid glass, burying them in the freezing shimmers of a thousand prisms. The raft rode the waves awkwardly, lurching up each drenching billow then running down the next with such force it always went under before it bobbed back to the surface, to drench them once again.

Grimly, O'Neill wondered how much they could take of this. They weren't so much fleeing the island as inching away from it, a vigorous haul on the oars would send them skimming over the surface only for the next wave to suck itself out from under them, sledding them under the sea before crashing down on top of them with another shattering of sea glass and stealing of air. At the end of each of those maneuvers they would sometimes find themselves a foot further away from the beach than before, sometimes ten feet closer to it. He could no longer work out if the tide was going in or out, it seemed more interested in tap-dancing all over them with the finesse of a bully in a playground shakedown.

On the plus side, the volcano hadn't erupted yet, although it was still vomiting ash and anger into the dusty sky. On the negative side, Daniel could still see the monkeys on the beach. Except when the next wave was breaking over his head, filling his mouth with saltwater and threatening to snatch the glasses from his face, of course. Then he couldn't see anything. He was being silent and dogged at the moment, that stubborn expression on his face because the sea was thwarting them, but there was a sorrow there, too, which it hurt O'Neill to look at, because O'Neill had forced him to betray living things who trusted him.

As another wave broke over them, drenched them, salt-burned their skin, and left their clothes sodden irritants clinging to them weakly, O'Neill wondered if this was their most futile waste of time since they had tried to 'fix' the gate with a pair of long-nosed pliers and a lot of cursing. He couldn't tell if they were making progress or not. Certainly they were a little further from the beach than they'd been two hours before, and further, he thought, than two hours before that, but the huge outlay in energy was hardly being justified by the few feet they were stealing back from the angry sea. He kept telling himself that when they got past the rocks the sea would calm down but now he had to admit, if only to himself, that it wouldn't. There were too many upheavals taking place beneath the surface, the seabed rippling with annoyance as the molten rocks shifted. There had probably been other islands once, scores of them thrown up by a volcano chain, fertile paradises dotted along a hidden fault line, but one by one the earth had claimed them back again, and now it was the turn of their island to be swallowed whole or buried under lava. And where did that leave them except pulling desperately against boiling waves and furious currents only to escape to an open nothingness on which they would slowly blister and curl under the frying midday sun.

Daniel spat out a mouthful of seawater. "I always suspected outdoor sports were overrated."

Glancing across at him, O'Neill was a little reassured by how strong Daniel looked. A part of his mind was still frozen at the point where Daniel had been a dying invalid, and that expected to see the pale-skinned weak-as-a-kitten man he had needed to spoonfeed just to keep breathing in and out. The reality of Daniel now was this sun-gilded vision of health and strength with those lean muscles across his chest and upper arms that the wet t-shirt he was wearing did nothing to disguise. The wet pants, cut off at the knee, did nothing to disguise the length of long golden legs either. O'Neill pulled on the oar automatically, his body matching itself to Daniel's with what was now the skill of long practice. In bed or out of it they could always seem to find a rhythm. He watched Daniel as his body did as O'Neill's was doing, bending as it pulled against the sea, the muscles on his arms tightening, his stomach clenching in just the way it did when his whole body tightened around –

"Jack!"

He barely ducked his head in time as the next wave rolled over them, hanging on tightly to the oar as the sea emptied itself over them, a gift that just kept right on giving even when the oxygen had run out and there wasn't an orifice left unfilled with blistering saltwater.

"Are you okay?" Daniel asked anxiously.

It was only now that it was so wet that O'Neill noticed Daniel's hair had grown a little. He looked very similar now to the way he had when he'd stumbled out of the ocean after having his brain vacuumed by the fish-guy. Then as now he was a sight for literally sore eyes.

O'Neill turned his head and spat out half a pint of ocean. "You taste so much better."

Daniel gaped at him. "You're thinking about sex now?"

"I'm a guy, Daniel."

"So am I."

O'Neill looked him up and down in all his soaking wet glory. "I noticed."

"I'm thinking about imminent death," Daniel pointed out.

O'Neill shrugged. "Each to his own."

The next wave followed, and the next, and O'Neill had to admit that even he could no longer cling onto thoughts of Daniel naked with his long legs wrapped around O'Neill's eager body when each wave seemed higher and angrier than the next. His muscles were aching, at first his back, then his arms and back, then everything, shoulders, chest, ribs, spine, knees, ankles, every muscle in his body locked uncomfortably into place as he braced himself against the waves. Then there was the sun beating down in the moments when the sea wasn't covering them, not enough to dry or warm them, just a sudden splintering of light to the eyes, a laser glow to the temples that summoned a migraine long before it dried garments about to be drenched all over again. However hard they rowed, the sea was always so much stronger than they were, able to toss them to one side on a whim, push them under, spin them round, throw them closer and closer to the ragged rocks that guarded the entrance to the bay.

They were already exhausted from gaining each difficult foot from the sea, and now there were the rocks to battle with. The swell was terrible here, the waves apparently pulled in all directions at once and some undertow intent on tugging them east, towards the outcrop of rocks upon which gulls were flying up as each wave broke over them, the seaweed glistening green, the rocks black with the swell of the sea. Daniel was rowing with all his strength, the veins standing out on his arms as he pulled and pulled at the oar but the current was still dragging them towards the rocks while the waves seemed to take pleasure in breaking over them with renewed vigor.

"We need to turn it!" O'Neill shouted in the brief pause between one wave and the next.

Daniel nodded and they dug their oars in deep, trying to spin the unwieldy raft around, to catch a current that would tug them past the edge. They succeeded in slowing their advance, but the next wave covered them and pushed them and they both flinched as Daniel's edge of the raft scraped painfully against rock. Daniel kicked off hard from the weed-slippery surface of rocks that O'Neill had already been informed were definitely igneous and probably intrusive. He supposed he should be grateful that Daniel didn't take a moment there to check the grain size. Another kick from Daniel's long legs in a welcome lull from the next wave and they were pushed back into the sea. O'Neill dug his oar in hard, trying to twist them around to catch the edge of the outgoing current, and felt the raft snag and tug the way they needed it to go. The next wave breaking over them almost felt like an old friend, the shock of the cold reduced by familiarity. He spat out another mouthful of seawater and looked across at Daniel, who looked tired but dogged. There had been many occasions in the past when O'Neill had been given cause to curse Daniel's stubbornness but today he was nothing other than grateful for it. The guy had come along way from the poor kid on Apophis's ship saying 'We're blind and we failed'.

"We're going to make it," O'Neill called across to him.

Daniel pulled hard on the oar, their bodies molding themselves to the uncertain rhythms of the sea, a heartbeat they were starting to learn to listen for, a pattern they were starting to sense. He looked across at O'Neill and gave him a smile that was sweet and stubborn at once. "Damned right we are."

Then it was just them and the sea in a three-way battle between their aching muscles, the wash of the waves, and the silent power of the current.

 

The sun died beautifully on the open sea. Daniel gazed and gazed at it, the sky reddening then darkening, then that last faint glow before it sank beneath the waves. He was relieved that it was nightfall if only because it meant he couldn't see the island any longer. The volcano hadn't erupted yet but he had no doubt that it was going to. He couldn't see the monkeys now either but he knew they were there, waiting for a rescue that wasn't going to come. Knowing it was irrational didn't stop him feeling terrible. A part of him believed the monkeys thought that he and Jack had gone for help, not just for themselves but for everyone; except the human race didn't do that, did it? It just cut and run and left every other sentient species to fend for themselves. The way the Goa'uld dropped human hosts off on fertile planets then experimented on them for a while before getting bored and going elsewhere, leaving their slaves to leave and die as chance decided. Power without responsibility.

"Daniel…?"

He blinked and realized he had been drifting off, only the ache in every muscle holding him to sentience. His rowing was feeble now, pathetic crab catching, they should have been going in circles. When he looked across at Jack he saw that the only reason they weren't circling was because Jack was as exhausted as he was, leaning on his oar and barely flexing his wrists to move it. As they had passed the rocks the sea was a little less violent now but all it would take was a turn of the tide and they would be carried back through all the sea they had battled against with such effort to get this far.

"You okay?"

Jack looked anxious in the starlight, gray hair turned to silver, skin oddly pale. Daniel wished that he was close enough to kiss, but there were too many tree trunks between them and they were both anchored to an oar. "I'm fine, Jack. You?"

"Beat." The smile was tentative. "I'm getting too old for this shit."

Daniel found him a smile in return. "Pretend it's sex."

"It's nothing like sex."

"Come on, it's exhausting, it makes you sweaty and makes your back ache, and you can do it over and over even after the point when you think you really have to stop now."

A much wider smile. "If anything could sell me on this being a positive experience, it would be you."

Daniel opened his mouth to retort and then realized Jack had just been nice to him. He missed their cabin. Missed both the lives they'd lost in the last few months. Quiet morning coffees in companionable silence in each other's offices, and their brief idyll in paradise. A restless sea was no substitute for either one. He was already sick of the constant tease of the horizon line, the undulating turquoise nothingness of the sea. "Same here, Flyboy," he said gently. "Wherever I lay my Jack, that's my home."

Jack made to get up and then slumped back again. "This really sucks. I'm too tired even to kiss you."

Daniel looked up at the stars and they were moving in the wrong direction, a slow bleed to the north. "We need to keep rowing."

"I know." He saw Jack dig in, the way he always did, summoning strength from somewhere within himself. Then the man was gritting his teeth and digging the oar into the water.

His arms were shaking with the effort as Daniel followed suit. It was a knack, he knew, finding a place to float above the pain, to keep aching muscles moving. It was okay as long as you didn't stop. If they stopped they were lost. Not only would they be carried back to the island upon which a volcano was about to erupt, their bodies would never work again.

After a few minutes of back-breaking effort he looked up to see the stars were back where they had been before. They were moving in the right direction again, but the sea had as much vigor as it had done ten hours before and they were already exhausted. He had to look across at Jack to remind himself of why this effort was worth it. They had too much to live for to allow themselves to be defeated by the sea.

Hours passed to the irregular wash of waves across creaking timbers, the constant ache of exhausted muscles not being able to rest. Still there was a kind of rhythm to it, even if it was the rhythm of the way pain followed numbness and numbness followed pain. All around them was a starlit darkness, milky with moonlight when the clouds parted, an unbearable brightness of distant pinpricks of light. When he looked at them for too long his eyes began to water, with effort or nostalgia. They had lost so much since then, since he had realized the language of the Stargate lay in the pattern of the constellations. He supposed that meant that if they died here, that would be his fault. He and Jack had tried to map these stars, he saw them as pictures, wanted to make up stories to explain their shape, Jack remembered them as game plans, defensive passes, strategies for victory. Trying to imagine them giving a powerpoint presentation on the subject in the future was a little tricky. "This is the unicorn, because Daniel thinks that's what it looks like because of this spike of stars here, and this trailing bit that could be mane and tail, although frankly, I don't think so. Now, this constellation I call the Winnebago Strategy used by the Chicago Blue Chickenhawks in the 1969 final against the Houston Pinstriped Rhinos…" He might not be remembering the teams Jack tended to cite with total accuracy, Daniel realized, as he tended to nod off when Jack got to that point.

"You okay…?"

He jerked his head up and realized he had stopped rowing. "Yes. Sorry. Must have dozed off." It was difficult not to let the panic show, but for how long really could they keep doing this? They were never going to be able to get far enough away from the island not to be enveloped by the consequences of the cataclysm about to rain upon it in a hail of fire and molten rock. The seas would boil and rise in a wall of green rage. It wasn't enough to be moving away, they needed to have somewhere to go to.

"We can do this," Jack said again.

Daniel found a weary smile for him. "Sure we can."

"Piece of cake."

"With whipped cream and strawberries on top."

He saw Jack's tongue flicker over his dry lips. "A minute ago I was thinking death by drowning. Now I'm thinking about you naked, on my bed, with whipped cream and strawberries all over you."

He didn't have the heart to remind him that there was no bed for either of them now. The bedrooms they had left behind would be given to someone else, if not now, then later. They would be another guilty secret the Air Force would have to hush up, more names to add to the list of disappeared, probably in invisible ink. Daniel missed his apartment with a sudden fierce longing, missed his books and his things, and the proofs of his existence. He wanted to hold that wedding bowl again, to touch the texture of it against his fingers and his lips and remember Sha're. He hated the fact that Jack no longer had a place to call his own in which he could stand a photograph of his dead son. But aloud he said only, "That sounds good to me. As long as you're going to be licking off the strawberries and whipped cream at some point."

"That was definitely the idea." Jack pulled on the oar raggedly, too shallow a stroke, flicking up a silver rippling of water.

Daniel found his body had forgotten the rhythms of rowing in that brief pause, and dug too deep, slicing through the water. The raft jolted like a car whose gears had snagged, lifting slightly out of the water. A rogue swell he presumed. His next pull on the oar reminded him of how sore his hands were, how much his back ached. The third one was too shallow and there was another delicate fall of water, the starlight picking out each droplet as it rose and fell. His body was uncoordinated with exhaustion. He wasn't sure he could do this any more. Looking across at Jack he saw the man was slumped over his oar, yanking at it awkwardly. There were lots of jokes about inadequate masturbation that just cried out to be made but he didn't have the brain energy left to formulate them, and Jack was too precious to him even to tease right now.

"You look really sexy when you're rowing," he offered.

Jack raised his head, some of the defeat in his neck and shoulders being turned into a positive movement, another summoning of strength from deep within. "Doctor Jackson, are you trying to seduce me?"

Daniel shrugged. "Well, you know, I always heard Air Force colonels were easy."

"Really?" A positive flash of teeth. "Well, I always heard archaeologists drop their boxers faster than they –" The words froze in Jack's throat then and he went still. Daniel knew something was behind him. Something bad. Even before Jack quietly reached for his gun every hair on his neck was standing on end. "…drop their rocks," Jack finished and swallowed. "Move into the middle of the raft, Daniel. Do it now."

He moved and a wash of water followed him, very cold on his skin, a wave displaced by something. As he scrabbled across the sea-slippery curves of the lashed trunks, he realized how low in the water a raft was. Not like a boat. Nothing like a boat. Level with the sea, no viewpoint, no protection, an ice floe was higher off the surface of the water. Another wave lapped over the raft, proof of something heavy moving through the water; other than that whatever was circling them was almost silent. He put his back against the mast and looked at Jack. The man was beautiful in the starlight, the silver light on his silver hair, the line of his jaw, the unexpected length of his eyelashes, the nap of his jaw, the coarse stubble that didn't feel coarse at all when you rubbed your eager skin against it. He could see the muscles in his upper arm, lean and unshowy, like all of Jack's physique, quietly confident, quietly fit. Remembering the taste of his skin, how it felt to lick and nibble and how it smelled when your face was pressed against it, Daniel hoped it seemed less edible to sea monsters.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"Just a fin." Jack brought the oar with him as he moved over to sit next to Daniel, also with his back against the mast, the skimpy shelter something a determined spaniel could have gnawed its way through in minutes, never mind a shark.

Daniel swallowed hard. "So it could be a dolphin?"

"Could be." But the unwavering straightness of Jack's arm with the revolver on the end of it like an extension of his psyche said otherwise.

"How big a fin?" Daniel gripped the end of the rope they had around the mast just for something to hang onto.

He saw that muscle flicker in Jack's jaw again. "Pretty big."

Daniel saw something dark against the darkness, more solid than the ocean. As clouds drifted to let the starlight free it revealed a firm outline of blackness against the shifting silvery blue sea. He touched Jack's arm. "As big as that?"

Jack was unwilling to move his gaze from where he had last seen the other fin but he did so albeit reluctantly. Daniel felt him tense beside him but his voice was calm. "About the same size."

Another fin cut through the water with the purposeful swiftness of a submarine turret just before a dive. Three of them now. Circling the raft. Daniel found a smile with difficulty. "They aren't dolphins, are they?" He noticed his oar wasn't properly secured, tilting in its rowlock, ready to slip free. Without a second oar they were dead.

"No." Jack looked locked down tight, ready to kill.

Spills of moonlight puddled on the surface of the waves, shimmers of uncolor, light just lapping there in a shade of gray that was neither blue nor silver but something in between. Cautiously, Daniel inched towards the place where he had left the oar. As he moved, another wave lapped over the raft and the oar shifted, it was leaving a small wake in the sea, a faint splash of surface tension as its stone-ground edge trailed through the waves. As he inched towards it he felt a hand close on his ankle and looked over his shoulder at Jack. The man grimaced. "Falling in the sea wouldn't be a good idea right now."

"You don't say," Daniel hissed over his shoulder.

He saw Jack holster his gun then, wrapping his fingers in the rope around the mast instead. Another wave lapped over them and the oar slipped again, deepening the furrow it was cutting in the sea. It was going. Daniel dived for it, barely grabbing at the slippery wood. As his fingers closed on it, he felt the raft jolt in the water then tip, waves rushing up to meet him. As he tried to haul himself backwards with gravity and the slippery surface of the raft against him, he saw a huge cavern open in the water below him. A cavern with teeth. As the open mouth lunged at him he could only frantically push off with the oar. The curving teeth snapped down on the oar at once to taste the wood then opened its mouth again, splinters floating in the sea. As the rush of water did its best to carry him into the shark's mouth, a firm yank on his ankle hauled him across the slippery timbers to the makeshift shelter. He found he was still gripping the end of an oar that now ended abruptly in a splinter of snapped wood. As the shark lunged after him, the raft tilted ominously, then as the shark slid off the planks, slapped back down into the ocean, sending a wave over both of them. Jack let go of his ankle only to grab his arm and yank him upright. They both pressed against the mast, hearts beating too fast while the fins circled them.

"Sharks don't usually attack unless provoked." Daniel could feel his teeth wanting to chatter. Still seeing those huge teeth curved inwards and that dark gullet beckoning him in.

Jack gave him a look of exasperation, still hanging onto his arm. "Maybe no one told them that."

As always when seriously spooked, Daniel took refuge in book knowledge: "The rhythmic splashing noise we were making with the oars probably sounded like fish to them. Didn't you say there were tuna shoals out here? I think we may be in a shark feeding area."

Jack's grip on his arm showed no sign of lessening. "I think you may be right."

Daniel thought it was probably best if he just kept talking. Apart from anything else it would disguise the manic samba his heart was currently doing inside his chest. "That's why they're campaigning to get fish-feeding dive tours banned in Florida. They say it's not fair on the diver who turns up in an area where sharks are usually fed on a day when the guy who feeds them isn't there. We could be the equivalent of that right now."

"What, they're pissed because they were expecting tunafish?"

"The tuna may have responded to the oncoming volcano and left the area. If these are young sharks they may not have known that the changes the tuna responded to are danger signals. They're just wondering where their dinner is."

He and Jack exchanged a laden glance and Jack winced. "And here we are. Sweet."

Still speaking rapidly, Daniel said, "Older wiser sharks will have followed the shoals but these are obviously hanging around where the fish usually are getting more and more hungry and confused."

"And pissed." Jack checked his revolver. "I'm definitely sensing they're pissed."

"You don't have to shoot them." Daniel was never going to like the way Jack automatically saw a bullet as the answer to all problems.

Jack gave him one of his vintage exasperated looks. The ones he saved for those special occasions. "You have another plan, do you?"

"They could be an endangered species."

Jack rolled his eyes. "We're endangered! In case it's somehow escaped your attention, we've got three hungry sharks circling our raft!"

"I'm just pointing out that they're doing what they always do, we're the ones who've got in their way."

Jack jammed the ammo clip back in. "Well, now they're in my way, and if they don't want to get shot they'd better get out of my way, pronto."

Daniel decided that he could also roll his eyes. "You know, there are days when I have more evolved things growing in the back of my fridge than – " There was real grace in the way the shark moved up out of the water, grace and silence, particularly given how huge it was. Most predators tended to roar as they showed you their teeth, but not sharks apparently, they just came straight for you with their mouths open wide, not caring that they were fish out of water as they used the edge of your raft for leverage. Or rather came straight for the guy sitting next to you, because although there was no expression in those liquid black eyes, it was heading for Jack and clearly seeing him as lunch. As he gazed into that yawning maw, those inward curving rows of teeth, and felt the raft tip beneath them, Daniel remembered that he still had the broken oar in his hand and swung it hard, aiming for the nose. That was their vulnerable spot, so he'd once read somewhere or maybe watched on the Discovery channel on some long boring Sunday when a translation wouldn't cooperate; that was what the book or program had said, anyway, but had anyone bothered to tell the shark?

Apparently they had as it slithered back off the raft with less grace than it had climbed on and splished back into the water, the raft rocking wildly from the displacement. Daniel grabbed the mast and hauled them both back under the shelter. "Are sharks usually that big?"

"No." Jack darted him a quick sideways look. "Thanks by the way." He sounded mildly surprised.

"You're welcome."

"That was kind of sexy."

Daniel looked at him in disbelief. "You get off on being attacked by sharks?"

"No, but I like the way you sprang to my defense there."

Daniel wrinkled his nose in mild embarrassment. "I may have had a bit of a rush of blood to the head."

"Really?" Jack looked pointedly at his groin. "You're full of surprises."

The thud on the wood beneath them and the way the raft lifted from the surface of the sea before flopping down again was not a pleasant sensation. Daniel and Jack exchanged a laden glance and Daniel wondered if Jack could hear the thumping of his heart. Another jolt underneath them and again the raft rose out of the water before dropping back down into the sea with a splash. If it had been a lighter craft it would undoubtedly have been flipped over by that strategy by now. As an anthropologist, Daniel couldn't help wondering if this was the proof that there must be inhabited islands nearby, or else how would the sharks have learned how to flip over fishing boats? Or was it a race memory passed on from the days when their island had been inhabited? Again the raft lifted and then jolted, rocking on the waves as it fell back to the sea, apparently too heavy to be flipped.

Jack looked grim but he found a smile for Daniel. "You see, sometimes size is important."

At the soft sound of water moving, Daniel jerked his head around and saw a shark rear up out of the sea and throw itself onto the raft. The weight of the huge fish made the raft tilt violently and he began to slide towards its open jaws. As he slithered across the wet timbers, he felt another wave wash over him, speeding him on his way.

"Daniel!" A hand grabbed his wrist but he was slippery with seawater and Jack was barely holding him.

The shark was splashing vigorously with its muscular tail, pushing itself up out of the water and onto the raft. Such black eyes, completely blank, no expression. And those open jaws--

"My, what big teeth you have…" Daniel breathed. He tried to wriggle back up the raft but as the shark flexed its body again, the raft tilted further and he slid down towards the waiting teeth. He saw the jaws gape wider, felt Jack's fingers slip from his wrist and then his feet were going into the yawning maw of the shark's mouth and his brain was locked with fear and the expectation of unbearable pain. Then something closed on his t-shirt and he was bodily yanked out of the shark's mouth. As his booted feet were pulled clear, the jaws closed with a sickening snap. He reached desperately for something solid, the mast, the ropes that lashed the timbers together, but found only Jack. The man was still hanging onto him, hand fisted in his t-shirt, and Daniel inhaled his scent as he clung to him, wet Jack O'Neill, wet clothing, fear. They looked into each other's eyes and he said weakly, "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Jack was also breathing fast. He hauled them both towards the mast and Daniel grabbed at it eagerly. They both locked their fingers in the rope around the mast, hanging on as the next shark tried to bellyflop its way onto the timbers, its body twisting as it did so, head thrashing from side to side. The raft tilted under its weight and Jack leveled his gun. "I don't have any choice," he said grimly. "If it turns us over we're dead."

"I know." Daniel turned his head away. He had killed serpent guards in the past and taught himself not to lie awake and think about it for too many nights. He accepted that sometimes you had to kill people who were trying to kill you, even if they were misguided victims of an oppressor who pretended to be a god, but it didn't make it right, just what you had to do if you wanted to keep breathing in and out more than you wanted to live with being someone who had killed. And he had to put himself in that group. He didn't want to die, and he didn't want the people he loved to die, he just didn't think made his cause any more just than anyone else's or his life worth more than his. There were no shortage of humans in the galaxy and for all they knew these might be the last three of these sharks left anywhere but he still wanted Jack to pull the trigger if the alternative was him and Jack being eaten alive. "I just think sometimes that if we didn't have a gun we'd have to think of some other way."

The raft rocked and they were being lifted out of the water at a steep angle now, both of them trying to throw their weight the other way to push the raft back down. Jack leveled his gun again and pointed it at one of the shark's dead black eyes. "Fuck off," he told it through gritted teeth. "Go chase some fish." But his finger didn't close on the trigger yet, giving it one last chance.

It slid back off the raft and then splashed back down into the ocean, water washing over both of them while the raft lurched clumsily. Another shark tried to drive its way up onto the raft with rhythmic waves of its muscular tail. Daniel had to admit they were perfectly designed killing machines, all that strength and power, those terrifying teeth and those dead, pitiless eyes. He wondered what it must be like to function without a conscience, without compassion. How simple the world must seem when your only needs were selfish. While still hanging onto the mast with his left hand, he grabbed the other oar and smacked the oncoming shark on the nose with it sharply. It retreated at once, wriggling back into the sea, face still eerily expressionless when another creature might have shown indignation or anger.

"Do you think this is a bit of cosmic justice because of all those fish I've caught over the years?" Jack enquired.

Daniel darted him a sideways glance. "What 'fish you've caught'? I thought your lifetime tally was three car tires, two boots, and a barrel load of condoms?"

Jack blinked. "You know, that would sting less if the boots had been a pair."

Again the raft jolted as it was thumped from underneath. Daniel hung onto the mast grimly. "Is this the point where we compare scars?"

"You just want us to do that because you know you'd win." The thumping stopped and the fins circled them again. Jack watched them warily. "I do know all the words to 'Show Me The Way To Go Home'."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" He was fumbling for a better grip on his oar as he spoke, noticing the world was significantly lighter all around them. The darkest hour giving way to the pre-dawn glimmerings of lightening gray. Now when the sharks circled the raft he could see their fins clearly, see the darkness of their bodies beneath the surface of the sea. "They are kind of beautiful," he offered.

"And they're going to be very dead if they don't take a hike." Jack leaned over to take a better look at them as they swam past. "Shark fin soup mean anything to you guys?"

The shark came up out of nowhere, huge, determined, and clearly very hungry. It loomed out of the water and hit the raft hard. They tilted up so high that for a moment they were almost upright, and then the angle of the raft and the shark's own weight sent it slipping back into the sea. When the they smacked down into the water, the raft went under several feet as a wave washed over them, and for a moment they were lurching the other way, too close to the open jaws of sharks. Jack swore sharply, and then they leveled out again, wet and scared and in Daniel's case, at least, extremely jittery. He turned to look at the gun in Jack's hand, comforted by it even as he disapproved of it, and found himself staring instead at an empty hand with blood running from it in an open gash across the palm. Jack was staring at his hand as if he had no idea who it belonged to.

Daniel grabbed his wrist to examine it better, counting fingers and then counting them again to be certain. Four fingers. One thumb. All present and correct. The bloody gash across his palm looked nasty though. "What happened?"

Jack looked at him in disbelief. "That damned shark ate my gun. Just took it straight out of my hand."

Daniel pulled off his t-shirt and wrapped it around the man's hand. He noticed Jack looking at his bare torso and rolled his eyes. "Jack! We're trying to keep your blood out of the water here."

"Oh." Jack finished wrapping the cloth around his arm. "Sorry. I thought the striptease was to distract me from the pain. It worked, too."

"Try not to bleed on anything you don't want eaten." Daniel shoved Jack behind him purposefully and tightened his grip on the oar. Of course, if their last intact oar was eaten by sharks, they were just going to drift aimlessly across the open sea, but he still felt that was preferable to them being eaten and their bloody remains being left to drift across the open sea. As the next shark came up at them, he hit it hard and purposefully on the nose. It slid back into the sea, but as the next one came up it had its mouth open wide so there was no chance of hitting it on anything except the teeth. As the raft tipped and did its best to spill them into the waiting jaws, Daniel tried to hold onto Jack, the mast, and the oar, only to find that Jack was hanging onto him and the mast. "Damnit, Jack," he breathed. "You only have one good hand."

"I only have one good archaeologist too," the man retorted.

Daniel tried to swing the oar but the shark was faster than he was, twisting with incredible grace and power, to snap down on the wooden spar. He hit out at it with the piece of oar he had left and it twisted again, snapping at him venomously. Kicking out, he hit it on the nose more by luck than judgment and it slipped back into the water. Exchanging a look with Jack he realized that the sun was coming up, the man more than a ghostly glimmer now, the sea had a red and golden haze to what they thought of as the east. It occurred to him that it might not rise in the east on this world, they had just decided that it did to make themselves feel less homesick. He also realized he was so tired he was worrying about compass points because that was easier than getting to grips with the reality of sharks closing in to eat them who were not going to just get bored and go away.

The raft was rocking from the force of the sea. A thump underneath it lifted it out of the water before it fell down again with another awkward splash. He moved close to Jack as they watched the fins circling them again, the dark bodies of the sharks now clearly visible in the water. He could see Jack's face, the furring of his jaw from the new stubble, coarse silvery hair he wanted to rub his cheek against. Another jolt from underneath the raft, another sickening pause as their craft was lifted out of the water then allowed to drop. Another wave washing over the timbers. Then the largest of the sharks reared out of the water, twisting its glistening muscular body up onto the raft, jaws open, eyes black pools of nothingness. Daniel yelled and banged the broken oar down on the raft but it didn't blink. Perhaps they couldn't blink or perhaps it just didn't care. It was using its tail to push itself further onto the raft, tilting them dramatically. Even clinging on tight to the mast, they couldn't stop gravity pulling their feet nearer to that advancing mouth. Daniel tried to get some purchase on the slippery deck but the waves were washing over them, the other sharks gathering where their fellow was advancing, also trying to get purchase to wriggle their way up the slippery timbers. They snapped at one another as they tried to push themselves up higher, the swell helping them as the waves seemed to urge them on their way, each one that washed over the raft lifting the sharks a little higher. Daniel saw the red trickle of Jack's blood in the water from the gash on his hand, the smell no doubt maddening to hungry sharks bewildered by the disappearance of their usual food source. He yanked his foot just out of the way of a snapping pair of jaws and saw Jack whisk his boot away from a threshing shark just in time. Daniel hit out with the spar, but the shark opened its jaws wide, protecting its nose and giving him only a yawning gullet and those terrifying teeth to strike at. When the jaws snapped close on air he swore he felt every hair on his body stand on end. Looking to Jack, he saw the same desperation in his eyes that he felt himself.

The raft was tilting at a more and more acute angle now, more like a ski slope than a means to float on the surface of the sea. They were both clinging to the rope around the mast, but Daniel could see the blood running down Jack's arm where the man was stubbornly persisting in holding on with his injured hand and clinging to Daniel with his undamaged left hand.

"Hold on properly!" Daniel demanded.

Jack gave him his most stubborn look and Daniel had opened his mouth to tell him what he thought of him when another wave helped the threshing sharks another foot up the tilting raft. The vessel gave another awkward lurch and Daniel barely whipped his foot out of the way of a pair of hungry jaws. As the other shark lunged at him he swiped at it desperately with the broken oar and it bit down hard on the snapped end then jerked its head to the side so savagely he was pulled with the oar. For a sickening second he thought he was about to be hurled into the sea and then he was yanked back by Jack's fingers in his t-shirt and slammed into the man, groping blindly for something to hang onto as the next wave washed over them. He grabbed for the rope around the mast just as the next shark lunged at them and now they had nothing with which to fend it off except their feet. Daniel kicked out hard and connected with something softer than teeth, but the shark only slithered back a foot at the most. "Thank you," he breathed quickly to Jack, horribly aware that it might be the last thing he ever got the chance to say to him. He dug his fingers into the man's t-shirt, all twisted up with his need to keep a grip on both mast and man. His heart was beating too fast and when he looked across at Jack he saw the man was also breathing quickly. Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw a shark swim purposefully past. Two advancing. One circling. Wonderful.

Jack was looking around for something to hurl at the sharks while Daniel kicked seawater in their faces in what he freely admitted was rank desperation. On another occasion he might have been able to appreciate their beauty better, the incredible power in their slippery, muscular bodies as they threshed and wriggled themselves higher up the raft, open jaws swinging from side to side as they gained momentum against gravity from the sea.

Then the next wave carried them higher and they were lunging, Daniel kicking out savagely and catching one in the side of the head while Jack slammed his boot down as hard as he could on the other one's nose. But they could scent the blood now and were not put off, advancing with jaws open, a pale gape of maw and teeth. Daniel could see the teeth curving backwards. He and Jack pulled themselves as close to the mast as they could, but as the next wave began to roll up the ramp they could both see that it would carry both the threshing sharks with it and this time there would be no escape.

At the familiar but momentarily inexplicable thud of rings dropping around then, Daniel looked at Jack in disbelief. The sharks were still advancing on the impetus of another blue-green wave but now there were metal rings between them and the sharks, followed by light and then abruptly the sharks were gone and everything was a gold-lit confusion. Then there was darkness, and the rings lifting, as if they were animals being released from a cage, letting out a rush of water that spilled across the surface of a metal ridged floor that was as real as it was impossible.

Daniel looked at Jack in disbelief. "Rings," he said.

"Tel'tak." Jack reached for a gun that wasn't there.

In unison they both said: "Goa'uld."

"Close, but no cigar." After a last panicked look at one another they turned their heads, not even daring to hope, although the voice had sounded so very much like:

"Jacob…?" Jack rose awkwardly to his knees, still hanging onto Daniel's bare arm.

"Jacob…?" Daniel also found his fingers were locked into Jack's t-shirt and were refusing to let go.

Jacob Carter smiled at them, not just the smile of a man who had plucked them literally from the jaws of death yet again, but of a man who was so pleased to see them he was only a blink away from tears. "Welcome home, boys. We missed you."

***

O'Neill realized that he now knew what 'culture shock' meant, and this was it. Some part of his brain simply couldn't accept that the life that had been lost to him was now beckoning again. Even as Teal'c said, 'O'Neill', and embraced him, even as he was wrapped in a Jaffa hug that enfolded him as gently as if he were made of crystal and liable to snap, even as Carter gave that cry and then ran to wrap her arms around Daniel, rocking him as she sobbed while he tentatively touched her hair, bending his head to breathe in her scent to see if it was truly Carter, a part of his mind thought he must be dreaming. This was the world he and Daniel had lost. They had both resigned themselves to the fact it could never be found again, that they were irretrievable. Yet somehow they had been found. He didn't know what he felt: panic and relief at once. A fear that this might turn out to be a dream, not something he could relax into yet, and at the same time a fear it might be real, and if it were real, that he and Daniel as they were now, a unit, a couple, might somehow disappear in the transition back to who they had been.

He darted a look at Jacob, whom he had never seen in any reality but this one, and the man nodded. "It's real, Jack. We found you."

"How?" Daniel was still hugging Carter. Not being given much choice, of course, given the way she had him wrapped into an embrace that seemed likely to crush his ribcage if she squeezed a little harder. "How did you find us?"

Jacob grimaced then and pointed. "We had a little help from a friend of yours, Daniel."

As Teal'c released him from the embrace and stepped back O'Neill looked up and saw…himself. Then realized it was not himself but rather that O'Neill. The one who called Daniel 'Doc'. The one he'd last seen dumping Daniel in a seedy motel room, ten minutes after seeing him humping Daniel in a seedy motel room. He made to start forward, not sure what he wanted to say or do, only knowing that it was hostile, but Teal'c's solid hand on his chest stopped him.

The Jaffa said quietly, "Without the assistance of Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Jackson we would never have found you."

That was when he saw the other person standing next to the Xerox O'Neill. Daniel. Not the Daniel he knew, but the 'Jackson' he had used to know. The Jackson who had saved his life on the Abydos mission. The clumsy, annoying geek about whom he had felt those impatient stabs of protective affection. The innocent genius who had been so stubborn, so maddening, so knowledgeable about some things and so frighteningly clueless about others. Surely even a ratfucking amoral bastard like the other O'Neill wouldn't have…? He darted the visiting O'Neill a quick horrified glance but the man wasn't looking at him, he was looking at Daniel. The real Daniel. His Daniel.

O'Neill turned quickly and saw that, worse, his Daniel was looking at the wrong O'Neill. Not just looking, but smiling, at another man, fond and emotional, a beat away from tears. "How did you find us?"

O'Neill's doppelganger winced. "I tagged you. Electronically. Some Tollan gizmo. Sorry. I was afraid to ask, in case you said 'no'."

Daniel blinked then nodded, face hard to read. "I would have said 'no'. So, if that's how you found us, I'm glad you didn't ask."

Another smile. O'Neill hated this. Hated the reminder of how these two had always been so damned comfortable with one another. Then the visiting O'Neill was drawing forward the fair-haired Jackson, a curious mixture of pride and guilt on his face. "This is Daniel."

"I think he could probably have worked that out for himself, Jack." Jackson nodded to Daniel and held out a hand. "Pleased to meet you."

Daniel went forward and shook his hand, darting a quick look at the visiting O'Neill as he did so, asking him a question with his eyes.

The man smiled and touched Jackson on the shoulder. "Daniel wants to know if I've got up the courage to tell you how I feel about you yet."

Jackson damned near blushed, certainly the base of his lobeless ears looked a little pink. "We're…married."

"Married?" O'Neill demanded in disbelief. He looked at his doppelganger aghast. "But he's just a kid."

His Daniel winced, that wince he always did when he thought O'Neill was doing something tactless, which in this case he actually wasn't, so he didn't know what the wince was in aid of. Given the way this Jackson looked like such a kid, O'Neill thought it was nothing other than a fair question. Daniel turned his head and did one of those annoying out of the side of his mouth mutters: "Jack, he's the same age as I am."

O'Neill turned to Daniel in disbelief. "He looks about twelve!"

Daniel gritted his teeth and gave one of those flickering little hand gestures and hissed: "And he's standing right there, and I doubt there is a whole lot wrong with his hearing." The smile he gave Jackson was full of apology, a sort of grimacing wince and shrug combined. O'Neill gave him a look of exasperation. How many planets had they been to now where Daniel had done that whole 'sorry about the troglodyte' thing?

The fair-haired Jackson looked between them in confusion. "Are you a…couple?"

"No, they always sound like that," Carter assured him, beginning to unwrap the t-shirt from O'Neill's hand. "Teal'c and I often used to say we should have t-shirts printed with 'no, they're just good friends' on them to save visiting dignitaries embarrassing Daniel by asking him that question all the…" She broke off and looked between them, then looked at Teal'c, then at her father, blue eyes very wide, mouth very open. She reminded him of Daniel in that instant and he realized he hadn't hugged her yet, and that he really wanted to.

Jacob said quickly, "In the Air Force in our dimension, Doctor Jackson, that's not a question they can answer. Certainly not in front of any serving members of the United States Air Force." He darted a look at O'Neill and then jerked his head at his daughter.

"I'll just get the first aid kit…" She sounded dazed, darting a gaze between them wistfully. Feeling excluded, perhaps.

O'Neill held out his arms and said, "Carter, damnit, give an old man a hug."

She was there in an instant, wrapping her arms around him so tightly his ribcage groaned. He felt her inhale his scent, the way she'd done with Daniel, and he found himself doing the same thing. He'd missed the smell of her shampoo and that talcum powder she wore. When she looked up at him there were tears in her eyes and dark shadows under them. If he hadn't been so glad to see her he would have had to say she looked like crap.

"I couldn't do the math, Colonel."

"Oh, Carter…" He hugged her again and breathed in her hair, then kissed the top of her head. "There wasn't any math to do."

Teal'c was saying something softly to Daniel, something quiet and comforting and when he looked across at him he saw Daniel had tears in his eyes as well. Teal'c took off his jacket and wrapped it around Daniel's shoulders tenderly. As Daniel wriggled into it, swamped by its folds but clearly glad of its warmth. O'Neill saw him sniff it surreptitiously, trying to inhale the proof that this Teal'c was no optical illusion but a three-dimensional familiar friend with an equally familiar scent. Satisfied that the Jaffa was really there, Daniel put his arms around Teal'c and hugged him, saying, "We missed you too, Teal'c. We missed all of you like hell."

Carter disentangled herself from O'Neill's embrace to get the first aid kit but he was touched by the way she was having to wipe the tears of relief from her eyes as she dabbed at his palm with antiseptic and told him this might sting a little, trying to sound so practical but the relief breaking through in that little tremor in her voice. He guessed they really had been missed after all.

Jacob looked between them all and then gave a brief nod. "Okay, kids. I think it's time to go home now."

As he turned to head for the controls, Daniel said, "No. We need to go back to the island."

O'Neill sighed inwardly because of course in some part of his mind he knew he couldn't really be that simple, not with Daniel in the equation. They couldn't really miss being eaten by sharks by a whisker and a miracle and then just go home, put their feet up, have a beer. Of course they had to go and dance with death again. Carter finished binding his hand and gave Daniel a look of enquiry. "Back to the island, Daniel?"

Jacob was looking at Daniel with that familiar mixture of fondness and exasperation. "The island that's in the process of erupting?"

Daniel had his stubborn face on. "That would be the one."

"The one spewing molten rock into the air high enough to damage this ship if we get within ringing distance?"

"We need to hurry." Daniel wrapped his arms around his body. "The…indigenous population thinks we've gone for help. They're waiting for us to come back and save them."

"Dad."

Carter gave her father a begging look and Jacob briefly raised his eyes to the stars then hurried for the control deck. Teal'c and Carter went with him, leaving them alone with their doppelgangers. The Jackson kid was gazing at Daniel wistfully, so much sadness in his blue eyes. It was obvious he knew about the relationship with his colonel.

Looking at Daniel, O'Neill flexed his bound hand. "'Indigenous population'?"

Daniel wrinkled his nose in that evasive way he had. "I didn't say they were human."

"You didn't say they weren't either."

Daniel gave him a full on exasperated look. "You want to save them as much as I do, you just don't want to admit it."

"Actually I want to go home, have a beer, and watch a hockey game. With you. Beside me. Alive and in one piece."

"Daniel…?"

At the call from Jacob both Daniels looked around and then Jackson realized he wasn't being addressed. "I think he means you."

Daniel smiled at him. "I think he does." He touched Jackson tentatively on the shoulder. "Thank you for getting here in time. I really didn't want to die like that." He smiled at the other O'Neill too and the sweetness of it went straight through this O'Neill's heart. The fair-haired Jackson just looked so wistful when his O'Neill looked at this O'Neill's Daniel. As if he could never compete so wasn't even going to try.

"No, he prefers being melted to death by boiling rocks," O'Neill muttered darkly. He couldn't believe Daniel was making them go back to that place when they had damned near broken their backs to escape it just so they wouldn't be there when the volcano erupted. He couldn't believe he had agreed to go back with him. He couldn't believe that Daniel was right and a part of him was desperate to save those damned monkeys. And the snake. He thought of its orange eyes, the smooth scales of its body. Daniel was alive because of that snake, because it had dared him not to touch its tree and O'Neill could never resist a dare.

As O'Neill went to accompany him, the Xerox O'Neill caught his arm. "Look, perhaps we should…?"

"And perhaps we shouldn't." O'Neill looked into his eyes, letting him see the depth of resentment in his own. "I doubt we're ever going to agree."

"I never meant to hurt him. I never meant to –"

"But you did, Colonel," O'Neill told him flatly. "And now he's over you. End of story."

The other man rolled his eyes in exasperation. "He was never into me, Colonel. You were always the one he –"

"I'm not talking to you about Daniel," he hissed angrily. He looked at the fair-haired Jackson and his heart did turn over, couldn't help it. He was so much the Daniel he'd used to know, who'd scared him silly five times a mission, so stubborn and vulnerable, so smart and dumb and brave and maddening. He looked so young. Christ, no wonder he'd never looked at Daniel as anything except a friend, no wonder he'd taken so long to make a move; the kid looked as if he still needed to have the birds and the bees explained to him. Jackson was looking at the other O'Neill in a way he was damned sure his Daniel had never looked at him, all that hero-worship and adoration and sorrow. If his Daniel had ever looked at him like that he would probably have gone down on one knee and proposed, too; but he and Daniel had got married years ago without really knowing it, they'd just forgotten to have sex while in the first flush of discovery about one another. He whispered savagely in the other colonel's ear, "I just hope you treat your Daniel better than you treated mine." He emphasized the 'mine'.

"Colonel, I –"

"I don't want to hear it." In some part of his mind he knew he was being a little unfair, but he didn't care. He could still see this guy fucking Daniel with such confidence, such practiced skill. A part of him couldn't help wondering how it would have turned out if Casanova here hadn't dumped his Daniel to take up with this adolescent-looking Jackson with his big eyes and floppy hair, who was too inexperienced to know what a piece of work his lying, cheating O'Neill was. He remembered something then and turned on his heel. "Weren't you already married? To a woman? To the mother of your child?" He darted a look at Jackson then, torn between hoping and fearing this would be a revelation to him, but the younger man only bowed his head and looked guilty.

"We got an annulment." The Xerox O'Neill was talking to him in the same way he talked to people with whom he was trying to keep his temper despite gross provocation. "Under Egyptian law it's not difficult to do."

O'Neill looked back at Jackson and felt an eerie sense of loss. This Daniel hadn't been through what his Daniel had. Couldn't have done to still look like that. "What law did you marry your Daniel under?"

He saw them both wince and realized he'd gone too far, was striking out blindly and not caring who he hurt. In his heart he suspected he was probably angry with himself, because he hadn't made the move he should have done, had put his energies into pushing Daniel away because he couldn't deal with his own unadmitted desires, and in the process had pushed him into this guy's arms.

His counterpart put his arm around Jackson's shoulders. "This is forever." He looked O'Neill in the eye, daring him not to read the conviction there, daring him to pretend he didn't know when a Jack O'Neill was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

"Nothing's forever," O'Neill said hoarsely. He thought of the way Daniel had smiled when Sha're had looked at him. Thought of the way he and Sara had been once. Thought of the baby in his crib whom he'd waited to see grow up and who now never would get past the age of ten and an eternity as a photograph. He wondered if his possessions were still where he'd left them. Abruptly he wanted to be home, in his own home, looking at his dead son's face, but this time with Daniel with him, never more than a room away.

"This is." The certainty in the man's eyes surprised him. The guy was looking at Jackson with absolute conviction on his face. He almost wished the kid would look up and see it but the other Daniel was looking after his Daniel.

O'Neill backed up. "You should tell him that." Even as he turned away he knew the other O'Neill did, probably told him every day, Jackson just wasn't hearing him. It occurred to him that he hadn't listened when Daniel had told him he'd never loved the other O'Neill either. He couldn't believe Daniel would have sex with a guy he didn't love, not for the first time, not when he'd never slept with a man before. Why would he? Another part of his mind was telling him patiently that he was thinking like an idiot and that he wouldn't have questioned it if had been a brief fling with a woman under discussion. Daniel had told him how it was from the start, two people who were lonely and who felt themselves undeserving of love meeting up under extraordinary pressure cooker circumstances and taking a chance. The guy had died in front of Daniel. The guy had the same DNA as Daniel's best friend. The guy had been nice to Daniel when no one else was.

He winced inside then. That was probably the major factor in it all. Daniel had been deprived of kindness and deprived of the comforts of touch, and this guy had offered both, and come wrapped in a package so familiar that Daniel had trusted him from the outset. Trusted him so much he'd even let him put his--

No. Couldn't go there. Could never go there. It just made him want to punch out the other O'Neill and then jam his own head into a grinder.

"Jack…!"

He found that he was walking swiftly, not running, refusing to run, but certainly striding at a fair pace in response to that call. This tel'tak seemed indistinguishable from all the others, gold hieroglyphs all over the walls and that shiny dark floor covering on which blood hardly left a trace.

Carter and Teal'c were both hovering close to Daniel, he noticed, close enough to touch, hands on his back and his arm, but he was looking out of the tel'tak. It was a shock to see daylight instead of the endless unfolding of unfamiliar stars. Then he blinked and realized what he was looking at. The island. Their island. The volcano was spewing ash into the air, red veins standing out on the once green mountain, blasted trees lying flat. Yet by the beach it was as it had always been, despite the choking smoke and ash, but the lava was pouring down in molten rivulets, red and black and unstoppable. For the moment it had flowed to each side of their part of the island, to the east and west of where he had built that shelter, where he had sewn up Daniel's wounds with fingers that so very nearly trembled, where they had kissed for the first time. But the lava streams were widening, soon everything was going to be covered by burning blackness, all greenery turned to fire and then to ash.

Daniel gave a little cry and pointed at the beach. "That's our cabin." He turned to look at O'Neill, eyes full of pride and sorrow. "The house that Jack built." It looked tiny down there, like something Charlie might have played with as a child.

Carter was looking at Daniel's face and he realized that she knew everything now without a word being spoken. She said gently, "It's beautiful."

Teal'c gripped his shoulder lightly. "It is indeed a most well constructed dwelling, O'Neill."

O'Neill sensed rather than heard the other two approaching and realized how out of things they must feel, their part done. He still wanted to punch out the other O'Neill but he felt sorry for Jackson.

"There they are." Daniel gripped his arm.

He followed Daniel's pointing finger and saw them for himself, the golden monkeys on the beach, frantic and desperate as they ran up and down their narrowing strip of sand. The lava was pouring down in two streaks of red, a widening river of red death and they were trapped in between with nowhere to go except into the angry sea.

Jacob gave Daniel a look of only mild exasperation. "Those would be the 'indigenous population' you want me to save?"

Daniel didn't show even a hint of guilt. "They're going to burn to death, Jacob. And we can save them. They trust us."

O'Neill realized with an inner sigh that Daniel not only had not changed but was never going to change. Most people would be grateful that his friends had risked their lives to come and snatch him from the jaws of death, but Daniel just took that for granted and started looking around for other people for them to save as well. "Sometimes, Daniel…" he murmured.

"What?" Daniel looked at him in what was clearly genuine confusion.

Jackson pressed close, his shyness at being amongst them clearly overwhelmed by his curiosity. Seeing the frantic monkeys his eyes widened. "Can you ring us down there, General Carter?" He had a soft deep voice, very easy on the ear. Daniel's voice, of course, but somehow when he was listening to Daniel, all he could hear was Daniel, not the way his voice sounded.

As Daniel looked at him in surprise, Jackson gave him one of those apologetic wincing smiles O'Neill hadn't seen in a long time. "If they trust you and Colonel O'Neill, they should trust me and Jack too, shouldn't they?"

"Good thinking." Daniel smiled at him and Jackson smiled back.

O'Neill wondered how when the Daniels had both been fucked by the same guy they could be so cozy with one another when he still wanted to throw his alter ego through a wormhole without a GDO. He was never going to fathom out the way anthropologists reasoned. He looked around for a bag and saw that there were packs stacked against the hull of the ship. Presumably in case some hiking had been needed at the other end if they had been located somewhere the ship couldn't reach without danger. He upended the first pack he came to, scattering medical supplies onto the floor that he would have given his eyeteeth for when Daniel was dying. All that morphine. They must have expected them to be in pretty bad shape. Their last view of Daniel had been of someone riddled with bullet holes, perhaps that was how they had imagined he would still be when they found him again. He glanced across at Carter and saw her looking at Daniel without disguise for a moment, big sister who hadn't kept an eye on little brother the way she was supposed to, who had let him get hurt then let him get lost, raw guilt, raw anxiety. Teal'c looked the same way, glancing across at Daniel, not wanting to move too far away.

O'Neill said, "Daniel, when we ring down there, don't take any stupid risks. Carter and Teal'c didn't bust their balls getting here in time just for you to get fried right in front of them. Okay?"

Daniel gave him a look of surprise then a sloppy salute. "Yes, sir."

Carter's glance was a mixture of gratitude and exasperation. O'Neill winced. "Figure of speech, Carter." Teal'c was also looking at him in that slightly disdainful way he had sometimes. O'Neill rolled his eyes. "I know she's a girl."

"Of course you do, sir," Carter sighed. She nodded to her father. "You'd better work the rings again, Dad."

Teal'c nodded. "I can keep the ship in stationary orbit."

O'Neill realized for the first time that it was a little odd that Jacob had been the one to greet them. "Problem with the ring mechanism?"

Jacob shrugged. "Nothing I can't handle."

He didn't like the sound of that but they were over the beach now and Daniel was tugging at his arm saying 'Come on, Jack." He was aware of their doppelgangers following them, Jackson grabbing some food out of a pack as he passed it and breaking it in two, handing half to his lawfully wedded dickhead. The guy who not only had everything but had had everyone: Daniel, Sha're, Jackson. The guy who got to keep his child and his lover and still be considered a hero. Who wasn't going to have to hand in his resignation when he got to the SGC.

Then they were standing within that circle on the deck and the rings were descending, light enveloping them, before they were deposited on the beach breathing air so singed it inflamed the throat and every lungful of oxygen came with an eruption tax of burning ash.

 

Daniel had barely crouched down and called them before the monkeys were running for him, the younger ones trying to climb inside his shirt. They didn't seem fazed by there being two of everyone, too busy fleeing the burning lava and seeing the humans as the only way out. O'Neill thought he had time. Maybe it was crazy but he felt a sense of obligation. He could see the flow of the lava and it wasn't at all as he'd imagined it. He'd thought it would be dramatic and beautiful but it was just dirty and hot, the island bleeding to death from slashed veins of molten rock, all greenness turned to ashy gray and blackened red. He ran, the heat wrapping itself around him, like being next to an open oven door when a roast was cooking. His eyes watered from the soot and ash, grime sticking to his sweat-covered skin. No parrots or gulls calling. He hoped they were long gone. He heard Daniel call him and shouted to him to get the monkeys onto the ship, he wouldn't be long. Only as he dived into the jungle did he realize the words shouted hadn't been 'Jack' but 'Colonel O'Neill', that it was the fair-haired Jackson who had noticed he'd gone, who, if he died in this jungle would have caught that final glimpse of him, not the Daniel he loved.

As he ran he could hear the sound of trunks toppling, the crack and mournful pause of the fall before they hit the shrubs below, the ominous clamor of something moving through the undergrowth. It sounded like a huge animal crashing its way heedlessly past the trees, a monster awoken. If he closed his eyes he could imagine it was a dragon pursuing him, the smell of singed leaves and singed flesh, the soot and ash darkening the day, the way the jungle moved aside to let it pass. He could almost picture the leathery wings beating against the heated air, its jaws opening to let loose another blast of fire. He didn't know if a dragon was more or less terrifying than the implacable power of a lava stream in full molten flow.

He ran for the tree, not looking back, needing to do this, a risk he had to take. The bark was pale and the leaves delicate, pale green, a faint sap oozing from them. The tree of life indeed. And there was the snake. With no means of escaping, nowhere for a creature that could not fly or swim or burrow to go to, it had stayed put. He looked into its orange eyes and saw nothing at all that told him whether or not it was intending to bite him or understood that he was here to help. But it didn't try to escape when he picked it up. Its body was much longer and heavier than he had expected and he held it gingerly, one hand behind the head in the hope it might prevent it biting him, the other clasped around its thick warm body as awkwardly as a schoolboy at his first dance, feet of tail dangling which he tried to support with one twanging knee. Although the snake opened its mouth and he saw the curve of its fangs, it only seemed to be warning him to be careful. He lowered it into the pack he'd snatched from the tel'tak and grabbed a handful of leaves, twigs, bark, and flowers, pushing that in on top of it. It nestled in the bottom of the pack, a heavy weight, but it made no attempt to escape. As he ran back towards the beach, the fire monster closer now, belching more smoke and flame, he saw lizards, beautiful and panicked, and grabbed those too, none of them attempting to evade him now. He shoved green and purple and multi-colored reptiles of varying sizes into the pack, staggered from the weight, and ran on. Would the snake eat them? Were they poisonous? Would they kill each other? None of them seemed to be moving when he shoved the next one in on top, just a quiet scramble for some dignity amongst the other heaving bodies. A red and yellow frog jumped onto a tree trunk right in front of him and he grabbed that too and tossed it into the sack. He'd never been a naturalist but this was different somehow, this had been his home too, his paradise. In some bone-deep part of himself he was devastated by this eruption, wanted to be gone before the lava incinerated the home he had built while Daniel was dying and in which they had later made all that sweet love. So he knew how these creatures felt in their angry bewilderment, their disbelief as the burning rock poured down the mountainside and destroyed everything in its wake. How could the jungle, that had been so verdant and thriving and full of life, now be this place of ash and fire and smoke and lava? He grabbed another lizard, and as he picked up its heavy green body another jumped onto his arm, tiny and jewel-like. Both were shoved unceremoniously into the pack.

As he reached the beach, he heard Daniel screaming his name and the monkeys screaming with him. Carter had ringed down too, the monkeys so panicked they seemed unaware this person was a stranger. The fair-haired Jackson was offloading his monkeys onto Carter, untangling their fingers from his jacket and transferring them to her.

"Jack…? Jack…!"

Nothing wrong with Daniel's lungs. "I'm here!" He shouted back. "Just keep doing what you're doing, damnit. Let's get out of here."

He saw Daniel turn, and the relief on his face, and ran faster, even though his back and knees were already aching, the weight of the pack astonishing, the straps digging into his shoulder. How could reptiles be so heavy? Daniel was a mass of clinging monkeys, their black fingers twisted into his hair and clothing, their golden fur standing up like cat fur in their anxiety. He could see the lava pouring down now, beyond the place where Jacob was keeping the tel'tak hovering, one stream was already crawling across the beach, black and red and twisting the air above it to a warped heat haze. There was a puff of flame and he saw a coconut palm burning as its trunk was enveloped by the lava flow, a coconut falling into the glutinous red puddle of molten rock disfiguring the once golden sands. Still running as fast as he could with a bag full of reptiles weighing him down, he blundered across the sand, blinking ash from his eyes, to the place where Daniel, Carter, and the wrong O'Neill were waiting for him.

As he reached them, the rings dropped and there was that brief sensation of being caged. The other O'Neill looked around. "Where's Daniel?" O'Neill also looked around in confusion but there was only one Daniel standing there, the short-haired one he loved. As the visiting O'Neill made to move, Carter grabbed him and held onto him. He was still yelling at her to let him go as the rings whisked them up into the darkness of the tel'tak.

 

The other Daniel Jackson, the one from this dimension who had spent so many weeks on this now erupting island paradise, had told him there were thirteen monkeys in the troupe. Daniel didn't need to be Sam to work out they were one monkey short. The other Daniel had been casting around for the missing one, a female he'd said, shyer than the rest, probably because she was pregnant, but he'd also been desperate to get the scrambling, panicking monkeys he'd already collected into the safety of the tel'tak. Logically, as someone who resembled the person the missing monkey trusted, Daniel reasoned that left finding the missing monkey up to him. Just as the rings had been about to descend, he had caught sight of a flash of golden fur and immediately offloaded his collection of monkeys onto Major Carter and taken off in pursuit.

Perhaps 'pursuit' wasn't quite the right word, as catching her was out of the question unless she consented to let herself be caught. It was more about persuasion, cajoling and convincing her that she really was better off with a strange human than on this once-familiar but now burning world.

She was just ahead of him, jumping from tree to tree, her body hunched awkwardly in a way that made him wonder if she was hurt.

"I promise I won't hurt you," he called softly. She looked over her shoulder at him and for a moment he thought she was going to come towards him, then a palm tree was uprooted by the lava burning through its trunk and fell with a crash. Panicked by the violence of it, she leapt on to the next tree and he followed her, talking in as low and soothing a tone as he could muster when the air was a flurry of ash all around him. The heat was terrifying, as was the destruction: the blasted trees on the mountainside and the dirty red river of lava advancing at a speed that made the heart catch and falter.

"Please trust me…" Daniel breathed in despair. He jumped a lava stream, the heat from it searing, and landed on a patch of vegetation under the tree in which she was sheltering. There was a rush of burning air as undergrowth caught alight all around them. The monkey gazed down at him from between soot-flecked green leaves, her golden fur speckled with ash, anxiety in her dark eyes. He saw something move against her body, a squirming flex of drying fur, and realized she was holding a baby; that she must have given birth sometime in the last hour or so while her world was going up in flames all around her. The smoke was thick now, like mist on a fall morning, gusting between the trees while the fire crackled and the lava slowly engulfed everything in its path. As a bush began to burn a few feet from him, butterflies flew past in a panicked cloud of iridescent blue and purple. A seared breeze blew another wave of flame before him and he barely jerked his head away in time, transfixed, he saw a tardy butterfly glow with flame, its wings alight, and then it was singed and dead and ugly as it dropped into the lava flow now uncomfortably close to his ankles.

"Please--?" He held out his hands to her, willing her with everything he had to trust him and just jump. She cast around in despair, looking for vanished relatives, once-green trees, the world she had always known, but he was all there was left that she even slightly recognized. As another tree fell against the one on which she sat, showering her and Daniel with a fall of burning leaves, she jumped and he felt the secure warmth of her thump against his chest. Briefly closing his eyes in relief, he wrapped his jacket around her and her infant. As he did so a small green lizard landed on his shoulder. Shoving it hastily into his pocket, he looked around for the way he had come – except the beach he had sprinted down was a lake of fire now, red-black lava seeping into a steaming sea. He turned the other way and found another stream of lava had poured down to cut him off. With nowhere else to go, he headed for the sea, barely getting his foot onto a fallen trunk to use as bridge across a lava stream before it burst into flames, and ducking under another tree only a moment before it crashed down onto the lava. As the sand crunched under his boots, he felt relief, blinking soot from his eyes while the ash whirled around his head like a gray blizzard on a winter day, but as he stepped to the right he saw the lava rippling towards him. It looked like a living thing, some creature whose veins ran with fire, barely contained within a magma skin. The jungle was a wreckage of burning trees, the land discolored by burning rivers of fiery rock, the broken Stargate was already engulfed by the flow. Around the sweep of the once-golden beach he guessed the cabin that Colonel O'Neill had built for his Daniel Jackson would be a blazing ruin now. Paradise lost indeed.

The lava was sweeping towards him, the two streams mingling into one spreading lake. As he backed toward the sea, the cloud of butterflies gathered around his head. They, like him, seemed to have nowhere else to go. When he turned his head to judge how far away was the sea, he saw the lava had cut him off. There was just a small patch of beach left now, with fiery rock oozing toward him from all sides.

"I'm sorry, Jack." He closed his eyes and felt the wings of the butterflies beat gently against his skin, felt the heat of the lava flow all around him as it lapped against his toes.

Then there was a 'thunk' of something dropping around him and he looked up in surprise to see the dark hull of the tel'tak overhead. He was still gazing at the ship when he was abruptly whisked up into the darkness of the ship in a blur of Tok'ra technology and confused butterflies.

 

O'Neill listened to his doppelganger screaming at the fair-haired Jackson and felt an unexpected sense of identification. The way the guy had been climbing up the walls of the tel'tak and telling Jacob to just open the goddamned cargo hold and let him jump as Jacob wrestled with the contrary ring mechanism had really taken him by surprise. He had it fixed in his mind that this guy was a phony, so the raw terror in his voice and the panic in his eyes had come as something of a shock to him. His Daniel had stood there self-hugging and rocking in anxiety as he willed Jacob to get the rings to work. Carter had been on her knees helping Jacob as her father shot out rapid instructions O'Neill could barely follow but which she seemed to understand. Looking at Daniel had been strange, seeing the man he loved looking at a man who looked just like him, oblivious to everything except the fate of that missing Jackson. That was when he had realized that rightly or wrongly, Daniel thought his ex-lover was in love with the guy down on that burning island. Was all twisted up with anxiety at the thought of any harm befalling that imperilled Daniel because he didn't think the ranting O'Neill would survive it.

"Please! Just give me a fucking rope!"

Then the rings had dropped, that strange sound they made, metallic and yet not truly mechanical. It had taken him years to realize that what they reminded him of was the kind of technology you saw only in science fiction movies. A moment later Jackson had been whisked back onto the tel'tak in a glow of light and clatter of rings. They dropped away to reveal him standing there with smoking boots, a monkey in his arms, a lizard on his shoulder and a cloud of blue butterflies flittering around his head. O'Neill thought he looked like a fair-haired Snow White. That was when the other O'Neill had started screaming at him, and it had been a strange thing, but O'Neill had found himself sympathizing not with the open-mouthed big eyed Jackson looking around the tel'tak as if he'd never seen it before, clearly completely taken aback at being yelled at, but with the half-out-of-his-mind-with-terror-and-relief O'Neill doing the yelling. So, he stood there watching it dispassionately and thinking that, yes, this was what falling in love with Daniel Jackson did to you: it shot your nerves to hell.

"What were you thinking…?"

The fair-haired Jackson possessed that exasperating mixture of stubbornness, self-possession, and reproach that was also his Daniel's trademark. He wordlessly put the monkey in his yelling lover's arms – a smart move, O'Neill had to admit, as it prevented the ranting colonel from taking a swing at him – and then said in mild reproof: "I was thinking I didn't want her and her baby to burn to death, Jack. What were you thinking?"

That was so damned typical, he had to admit. So matter-of-fact and quiet when he had been the one taking the insane risk. As if nothing could be more unreasonable than the guy yelling at him. Did Daniel Jacksons learn this stuff at their mother's knee in every dimension or was it just that they all purchased their Acme O'Neill Manipulation Kits the day after that hapless colonel fell into their web?

"I was thinking you were going to fucking die while I had to sit here and watch it happen!"

Jackson gave a long-suffering sigh. "But I didn't die, Jack, and neither did she or her baby, so it all worked out for the best, didn't it?"

"No thanks to you! For Christ's sake, Daniel, your boots are smoking! That's how close the lava came to killing you"

"Good point." Jackson held up a finger. "And if you'd just stop yelling for a few minutes perhaps I could take my smoking boots off before I lose my toes. If that's okay with you? And stop shouting – you'll frighten the baby. Oh, and can you hold this a minute?" Jackson took the lizard from his shoulder and slipped it gently into his O'Neill's jacket pocket, smiled at the monkey, stroked the baby delicately on its still-wet head with his fingertip then began to unlace his boots.

O'Neill shook his head in disbelief. Yep, in every universe apparently Daniel Jackson managed to have the last word even when he was so damned wrong he could hardly be any wronger if he took the wrong road to Wrongsville and got a doctorate in Wronging.

O'Neill watched his doppelganger slide down the wall, still with the monkey in his arms, to end up on his seat, running a shaky hand through his hair. Unable to stop himself, O'Neill crouched down next to him then pointed at his own silver hair.

"Take a good hard look at your future, Colonel. Give it six months and this is going to be what you see in the mirror every morning."

"You could have warned me." The lizard jumped from his shoulder and scuttled off around the side of the ship, the butterflies were still hovering over Jackson who was now peeling off his smoking socks to reveal pale pink toes, mercifully unscathed. It was strange to see Daniel's feet on someone else, the same elegant shape and long toes. The kind of feet that made you want to pour Southern Comfort over them and start sucking…. He collected himself with an effort as his Daniel walked over to sit down next to the visiting one. They looked good together, he had to admit, Daniel past and present in earnest consultation, both of them alive and well and looking appetizing enough to eat. And, even better, there wasn't a shark in sight.

"I figured you had it coming."

The other man shrugged. "I guess I should have known. Your boy was pretty much a heart-attack-on-a-stick, and I think mine is worse." There was a slight emphasis on that 'mine' which O'Neill recognized from his earlier comment. There was just something about Daniel that brought out the jealous Neanderthal in the guys who fell for him, and he supposed that had always been a part of their relationship. There wasn't a single woman who had kissed Daniel that he had felt warm fuzzies about in the past, probably as good an indicator as any that he was a little conflicted in his feelings about his best friend. So he heard and understood that 'back off – you've got your own Daniel so keep the hell away from mine' vibe from his alternative dimension counterpart.

"Mine's obedience trained," O'Neill shrugged. "Yours seems to have a little trouble with that whole 'following orders' thing." He winced as a monkey tugged his hair and looked up to see that the troupe had come to liberate their lost member. They were still huddling together a lot more than usual but some of them had food in their hands which looked suspiciously like Powerbars and USAF crackers. He suspected Carter had been feeding them, she was another soft touch, just like Daniel.

The visiting O'Neill lifted the mother and baby up onto the gold-paneled seating the monkeys were running around. "Bullshit. I was on a mission with your Daniel, remember? And he was about as obedience trained as a toddler on speed. He just ducks faster than mine does."

O'Neill watched as the other monkeys fussed over their returning member, one immediately starting to groom her while the females began what he would have had to term 'cooing' over the new infant. He suspected monkey babies were about as spoilt as a baby could get. Although he had no intention of saying it aloud he couldn't help thinking that if Jackson was even slower to duck than Daniel, then his life expectancy was looking a little on the short side.

"So. Are we…okay?" His doppelganger made a caution motion of the hand between their chests. "You and me, I mean?"

O'Neill looked him in the eye. "I am never going to forgive you for using my Daniel as a place to keep your dick warm while you got up the courage to ask your Daniel out."

"You know, I sensed that about you."

"But I am grateful you zapped Daniel with that tracer thing and that you helped save our lives."

The other man wrinkled his nose. "Well, that's…gracious. For an O'Neill, I mean. I figured I was going to have to sleep with one eye open or something while we were on the same tel'tak."

O'Neill shrugged. "So much as look at my Daniel in a way other than fraternal and sleeping with both eyes open won't save your balls going AWOL. Do I make myself clear?"

"Well, you're not being exactly subtle so the message is hard to miss."

"…And then there was that mission you went on to the planet where the occupants seemed to be descended from a Hittite culture. Can you tell me something about that?"

They both turned to look at the two Daniels, the fair-haired Jackson now barefoot and having his toes tugged at curiously by a young monkey, the properly-shod Daniel positively festooned in thumb-sucking golden-furred creatures trying to burrow inside his clothes for comfort.

Jackson darted Daniel a sideways look, a tentative smile flickering across his pale features. "You know so much about our missions."

"Some of them, yes. I certainly heard all about the time you persuaded that chief to sign the peace agreement with that rival tribe and give the SGC first rights on the naquada mine in exchange for medical care and food. Not to mention your bawling out the USAF for putting milk powder in the aid bags. I've been complaining about that for years."

"It's this Western Culture everyone has clean water out of a tap mindset that's so hard to deal with. I keep telling them how many babies are dead in developing countries from wrongheaded corporations doling out their powdered baby milk--" Jackson broke off to frown. "You must have a good memory to remember all those details from someone else's missions."

"Not really." Daniel gave him a rueful smile. "It was just all your colonel ever talked about."

"Our missions?"

Daniel half-laughed. "You." He looked the other Jackson in the eye. "All he ever talked about was…you."

Although his heart gave a little catch at the brittle way Daniel smiled there, O'Neill couldn't help thinking that was a very nice thing his other half had just done. Just another reminder of why he loved this guy so much.

Jackson gazed at Daniel for a moment in confusion, then he ducked his head to hide a pleased little smile. O'Neill saw him dart a glance in their direction, trying to see if it was true as he caught his own colonel's eye. Given the doting way the guy was looking at him he evidently saw what he was looking for. It took him a moment to stop grinning with relief and get his face back under control before saying to Daniel: "That must have been fun for you."

"Oh, it was." Daniel nodded. "Made me feel so special, as you can imagine."

O'Neill felt the man sitting next to him give a little jolt of disagreement, an inarticulate sound broken off, a resistance of body language, but at a darted look from O'Neill and Daniel, he ducked his head and submitted to this version of the truth. Under his breath he murmured to O'Neill, "I did care for him. I do care for him. I just--"

"…Love the Daniel you married better?" O'Neill shrugged. "I wouldn't sweat it. My Daniel loves me better than he loves you too."

"I know that." The guy sounded positively exasperated. "That's the other half of the reason why I broke up with him. We both knew you were the one he loved. Just like we both knew my Daniel was the one I loved. We were just…."

"Too chickenshit to tell the people you were in love with how you felt?"

The guy seemed to take umbrage at that, not so much on his behalf as on Daniel's. "Well, in my case there was a lot riding on it and I had a lousy track record, but I never got the impression the object of Doc's affections was making it any too easy for him to tell him how he felt – probably because he was too busy being an insensitive prick in denial of his true feelings. Tell me, Colonel, how was life in the closet anyway? Didn't the smell of mothballs get you down after a while?"

"I think I'd rather be a little confused about my orientation than fucking everything with a pulse."

"Your loss, Colonel, because as far as I can see we both got to be confused but you also got to be celibate whereas I got to have lots and lots of really good sex…."

"Well, whoopee-doo for you, and God forbid a colonel in the United States Air Force should have his mind on anything higher than groin level."

"Could you two – oh I don't know – maybe stop pawing the ground for five minutes?"

They both looked up guiltily as Daniel loomed over them, a monkey in each arm. Jackson stood next to him, fair hair in his eyes, arms folded. They both looked very pretty, O'Neill thought, but he couldn't deny they also looked pretty pissed.

Jackson gave his O'Neill a withering look. "There are actually grown-ups trying to have a conversation in this tel'tak, Jack – which is a little difficult with you two making all that noise. And General Carter wants to talk to Colonel O'Neill."

Hey, what do you know, Daniel Jacksons are waspish little smartasses the universe over. But O'Neill said nothing aloud. The barefoot Jackson reminded him too much of the way his own Daniel had been when he'd first met him, and exasperating as the kid undoubtedly was, he was also someone about whom it was impossible not to feel protective. So, like so many times in the past, he just got to his feet and did as he was told. As he reached Jacob it occurred to him that Daniel and Jackson were probably comparing notes on how obedience trained their other halves were. Damn. All these years of thinking he was Petruchio and now it was looking suspiciously as if he might be Kate after all. That really sucked.

"You wanted to talk to me?"

Jacob looked over his shoulder at him. "What do you want me to do with the menagerie?"

"Find somewhere like our island, I guess, where they can live a free and happy life."

"There are laws about moving flora and fauna from one landmass to another, you know, Jack. You can cause irreversible harm to the ecosystem if you start playing fast and loose with that kind of thing. Look at Australia and New Zealand and what the introduction of rats and cats did to their indigenous species."

"It wasn't my idea to play Noah's Ark." That had sounded whiney, but he was feeling whiney right now.

Checking around to see that his daughter and Teal'c weren't in earshot, Jacob said quietly, "You are so Dannywhipped, Jack."

O'Neill opened his mouth to retort then pulled a face instead. "The other O'Neill is worse."

"Granted." Jacob inclined his head. "Colonel O'Neill is positively embarrassing, but you're not much better."

O'Neill rolled his eyes. "So what do you want me to do? Throw the animals out of an airlock?"

As one of the monkeys scampered along the controls, Jacob sighed like a saint whose patience had been tested beyond endurance. "This is a ship made using technology so advanced the human race can only guess at how it functions. It's not meant to be lubricated with monkey guano." The monkey examined Jacob for a moment with its head on one side and then sprang onto his shoulder and began to tug and twist at his ear.

O'Neill hurried to remove the monkey from the other man's shoulder, the monkey clinging on determinedly and shrieking at O'Neill like a toddler having a temper tantrum. He yanked it off at last and it smacked his face then grabbed his hair in retaliation, giving it a tug so hard it made his eyes water.

"Jack, what are you doing?" Daniel demanded. "Don't be so rough with him."

"Hey, I didn't pull his hair!"

Daniel made soft cooing noises to the monkey and it immediately became docile and penitent, holding out black-palmed hands to Daniel in obvious 'rescue me from the big bad colonel' body language. Daniel held out his arms and the monkey leapt onto his chest, clinging to his jacket and giving Jack a malicious look of triumph over its shoulder. It rubbed its head against Daniel's jaw and made little chirruping sounds. Daniel stroked it gently and gave O'Neill a look of reproach.

He held up his hands in protest. "The little monster mugged Jacob and then was starting to beat the crap out of me!" Jacob shook his head beside him and O'Neill was almost certain he heard the word 'Dannywhipped' murmured again. Raising his eyes to heaven he glared at Daniel. "Maybe you'd like to bring your mind to bear on the problem of what we do with them next, Doctor Dolittle?"

"It would be very unusual to only have one island in the middle of the ocean. It should be part of a chain and the others should have comparative ecological conditions."

"Erupting volcanoes, you mean?"

Daniel did one of his reaching-for-the-last-of-my-patience sighs. "Do you really want a lecture on the way volcanic island chains and atolls are formed and function? Because Sam and I are quite happy to talk about plate tectonics and hot spots until you beg for mercy."

"'Hot spots'?" He couldn't help it, he was now staring at Daniel and remembering exactly how he looked lying on his back with his legs raised just so while O'Neill drove into him at exactly the right angle to make him moan. And he hadn't been the one doing the begging for mercy back then, no, that had been all Daniel. He licked his lips, feeling the sudden dryness of his mouth.

Carter appearing suddenly at his elbow made him jump. "They're what geologists call the places within the earth's mantle that have a stationary plume of magma rising from them. The magma partially melts the overriding plate and that causes –"

"Carter." He rested a gentle hand on her arm. "Don't think I don't love you because I really do, but I still couldn't give a bent horseshoe nail about magma."

Daniel stroked the monkey's golden head. "Stop being a smartass then or you get the whole lecture."

"Just tell me if there's likely to be anywhere around here where we can offload the damned monkeys!"

"Land ahoy!"

They all turned to look at Jacob. Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "I am unfamiliar with that term, General Carter."

"That was a monkey on your shoulder, Jacob, not a parrot," O'Neill pointed out helpfully.

Jacob pointed ahead. "Do you all want to keep bitching about my choice of words or take a look at the landmass?"

It was large, possibly an island or possibly the edge of a whole continent, it was hard to tell from their position, but it was certainly beautiful looking. The way their island had looked before it had exploded in a shower of angry ash and burning rock, only much, much bigger. The sea was turquoise here, the beaches pale gold. It looked like their island had looked when he'd first woken up there, with gulls diving the incoming tide to snatch up shrimp and fish. This place was clearly far enough away that the ash hadn't reached here, or else just in the other direction from the way the wind was blowing, whatever the reason it seemed completely untouched.

"It looks beautiful," Carter offered.

Daniel still had a monkey in his arms. "What if there are poachers here? What if there are animals that eat monkeys? They're not used to predators and we've taught them to trust humans."

As Jacob took the ship over the landmass they could see that it was mostly tropical forest, looking very similar to the world the monkeys were used to. Coconut palms on the long empty beaches and a tangle of wet warm jungle. They flew low enough to see waterfalls tumbling in silver streams from high peaks and eagles wheeling. It seemed unlikely that a land so teeming with fertility did not have fruit in abundance. But the monkey Daniel was carrying burrowed into his chest in a way that suggested it was very comfortable where it was.

"They're wild animals," O'Neill told him sternly. "They need to be in the wild."

"I know." Daniel peered intently at the jungle. "I just wish there was some way of knowing if they'd be safe here."

"I see habitation that appears to be human." Teal'c pointed and they all followed his finger to see what he had seen: the silvery domes of some modern-looking building constructed in a circle of see-through walkways leading from one low domed tower and the next.

"It looks like a laboratory." Carter peered at it intently. "Like a biosphere or something."

Jacob looked at O'Neill. "Want to put down?"

O'Neill thought of the weapons they carried and nodded. "Okay. But the first sign of trouble and I expect you to get us out of here. Teal'c…?"

The big Jaffa nodded. "I will remain on board to take the controls so that General Carter can ring you back onto the ship at the first sign of trouble."

At the thought of having to confront other human beings, O'Neill began to feel a little self-conscious. Looking down at his ragged and stained clothing, he became aware of the way he smelled so strongly of sea, sweat, and too much sunshine on unwashed skin. Daniel seemed to be thinking the same thing as he scraped his fingers through his hair ineffectually and then quietly asked Carter if she had brought a t-shirt for him.

Carter obligingly found a t-shirt for Daniel, giving him an encouraging smile as she held it out. He had to put down the monkey to put it on. No sooner had he put the creature on the floor of the tel'tak than it ran back up him again and O'Neill rolled his eyes but heroically forbore from commenting. Even with the eager-fingered help of the monkey, Daniel managed to wriggle his way into a t-shirt and then back into Teal'c's jacket but it didn't help much. He still looked in need of a shave and his hair was sun-bleached and untidy. Scratching his own unshaven jaw and feeling his once-short hair tickling his ears, O'Neill suspected he was looking a little less than military issue himself. In fact he suspected that he and Daniel both looked – and smelled – like two guys who had spent the last few months on an island that didn't have soap or hot water. Carter was more presentable as at least her clothing was clean and had seen an iron in the past few days but she was too skinny and the shadows under her eyes were scary. The Jackson kid was barefoot, still looked about seventeen to O'Neill, and the way his fair hair was in his eyes coupled with his mouth breathing gave him a distinctly available-by-the-hour appearance. Groaning inwardly, O'Neill had to admit that a team apparently consisting of two smelly hermits, a crack whore, and a rent boy might not give exactly the right impression to the humans down there. Annoyingly, the other O'Neill was the only one of them who actually looked like a suitable representative of the United States Air Force.

"Let's just take one monkey for now." Daniel pushed the one he was carrying inside the jacket Teal'c had lent him. "Find out if they're nice people first."

Forbearing to point out that even if they were vivisectionists they were unlikely to tell Daniel that, O'Neill nodded. He took the gun Teal'c handed him, checked that the clip was full and then holstered it. When he looked up he found two sets of big blue eyes looking at him in disapproval and glared between the two Daniel Jacksons in annoyance. "I don't go anywhere unarmed if I can help it."

"Would that include the bathroom?" Daniel enquired mildly.

O'Neill gave him what he sincerely hoped was a withering glare but Daniel looked resolutely unwithered. Jackson wrinkled his nose in mild disdain but said nothing aloud. Pointedly checking the ammo in his own revolver, the other O'Neill said, "You two stay behind us. Okay?"

Jackson rolled his eyes. "Because we're the anthropologists trained in meeting and greeting and you're the shoot-em-up guys? Yes, that makes perfect sense."

O'Neill looked at his doppelganger. "Do you have any kind of control over your Daniel? Because if so it would be nice if you could exert it round about now."

"Control your own Daniel," the man retorted.

The two Daniels exchanged of look of total sympathy with one another. Clearly here was the only other person they would ever meet who would fully understand the nature of the burden they carried.

"When you're ready." Jacob looked between them with no discernible patience. "Don't rush yourselves or anything. There's nothing I like better than having to play fifth wheel to a good domestic quarrel."

That shut them all up very effectively and with Carter staring straight ahead so neither of the two ranking officers could see her smirk, they ringed down to the shiny silver modernity of the alien laboratory.

 

O'Neill had to admit that Daniel was right. Again. Sometimes when you arrived with guns in your hands looking military, people did get a little…scared of you. The laboratory they'd ringed down into was shiny enough with various instruments bleeping and a wall of small screens like a hi-tech security outpost, but the two scientists could hardly have looked less dangerous if they'd tried. They were young men, one dark, one fair, both wearing shorts, sandals, and t-shirts, and both very obviously unarmed. They were talking on some kind of communication device as the rings disappeared.

"People. Yes, here. Oh shit. Make that armed people. No, stay where you are. I'll leave the radio open – "

Then at a jerk of the gun from the other O'Neill, the fair-haired guy, who had been speaking so rapidly into the communications panel, stepped back with his hands in the air. O'Neill noticed the way the dark-haired guy moved forward to put himself between the blond and his gun.

"Hi," the dark-haired guy spoke evenly, holding his hands up. "As you can see we're not armed or dangerous."

Daniel stepped in front of O'Neill's gun in a way that made it clear that he wasn't going to let a little thing like getting shot to pieces affect the habits of a lifetime. "Hi. I'm Daniel Jackson. We're sorry to gatecrash your lab. This is Major Samantha Carter. Colonel O'Neill. Jack and…Doctor Jackson."

"Are you twins?" The dark-haired one looked between them suspiciously. "Or are you from a place with cloning?"

"We're kind of twins." Jackson looked at Daniel and shrugged. "We're sort of the same people but not. It's to do with quantum theory and dimensional parallels and…stuff."

Carter had her mouth open to explain when the fair-haired guy said, "Is that a Patterson Monkey?" His voice trembled a little as if he could hardly dare to hope.

"What?" The dark-haired guy wheeled around to look at Daniel accusingly. "Where did you get that from? Don't you know they're a protected species? You have no right to –"

"Kalen, it's not tagged." The fair-haired guy had that look of suppressed excitement Daniel got when he found new chicken scratchings in a dusty tomb. He picked up an instrument from the panel next to him and, oblivious of Carter shadowing him with her P-90, waved it slowly. "No reading. No tag. Not one of ours."

"What?" The hard look vanished from the dark-haired Kalen's face at once, like a true believer getting his first look at the Grail. He swallowed hard, searching Daniel's face. "Did you find it here or…?"

"On another island." Daniel kept stroking the monkey's head. "On your world is this a species that's…?"

"One of the ten most endangered, yes." Kalen held out his hands then put them back by his sides. "I'm sorry…this is a little too much to take in. I mean… Another island? Around here?"

"About four hundred miles from here," Carter told him.

"It erupted," O'Neill explained helpfully.

Daniel said: "It may have been called 'Tanui-ike' by the people who used to live there."

"I knew it!" Kalen stabbed the communications button. "Christabel? Tenanye? Did you hear that? The damned military wouldn't let us go there and all the time there were Patterson Monkeys there!"

There was a crackle back from two excited female voices in a language O'Neill didn't understand.

"It was about to erupt." Colonel O'Neill put his gun away. "So, your military were probably just trying to stop you getting crispy-fried."

"We'd have been fine." The fair-haired one dismissed the possibility of danger with a shrug, gaze still fixed on the monkey in Daniel's arms. "I'm Anwar, by the way. Can I…? Is he…? Is it a he or a she by the way…?"

"Definitely a 'he'," O'Neill assured him. "If you don't watch him he tries to stick his dick in your ear. I always thought that was just part of a comedy routine when Richard Pryor said his monkeys did that, but it so wasn't."

"Jack…" Daniel gave him one of those reproving looks he saved just for him. "He's an adolescent. He's going through changes."

"Hey, I was an adolescent once. I still never stuck my dick in anyone's ear."

Kalen was also gazing at the monkey as if it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. "A female would have been too much to hope for but even a male is an incredible find. Is he hurt? Does he need medical care?"

"He's fine." Daniel smiled at them gently. "They're all fine."

Anwar hit a button to show them something playing on one of the screens. Golden-haired black-faced monkeys were swinging from tree to tree in a way that was very familiar. "This is our troupe. They're at the south end of the island at the moment. Christa and Tenanye are monitoring them because one of the females is pregnant for the first time and we need to know she has the baby okay. There are ten of them, and as far as we knew they were the last ten Patterson Monkeys alive anywhere on the planet. The history of these islands is enough to break a conservationist's heart. There was terrible exploitation here because of the Eden trees and their benefit to medicine and then, of course, there was the whole Natana flower drug harvest thing, and the wildlife was slaughtered by the people harvesting the Eden bark and the Natana flowers. They ate everything, and because the Patterson Monkeys are so curious and fearless they ate those first. By the time the world woke up to the wreckage that had been wreaked in this place, several islands had been lost to volcanic eruptions and the wildlife was decimated by three centuries of human intervention. This whole area is a wildlife preserve now and everything is tagged and monitored so any poacher would be wasting their time as we'd know where the animal was straight away."

Kalen was staring at Daniel as if mesmerized. Very carefully, as if afraid the words might bite him, he said, "'All'? You said 'all'?"

"All the monkeys in the troupe." Daniel pointed at the ceiling. "They're on the ship."

Anwar's jaw dropped. "How…how many?"

"Thirteen."

Jackson looked up. "Fourteen. Remember the baby?"

"Oh yes." Daniel nodded. "Fourteen. Eight females and six males. All healthy."

"Oh my God." Anwar sat down suddenly.

Kalen rested a hand on his shoulder, patting him reassuringly. "Put your head between your knees."

O'Neill looked across at Daniel and had to admit that the boy had done good. Again. And he was getting to smile in a way Daniel didn't get to smile anything like often enough. He was feeling pretty damned good himself.

"So, they'll be safe here, right?" He looked between Anwar and Kalen. "We can leave the monkeys with you and you'll make sure they're okay?"

Anwar looked up. "You're…happy to do that?"

"Sure." O'Neill shrugged. "We just want them to have a good life. If you can guarantee that…?"

"I promise you they'll have a good life," Kalen said fervently. "The island is about a hundred thousand square miles of protected animal paradise."

"That's about the size of California," Carter observed. "Or New Zealand."

"…It has mountains, tropical rainforest, sandy beaches, glaciers, and fjords. Every environment in one package. It's an internationally protected nature reserve for endangered and indigenous species. Anwar, where are the information packs?"

O'Neill found a printed pamphlet pushed into his hand by the fair-haired Anwar. "There are only the four of us humans here," the young man explained. "It really is a paradise for the animals that live here."

"No tourism?" Jackson enquired.

Kalen shook his head. "Not here. They go to Okoluna. That's about six times the size of the Island and the species there are off the danger list. The money from the tourism there pays for this place with plenty to spare."

Carter had shouldered her gun to examine the screens and instrumentation curiously, she and Jackson murmuring to one another quietly as they read from wallcharts and looked at data. She looked over her shoulder. "Sir, is this the tree you were talking about?"

He crossed over the room, aware that behind him, Daniel was gingerly putting the monkey he carried into Kalen's arms. After a muffled protest the monkey consented to unhook his fingers from Daniel's t-shirt and to fasten them on Kalen's instead, the dark-haired scientist looking like a kid whose Christmases had all come at once. "Of course, we try not to interact with them too much." Kalen held it out so Anwar could touch the monkey's fur. "We don't want them getting tame. But we do like them to be aware of us so we can get close enough to help if one of them is hurt."

"They have the softest fur, don't they?" Anwar stroked the monkey's head with one tentative finger, looking like a kid with a new kitten and not at all like a scientist.

"Sir?"

O'Neill stared at the picture on the wall Carter was pointing at. He recognized it at once. It was exactly like the one on the island, even down to the snake wrapped around it. Above something incomprehensible in what looked more like Greek than Latin was the text: 'The so-called 'Eden Tree', also discovered by Patterson in his historic Eighth Voyage, and so named by him because of the 'Eden Snake' which made these trees their home. Once the medicinal properties of the bark were uncovered by the famous Malike Onanwye, the felling and harvesting of the trees began in earnest as pharmaceutical companies hurried to stake their claims to the trees. The venomous Eden Snakes were slaughtered in their thousands…'

O'Neill spun around. "Are Eden Snakes really big with this sort of diamond pattern on their skin and orange eyes?"

Anwar and Kalen both jerked their heads up and gazed at him open-mouthed. They were a good-looking pair and he wondered idly if they were involved with the women whose voices he'd heard over the radio. Then it occurred to him that they could be doin' it with each other and looked at them with more curiosity. Perhaps he was just assuming everyone was gay now that he seemed to be, and how would you tell anyway? Of course it might not have occurred to them to get involved with anyone as they both seemed a little intense about their work, but maybe even naturalists occasionally noticed they were also human beings. He hadn't seen the two women but he liked to think they were also wearing only t-shirts and shorts, and if they were a couple that wasn't exactly an unpleasant thought, especially if one or both of them looked like Lara Croft. Actually, he really liked that idea. A lot. Then he looked across at the other O'Neill, who was gazing at the two scientists with the same thoughtful expression on his face, and realized he was now being as unevolved as that guy was. He was damned sure he wouldn't have been having lesbian fantasies about two women he'd never even seen if that other O'Neill hadn't been around to lower the tone.

"Are you saying…?" Kalen moistened his lips. "You saw one? A live one?"

"Yes. It was on one of these trees. I used the bark to save Daniel." He nodded his head at the man and Daniel gave him a very sweet smile in return.

"It didn't bite you?" Anwar began and then shook his head. "What am I saying? Of course, it didn't bite you. If it had you'd be very, very dead by now. I think seventy paces is the farthest anyone ever got after a bite from one of those snakes. They're not just deadly – in that the toxicity of their venom is off the scale – they're also very dangerous – they bite first and ask questions later."

O'Neill scratched his jaw. "So, it's a poisonous snake then?"

Kalen half-laughed. "It was the most venomous snake on the planet. Now, it's extinct. As far as we know. But, although it's officially listed as on the extinct list, we're hoping there may be one around here somewhere. This island is the only one that escaped the sea journeys. It's so far from the rest of the chain and the seas are so treacherous that it didn't appear on any charts and so no one knew it existed until after the days of air travel. We still have giant turtles. Nowhere else does. And we still have Patterson Monkeys and all the most endangered flightless birds, like the Inu and the Yenatir. The Inu are extinct everywhere except here and Okoluna. There are Nanteni lizards here and a pretty flourishing population of Matalik frogs and Jewel Snakes as well. Given that those things survived here and nowhere else, we all cherish this hope there may be an Eden Snake as well. This place is so huge there could be a lot living here we don't know about."

"There's one on the ship." O'Neill pointed upwards. "In a bag. With some lizards. Or at least it's a big snake with orange eyes that I found on one of those Eden trees anyway. Maybe it's not the one you're hoping for."

"Can we come and get it?" Kalen demanded. "Now?"

 

They kind of reminded him of Daniel. That Jacob’s voice tended to fall into a different register when his eyes glowed briefly, or that Teal’c had a strange tattoo and was introduced as a Jaffa barely merited a glance. The fact they had just been ringed up into an alien spaceship wasn't of any interest either. Only the animals were interesting and they were the most fascinating thing in the whole world. They netted the butterflies first, explaining that they were Irides Emperors, common on the Island now, but rare elsewhere, and picked up any loose lizards they could find, cooing over them happily. They looked a little askance at the tameness of the monkeys. "Were you feeding them?" Kalen enquired.

As all eyes turned accusingly to Daniel, he shuffled his feet. "I thought it would be useful for evacuating them." A slight raise of his chin, that stubborn look on his face. "Which it was."

Anwar nodded sympathetically. "Much better for them to have their natural behavior patterns compromised than be burnt alive, certainly."

Daniel nodded. "I thought so."

Moving the monkeys was easy. They climbed on the two Daniels and the two O'Neills without a problem, clung happily to Carter who had definitely been feeding them going by the way they immediately started shaking her down for PowerBars – yanking at her t-shirt to check down her bra as if she was in the habit of secreting food there in a way that made O'Neill wonder if they knew something about her he didn't. And to everyone's surprise the shy female with the baby approached Anwar of her own choosing and let him pick her up. He doubted any grandchild had ever been admired more dotingly than that tiny fluffy infant by the two scientists. Down on the planet they were shown an eight-sided fenced compound with trees and a small pool in it where Kalen suggested the monkeys be left to acclimatize for a few days. They had built it when some intrepid explorer had found the last three Patterson Monkeys on Okoluna, he explained, and brought them over at once to join the troupe here. Apparently, they had integrated no trouble at all, Patterson Monkeys being very social and non-aggressive creatures. He was hoping the other troupe would soon be back from the south side of the island and could get used to the idea of there being other monkeys around. The monkeys seemed perfectly happy in their compound, climbing trees and snatching fruit from one another with their old vigor in a matter of moments. O'Neill supposed they were such a strong family unit that wherever they were mattered less than who they were with, a bit like him and Daniel. Given their curiosity he thought they would probably enjoy having a whole new island to explore a hundred times the size of the one they had been on before, and would like meeting new monkeys. Anwar pointed a camera at them as he babbled happily into the communications panel, eliciting excited squeals from the other two scientists who said why did the good things always happen when they were on the other end of the island? The butterflies were easily released to flutter away in a shimmer of blue while the lizards were put into tanks overnight with water and some insect covered leaves to acclimatize.

Moving the snake was a different matter. After Kalen had explained in a hushed voice exactly how venomous it was, how there had never been an anti-toxin found for its venom, and how agonizing the paralysis and death was that followed its bite, they had not needed to be told to keep their distance from that innocuous looking bag on the deck.

"You brought the most poisonous snake in the universe onto my ship?" Jacob demanded.

O'Neill winced. "I owed it one."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. "And you talk about me being reckless."

As they watched, a small green lizard scuttled cautiously out of the bag. Anwar gave a little exclamation beside him. "It's a Nanteni Lizard, Kalen."

Kalen shook his head. "Someone please pinch me, because I couldn't bear to wake up and find this was just a dream."

"Well, if it is I'm dreaming it too." Anwar sighed happily as the lizard scuttled over to him. He picked it up carefully and placed it in one of the containers they had carried onto the ship.

Telling Anwar to keep back in a tone that O'Neill recognized all too well as that of someone used to dealing with a too-curious companion, Kalen caught the edge of the bag and dragged it very gently to where the ring mechanism was. Looking up at Jacob he said, "Could you ring it down to here?" Showing the man a plan of the laboratory he marked a neat 'X' on it. "That's our reptile house. From there we should be able to move the snake to a safe place while we assess its condition."

He thought Teal'c and Jacob looked a little wistful as they were left behind on the ship again without getting to see the interesting stuff but he didn't blame Carter for not volunteering to stay behind herself. He was pretending indifference but he really did want to know if this was an Eden Snake. If he had saved something that wasn't just endangered but believed to be extinct.

Kalen was trying hard not to get too excited, explaining that Eden Snakes had always been described as very aggressive so it made no sense that one would just sit there and let a human pick it up and put it into a sack the way O'Neill had described. Moving swiftly and decisively, he lifted the bag into a divided glass enclosure, explaining that he was hoping to lure the lizards into the other side where they could be safely removed. The lizards proved surprisingly co-operative, clambering out of the bag and finding nothing of interest in that side of the tank, moving towards the water feature and greenery in the other.

"Another Nanteni lizard." Anwar was breathing down O'Neill's neck as he peered into the tank excitedly but O'Neill didn't feel the need to object as the kid was so full of enthusiasm. But the way Kalen gave Anwar an almost imperceptible shove along the tank away from O'Neill did suggest that perhaps the dark-haired scientist had noticed his companion was a nice-looking boy he didn't want to share after all.

"And a Striped Vantel. Two Striped Vantels. A Jewel Frog." Kalen gave O'Neill a look of admiration. "You seemed to have grabbed everything endangered you could find, Colonel. A trained naturalist couldn't have got a better collection."

O'Neill didn't even try not to look smug. He had to admit he wasn't exactly averse to getting all this praise and admiring looks from two good looking boys not wearing very much but when he saw Daniel smiling at him, so happy that he was being praised, he found his chest got a little tighter as his heart expanded a fraction. It was wonderful to be able to give someone else what they most wanted in the world – which in the case of these two, who clearly didn't get out much, seemed to be a lot of snakes, lizards, and monkeys – because he had certainly been given everything he wanted the day that bark had saved Daniel's life, and given it again on the day Daniel had admitted he loved him.

Only after the last legged reptile had clambered out of the bag, did the snake slowly and very cautiously consent to put its head outside. Its orange eyes met O'Neill's and he had no idea what the serpent was thinking, whether it recognized him, blamed him for moving it from its nice familiar tree or was grateful to have been saved from fiery death. The gasp from Kalen and Anwar told him the truth before he turned to look at them.

Anwar had tears in his eyes and Kalen was just staring and whispering, "Oh my God…" over and over.

"So?" The other O'Neill demanded. "Is it one of those extinct snakes or not?"

"Yes," Anwar gasped. He fumbled to shut down the glass partition that would keep the snake in its side of the tank while Kalen switched on some ultra violet light over the tank. At once a screen lit up at the side of the tank and O'Neill realized it must be some kind of X-ray machine, the warm coils of the snake showing up as glowing color within the bag.

"Kalen!" The stifled yelp from Anwar made O'Neill start. He saw the young man point a visibly shaking hand at the screen, pointing out bright points of redness dotted along the snake's body. "Tell me I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing."

Kalen sank into a chair, open-mouthed as he gazed at the screen. As O'Neill looked to Daniel for information and the man shrugged at him helplessly, Carter frowned at the screen and then smiled. "You did good, Sir."

Anwar looked at O'Neill and said a little shakily. "Would you like to name the snake? I think you've really earned that honor."

O'Neill felt a little awkward in front of so many people. If it had just been Daniel it wouldn't have been so bad but with the others around it was a trifle embarrassing. All the same, he'd had a name for it for a while and he wanted to share it, even if the reason was a trifle sappy. "Lucifer. I called him Lucifer. Not just because he was wrapped around the tree, but because he was a…" He looked at Daniel. "A bringer of light. And that's what he brought me. He brought Daniel back to me." He dropped his gaze in embarrassment and then darted a glance across at Daniel to see the man with that look on his face that told him beyond the shadow of any doubt that he was loved.

"That's a lovely story." Anwar gulped. "But maybe not the best name in the world – given the circumstances."

"The snake is female, sir." Carter smiled.

He looked at her in confusion. "As well as knowing chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and how to repair motorbikes you also know how to sex snakes now?"

"No, sir." Her smile grew wider. "But I can read an X-ray." She pointed at the screen. "Your snake is full of fertilized eggs. See those little red glowing points along her body? That's the baby snakes inside the eggs. When you picked her up you took a whole species from extinction to only…critically endangered."

"We're going to have to keep her here. Make sure the eggs hatch okay." Anwar still looked like someone in deep shock but the scientist in him was reasserting itself. "We have the python maternity ward set up already. That's nice and dark. I think she'll like it there. Tell Christa – no, don't. We don't want them distracted when they're trying to get back here. Remember the time I crashed the shuttle when you told me you'd found an Inu nest…?"

O'Neill smiled as the two of them burbled at one another rapturously. And, okay, he had to admit that Daniel had been right to make them go back to the island. It was nice to have put that expression on someone's face. It felt good to have achieved something that wasn't just taking big guns back to Earth, or, more realistically, given their allies, failing to take big guns back to Earth and instead having a big fight with Daniel about the ethics of it. A thought occurred to him. "That drug you talked about. What was that again?"

The two scientists were oblivious of him, too busy preparing a maternity ward for their not-extinct snake. O'Neill met her orange eyes and it seemed to him she didn't look too unhappy. He was sorry for her lost mate who had presumably died on the island but the look in her eyes suggested she thought he'd done good as well to save her. Carter appeared at his shoulder. "Perhaps she didn't bite you because she was pregnant and it affected her normal behavior?"

"I think she knew I was trying to help." He looked into her orange eyes and wondered if she had. That still didn't explain the first time this supposedly very aggressive snake had just let him take that bark from underneath her coils, but perhaps so long without human interference had blunted the edge of her aggression. He was never going to know because this was one translation job between species that not even Daniel could manage.

"Perhaps she didn't think he'd taste any good," the other O'Neill shrugged.

O'Neill gave him a withering look but was saved having to answer by Jackson who said, deadpan, "I doubt that, Jack. Not if he tastes anything like you." The colonel looked at him for a moment and the fair-haired archaeologist gave him what O'Neill mentally designated a 'come hither' smile. "You taste pretty damned good to me."

As the other O'Neill went to kiss Jackson, O'Neill put a hand on his shoulder. "Do you mind? Not in front of the snake." He jerked a head at Carter and the other O'Neill shrugged.

"Our Carter knows we're an item."

"Bully for you. Your Carter lives in a universe where it's not against the regs. Ours doesn't."

She cleared her throat. "The Natana flowers, sir? You were asking about those? They look like this." She found him the relevant page in his pamphlet even though he had no idea when she'd found the time to read it, and held it out.

He recognized them at once, sticky-pollened white blooms that didn't heal cuts worth a damn. There had been hundreds of them on the fringes between the shore and the jungle. He and Daniel exchanged a glance. Carter was reading from the pamphlet. "Apparently the pollen gives anyone who swallows it a wonderful high. It's described as far superior to any processed drugs created by mankind."

Daniel spoke for both of them with that muttered, "Damn."

The other O'Neill looked between them in disbelief. "You didn't try it?"

O'Neill shrugged. "I was looking for medicine not happy powder."

Jackson was also reading over Carter's shoulder. "It says that some of their most famous poets have been inspired by the Natana dust to write their greatest works. That it brings a 'clarity and beauty to the mind of such intense pleasure that is comparable to a six hour orgasm'."

O'Neill and Daniel exchanged another glance, O'Neill reading his own disappointment in Daniel's eyes. The damned flowers had been everywhere. How had they not accidentally imbibed a little of that apparently wonderful dust? He tried to shrug casually. "We made our own entertainment."

"Absolutely." Daniel also shrugged. "We didn't need empty stimulants." He darted O'Neill a look. "You did bring some of that healing bark stuff though, right?"

"Some." O'Neill thought of the hasty handful he'd snatched and thought about explaining to Janet Fraiser he would have grabbed more but he'd been overcome with an irrational urge to save a deadly poisonous snake instead. "Enough for…analysis. Things were a little…eruptive at the time."

"And I'm sure Janet will be very understanding about that." Daniel didn't even try to sound convincing. He smiled at Kalen and said tentatively, "We may need to come back at a later date. Would that be…?"

"Oh, fine." Kalen only had eyes for the snake in her tank. "We'd always be happy to give someone the guided tour. Just as long as you don't take any flora or fauna off the Island, of course." He laughed as if the idea was too absurd to be anything more than a joke and O'Neill groaned inwardly.

"All the trees are protected as well, are they?"

"Absolutely."

O'Neill grimaced. "I guessed they probably would be." He rolled his eyes at Daniel who shrugged in resignation. Janet was going to kill them. Not only was the infirmary going to run red with their blood, but she was probably going to stick really big needles in their asses as well.

Jackson was still reading. "Apparently someone called Anaz el Landa wrote what is described as 'that most dizzyingly beautiful of verse, 'Amounsanet' ' while under its influence." He looked up at his O'Neill. "Do you think that's the equivalent of 'Kubla Khan' for this planet? I wonder if it works for translations? If it actually helps you to realize things you've never realized before…?"

"Drugs are bad." O'Neill snatched the pamphlet out of his hand. "Ask your boyfriend if you don't believe me, I'm sure he can tell you all the reasons why not taking them is a very good idea."

"Oh absolutely." Colonel O'Neill didn't sound any too convincing but he was at least attempting to back him up. "Very bad."

"What about that 'squirrel jump' you bought?"

"Well, I regretted it afterwards."

"And those tablets. What were they called? The ones that you said meant you could keep it up for a – "

He clamped a hand across Jackson's mouth. "You don't need drugs – you've got me. Now, let's stop talking about anything I may have told you I've done in the past while under the influence of alcohol, and go home. I'm tired of wearing Tollan jewelry and I want to see my own universe again."

Although the man had smiled, O'Neill saw a glimpse of weariness in his doppelganger's eyes and realized it was true, the man really did want to go home. He certainly knew how that felt. The scientists were happy, the snake, monkeys, lizards, frogs, and butterflies were all in a place where they could live out their lives in relative peace and tranquility. There was a still long journey until they could reach the SGC again and he really needed a shower. He looked around at his mismatched crew, Jackson still earnestly reading the pamphlet he had taken back from his weary-looking colonel, a Carter who looked so much better than when they had first ringed aboard the ship, starting to smile again, starting to relax, and Daniel, his Daniel, scruffy, unshaven, unwashed, and wearing borrowed clothes, and truly a sight for very sore eyes. He squeezed Carter and Daniel on the shoulder and found a smile for them so wide it made the salt burn on his lips start bleeding. "Kids, let's go home."

***

Hammond could feel his face actually hurting, he had been smiling so widely and for so long, but he couldn't seem to stop himself. He was feeling the kind of soul-deep happiness and relief that just needed an outlet and there were only so many times he could pat O'Neill or Daniel on the shoulder and tell them how glad he was that they were home. He hardly recognized Major Carter and Teal'c. They were transformed into laughing, relaxed human beings after so long as silent, stressed-out ghosts. Admittedly, it had not escaped his attention the way they hovered so close to O'Neill and Daniel, Major Carter, in particular, practically clutching Daniel's sleeve, but he was feeling a little like that himself. They all looked tired but so happy. He kept saying 'Good job, people' but however many times he said it, it still didn't feel like enough. He was sorry Narim wasn't there to share the moment of triumph as he had certainly done his part to help, but however complicated a mission it had been, however much of a risk had been taken in using the Tollan, the Tok'ra, the quantum mirror, and the assistance of travelers from a different dimension, it had worked. He had got his people back.

O'Neill and Daniel were a little dazed, certainly, he could see the culture shock hitting them as they found themselves back in a place that was so familiar and yet, after so long away from it, so strange; looking around the SGC as if they were not quite certain it was real. Although they both looked thinner than when he had last seen them and Daniel Jackson's hair was several shades lighter as well as being noticeably longer than when he had seen him last, he was still recognizably their own Daniel Jackson back again. And definitely not the inexplicably barefoot Jackson who had greeted him with that sweet smile and curious self-possession before looking around for coffee. Somehow both Daniels had been supplied with steaming mugs while they were still standing in the 'gateroom, both of them sipping orgasmically and smiling at one another through the steam, one addict empathizing with another.

O'Neill looked lean and suntanned and tired, but also well in a way that Hammond hadn't seen in far too long. Whatever shadow it was that had been haunting him before was gone from behind his eyes. He looked at peace with himself in a way he hadn't been for years. Looking at Daniel Jackson, who also had that look of tranquility he certainly hadn't had when he had left, Hammond suspected it was not yoga or meditation that had led them to this new plateau of peace within themselves. In some ways it was no more than he had expected and he was torn between relief that they had finally worked out what their problem was and solved it, and an inner groan at what a problem this now presented him with. Still, if what he suspected was true, he already had his answer ready, had already thought it through.

He had decided to combine a celebration supper with the debriefing, so they were dining around the briefing room table, while everyone talked over the top of one another and in the case of the two O'Neills scored points at every opportunity. O'Neill and Daniel had showered and shaved and changed their clothes, but their hair was still ragged and in need of cutting and there was still something more of the beachcomber in O'Neill's appearance than the military officer. O'Neill had said he would eat canteen food if he had to but he'd rather not travel across the universe just to die of salmonella from the commissary's version of chicken fritters so Hammond had ordered food to be sent in from a nearby restaurant. Perhaps it was an extravagance, but it wasn't every day he got two of his best men back from the dead. It was called a 'debriefing' but in reality it was more of a celebration, complete with wine, whiskey, and, of course, coffee. Some information about what had happened since O'Neill and Daniel Jackson had been thrown through the wrong wormhole to their volcanic paradise island was certainly being exchanged but if he was honest, the only information Hammond really needed was here in front of him: his people were back, alive and well, and, according to Doctor Fraiser, apart from a little scar tissue, unscathed.

Interestingly, much of the debriefing was done for him by the Daniel Jackson from the other dimension who had apparently, on the journey home, come to the conclusion that their own SGC needed to mount a mission to their equivalent of the volcanic island chain in which O'Neill and Daniel had been marooned and see if they could save the apparently endangered species that had been living there. Everyone else had looked happy but exhausted, he had just seemed full of enthusiasm, asking Major Carter and Jacob to write down exactly what the coordinates were so the world could easily be found and copying information from a tattered-looking leaflet into his notebook.

The other O'Neill had looked shattered past the point of being able to make more than the weakest protests. Hammond had been sharing twenty year old single malt with everyone – except Daniel Jackson who had insisted he would only drink whiskey if it was added to the strongest cup of coffee available to man – but the visiting O'Neill had been the one to clutch the glass as if it was the most necessary to him as he gazed at the fair-haired Jackson. "You want to go to where there's an erupting volcano to look for a deadly poisonous snake?"

The visiting Jackson was undoubtedly a sweet-natured young man and Hammond could see why his alter ego was so fond of him, but he was also relieved that the Daniel in his dimension had grown up a little past this point. Blinking at his O'Neill in confusion, Jackson said, "Yes. Of course. We could save it from extinction. Oh…and there's that bark stuff in the Eden Tree. We can get General Hammond to authorize a mission to look for that. I'm sure Janet would like some of that in her infirmary. Then while Sam gets the bark stuff we could get the snakes and the monkeys – and what were those lizards called…?"

The visiting O'Neill offered a faint moan and put his head in his hands. Hammond gave him another refill.

There was a regrettable smugness about their own O'Neill as he tugged at his silvered hair and said, "Six months, tops. You'll see. You may as well buy the dye right now."

"The Natana flowers might be worth harvesting too." Jackson seemed oblivious of his partner's unhappiness, frowning thoughtfully from behind the gold circles of his spectacles as he made more notes. "If someone took some of that while wearing one of those Tok'ra things we could see what a really good drug trip looks from the inside. I'm sure Sam would like to know that."

"I know what a really good drug trip looks like from the inside," the other O'Neill protested. "Just drink a lot, stick your fingers in your eyeballs, then watch the Tellytubbies, you'll get the same effect. I really don't think going to that island is a good idea."

"Jack…" Jackson gave him a look of reproach. "Don't you want to save those species from extinction?"

"I have a hard enough time saving you from extinction! Have you forgotten that you went paddling in molten lava to save a damned monkey? I nearly had a coronary!"

"You're not still going on about that, are you?" Jackson looked genuinely surprised.

The visiting O'Neill held out his glass to Hammond in mute appeal and the man refilled it at once. "At least you never need to worry about being bored, Colonel."

The man groaned and rested his head on the desk. "Why couldn't I fall in love with someone with at least a basic sense of self-preservation? Why did it have to be Lemming Boy Jackson?"

Jackson only smiled at that. "You wouldn't want me any other way, Jack. Now, how far was the island Doctor Jackson calls 'Tanui-ike' from the place Anwar and Kalen called 'The Island', General Carter?" Hammond had to smile himself then. The same boy who had been so full of doubts before they had set off had clearly had all of them laid to rest on this trip. It was now evidently as obvious to him as it was to everyone else in the vicinity who didn't need a seeing eye dog that Colonel O'Neill was head over heels in love with him and didn't seem likely to be getting over his infatuation this side of the grave. How swiftly that infatuation was pushing him and his shattered nerves toward the grave was another matter entirely.

Jacob gave the visiting O'Neill a sympathetic look before obligingly sketching out the placement of the island on a piece of graph paper for the curious Jackson.

"I'd like you alive," the visiting O'Neill muttered. "And in one piece would be good. One undamaged piece would be even better."

Delighted as he was to have him back, Hammond couldn't deny that his own O'Neill did seem to be taking a malevolent satisfaction in upsetting his doppelganger. "Talking of undamaged pieces, I'd ask Daniel to show you his last batch of scar tissue, but that would probably just really upset you, wouldn't it? I can't get him to show you his old scar tissue, of course, because the sarcophagus got rid of that when he was being revived – from dying, you know, as he does. Is it three times or four now, Daniel? I forget. You do know yours has an appendix that could blow at any moment, don't you? Just saying. Just a friendly reminder from one team leader to another."

"You will burn in hell," the other O'Neill told him blearily.

"Jack…" Daniel gave the O'Neill from his own dimension a warning look. "Stop being such a…bitch."

"Hey, I was just trying to be helpful." O'Neill took another swig of whiskey, grinning as he did so.

"They were like this all the way home," Jacob Carter shook his head and Hammond sympathetically refilled his glass too. "I never realized quite how many bad things had happened to Daniel until Jack decided to recount every single one of them to Colonel O'Neill in that helpful way of his."

"That's me." O'Neill smiled. "Mister Helpful."

"I'm glad you told me that," Daniel observed witheringly. "Or I might have mistaken you for Mister Smug Gloating Bastard."

"A lot of people make that mistake." O'Neill looked completely unabashed as he turned to the other O'Neill with a happy smile. "Did I ever tell you about the time Daniel slipped out of phase and ended up invisible and haunting us like a really pissy poltergeist?"

"You need therapy," the visiting O'Neill told him. "You need serious psychotherapy, preferably the kind where they stick electrodes in your brain then hit a really big switch."

Hammond looked at Teal'c and Major Carter. "That must have been a long trip."

"It did indeed appear to be of a considerable duration," Teal'c assured him. His gaze softened as it passed across Daniel then O'Neill. "There were, however, some compensations."

"There certainly were." Sam put her arms around Daniel and hugged him against her body before planting a kiss in his hair.

Daniel rested his head on her shoulder briefly in gratitude then looked across at Teal'c and Jacob. "Thanks for finding us."

Major Carter had to wipe her eyes before she could answer. "Well, we estimated what supplies you had with you, and we realized you'd be getting low on coffee, so we knew the situation was pretty critical."

Daniel looked down at the mug in his hand and sighed happily. "You thought right."

"Does this mean you're not going to be obnoxious in the mornings from now on?" O'Neill pointed to his mug.

Daniel took another swig while giving O'Neill one of his patented 'if your brain was any smaller it would be invisible to the naked eye' withering looks. "No. I'm going to be my usual happy smiling self in the mornings, as I always am, whatever my caffeine intake might be. Are you suggesting otherwise?"

O'Neill looked at his Daniel then at Jackson who was also listening closely to this exchange and cleared his throat. "Um…no. Because I would never do that."

"Glad to hear it."

"Mostly because I like my ribs just where they are and not ripped out and stabbed through my lung."

Daniel wrinkled his nose. "Okay, on the occasion when I threatened to do that, I do admit I may have been a little…testy, but I think we can both agree that you were being more than ordinarily annoying."

"I said the water was going to take five more minutes to boil, Daniel, and unless you wanted lukewarm coffee you were going to have to wait. How is that annoying?"

"Trust me, it just is."

Hammond noticed the visiting Jackson watching the exchange wide-eyed, and wondered if he was taking notes for future reference. He looked at his own O'Neill and then back at the other one as if he was wondering how anyone could want to threaten someone quite so perfect. He seemed to come to the conclusion that Daniel's O'Neill must just be inferior to his, interlacing his fingers through those of his O'Neill just to let him know he was there. Tired though the older man clearly was, at that affectionate look and touch from the young man beside him he positively melted, reaching out to stroke the young man's bangs back from his eyes. "You okay?" he murmured.

"Yes. You?"

"I'll be glad to be home."

"Me too."

They leaned their heads against one another, fingers still interlaced, nothing other than a unit, unconcealed, unashamed. Hammond looked across the table and saw their Daniel Jackson looking at them wistfully and a sad expression flicker in O'Neill's eyes. They made eye contact then and drew a little away from one another, a conscious averting of his gaze from Daniel while O'Neill brushed imaginary dust from his thigh. Sighing inwardly, Hammond realized that he and O'Neill were going to have that little heart to heart he had been dreading sooner rather than later.

 

"Can we talk, sir?"

Hammond looked up to find O'Neill in his doorway. He looked at the clock on his desk pointedly. "It's a little late, Jack."

O'Neill came into the room and closed the door. "Well, I thought about asking what you were doing up at two in the morning on a schoolnight, General, but I figured it was probably for the same reason I am."

Hammond nodded to the chair, mind working fast as he did so. This was the old and not the old O'Neill who had walked into the room. In some ways he reminded him of the man he had first met, the same combination of bravado, charm, and, just underneath the surface, that serious core. He seemed rejuvenated in some ways, yet there was sadness in his eyes as he looked around the room, as if he thought he might be seeing it for the last time. Hammond reached for the whiskey bottle again. O'Neill appreciated a good single malt like almost no one else on the base except Hammond himself. When O'Neill wasn't around and Jacob Carter didn't visit, the whiskey stayed in the drawer. Hammond had known too many senior officers who had become solitary drinkers, sometimes the pressures of having to send good men into situations where there was a more than even chance they might die created fissures which only alcohol could fill. So, when he was alone, the bottle remained untouched, which made occasions such as these all the sweeter.

He poured them both a tumbler and put the second in front of O'Neill then held up his own. They clinked glasses quietly. "Cheers."

"Cheers." O'Neill took a sip and closed his eyes as he savored it. "I thought about things like whiskey. When I thought the island was going to be our world forever. The things we wouldn't see and touch and taste again. I used to wake up sometimes smelling burgers grilling. You know that burned flavor in the air when you're cooking them in the yard on a summer evening? Nothing like it. I used to wonder how crazy that scent would have to drive me before I'd think killing a monkey was worth it just to taste meat again." He took another swig. "I want to thank you, General."

"You already did," Hammond reminded him gently.

"Some things need saying more than once. We'd be dead now if it wasn't for you. The last thing I ever saw would have been Daniel being eaten by a shark. The last thing I ever heard…" He ran a hand across his face.

"A lot of people got you back. I was just one of them."

"But without you the other people couldn't have done anything. I know how many resources you must have committed to finding us. I needed to tell you that I appreciate that. I know what we cost the SGC in man hours and money, and that makes it all the harder to--"

So, this was where things were. Hammond cleared his throat and held up a hand. "Jack, can I say something?"

"General, while we were on that island, Daniel and I – "

"Colonel O'Neill, I really do need to talk now."

O'Neill subsided, resigned and weary but obedient. "Yes, sir."

Hammond gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "Where are our guests?"

"I think Jacob went home with Carter, and Teal'c went with them. They're going to talk…Tok'ra stuff. Colonel…O'Neill and Doctor Jackson are in one of the VIP rooms. I imagine Jackson is thinking up new and exciting ways to get himself killed and the colonel is working on his ulcer. I told Daniel to go to bed about an hour ago on pain of death, so I think that makes it a good bet he's in his office right now reading mission reports and giving himself a caffeine overdose. I'm here because of him, sir. It wouldn't occur to Daniel you'd still be awake at this time of the morning. I imagine he's planning to see you first thing tomorrow."

Hammond turned around his diary so O'Neill could see it. "He asked for a ten-thirty appointment." He didn't mention that Doctor Jackson had tried to see him that night but Hammond had told him he was too tired to talk and it would have to wait until morning.

"He thinks he'd be happy just looking at artifacts other people have brought home. Working on translations other people have filmed. But he wouldn't. I know he wouldn't. He's not the one who needs to resign."

Hammond cleared his throat. "Before you hand me your resignation, suggest Major Carter as the new CO of SG-1, and tell me a lot of things we both know aren't true about how much you enjoy fishing, Jack, perhaps you could listen to what I have to say?" He took a deep breath, picking his words carefully. "SG-1 has never been like any other team in the SGC. For one thing, there is no other team in the SGC I met in 1969. No other team comprised of people I had met before I ever met them. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for others, that has always given SG-1 a special place in my heart. If there is a way this team can stay intact I want to find it."

"Sir, Daniel and I broke the – "

"Do you remember what I told you when you requested permission to go and retrieve Doctor Jackson from the other dimension?" He was careful not to say 'from that other Jack O'Neill's bed' but they both knew where Daniel Jackson had been found on that occasion. No one had needed to tell Hammond directly what had happened, a good CO found out about these things by osmosis, and although he said it himself, Hammond did think he was a good CO.

"That anything done in a different dimension has no bearing on what happens in this one?" O'Neill put down his whiskey glass. "Except, we didn't leave this dimension."

"But everything was altered for you on that island, all the same. You may as well have been in a different universe because as far as you knew there was no way you would ever be coming home. It was no different than when you believed yourself stranded forever on P5C 768. Had you married Laira after that and brought her back with you to Earth, no one would have asked for your resignation."

"Laira wasn't a member of my team, sir." She was just a very kind, very lonely woman who thought she saw something in me that meant we could have been happy together, as long as I was an exile, as long as I was part of her world. She had been wiser than him. He'd thought what they had was special enough to survive uprooting, still reeling from the culture shock of rescue and trying to hold onto both worlds simultaneously, even as she had already worked out that this was 'goodbye' forever.

"But Doctor Jackson is a civilian." Hammond saw he had all of O'Neill's attention, but was careful not to make eye contact, pretending a deep interest in the citations on his wall. "When SG-1 goes on a mission, I expect you to carry out that mission, safeguard this facility and through it this world from any harm to which it may become exposed as a consequence of your going on that mission, and to protect your team. I also expect you to protect any civilian members of your team a little more closely than you would someone who has chosen a career in the military, or –" he risked a glance at O'Neill to see if he was taking this in, "someone who has had a century in which to polish his military skills, and has an immune system that can repair almost any injury. Do I make myself clear?"

O'Neill ran a hand through his hair, expression thoughtful. "You're saying you think it's okay for me to play favorites as long as Daniel is the one I'm favoring?"

"When did you ever not favor Doctor Jackson? When did Major Carter not favor him? When did Teal'c not favor him?"

"Teal'c has that whole…blood-debt-obligation-Sha're thing going on, it's probably a cultural thing with him, and Carter's never had kids and I think that's kind of upped her maternal instinct drive, and Daniel seems to appeal to women in the same way kittens do. One look and they want to protect him or cuddle him or both. But I –"

Hammond waited politely for O'Neill to wrestle with those inconvenient memories. O'Neill grimaced as he got playback from various events from his past. "Okay, so maybe I –" He held up a finger. "When it mattered, I put the Earth first."

"That was going to be my next question. If the circumstances were the same and the only way to save a mission whose purpose was to save the planet was to sacrifice Doctor Jackson, could you do it?"

O'Neill thought for a moment and then nodded. "Daniel has made it pretty clear to me over the years that he thinks we all have an obligation to lay down our own lives if those of others are threatened, and I agree with him. I mean – that's not saying I don't want to swat him sometimes when he's making me do things I don't want to do. But he made me leave him behind on that ship when I really didn't want to, and I still pressed the button on an explosive device I thought might kill him when it seemed the right thing to do."

Hammond topped up both their whiskey glasses. "Colonel, no doubt you know your own feelings best, but I've been telling the Pentagon for years that the bonds formed between members of an SG team are closer than those of any other military unit I have ever encountered. In the case of SG-1, which has a more…eccentric configuration than that of other SG teams, I think it goes double. My question is, close as you have always been to Doctor Jackson, whatever the fine details of your friendship may now be, can you honestly tell me there has ever been a time on any mission on which he has accompanied you where his safety has not been a constant in the back of your mind, and where his death or capture would not have been something you would go to considerable lengths to avert?" As O'Neill didn't answer he continued quietly: "The regulations exist for a very good reason. They exist to prevent dishonorable conduct. To prevent favoritism. To prevent errors of judgment that could lead to unnecessary losses. Had you formed an attachment to the wife of a fellow officer, I would accept your resignation on the spot. Had you formed an attachment to a fellow officer under your chain of command, I would accept your resignation on the spot."

"Daniel's under my chain of command, sir. I'm responsible for his life out there. And for Carter and Teal'c's life."

"The difference being that if you had formed a romantic attachment to Teal'c which made you more inclined to save his life in battle than that of anyone else, when one of your teammates was a civilian archaeologist, the safety of Doctor Jackson would have been undermined by your new closeness to Teal'c." Hammond took another sip of whiskey and fixed O'Neill firmly with his gaze. "Not that I am suggesting you have formed a romantic attachment to any of your teammates, O'Neill. Given that one of them is a subordinate and two are male civilian consultants, we both know that such an attachment would be against the regulations. What am I saying is that it is an inevitable consequence of you and Doctor Jackson having believed for several weeks that you were going to be spending the rest of your lives together that you should have grown closer, and that there will now be a greater…intensity to your friendship. Would you agree with that?"

O'Neill took a rapid slug of whiskey. "Yes, sir. I'd say Daniel and I are definitely even more…intense than we used to be."

"That's perfectly understandable, Colonel. Given that Doctor Jackson's apartment was re-let while he was absent and his possessions are now currently held in storage, it is also clear to me that he is either going to have to take up temporary residence in the SGC or else one of his teammates is going to have to offer him accommodation. As his CO and his closest friend I was hoping you might be willing to step into the breach and –"

"Yes, sir." O'Neill moistened his lips. "General, you know I have too much respect for you to want to –"

"There are some things even the closest friends can't talk about, Jack. But where there's trust and there's respect, I hope that doesn't have to be a problem. I am telling you here and now that I don't feel it's necessary for you to resign, that it would be counter-productive to the Stargate Program for the SGC to be prematurely robbed of your active participation, that I don't want to have to break up a winning team unless I absolutely have to. When you go through that Stargate I expect you to put your mission and this facility first and your teammates a close second. I also expect you to guard the life of the member of your team who is not a trained military officer or ex-first Prime of Apophis a little more closely than you might your other teammates. I also expect you to be able to sacrifice any member of your team for the greater good if the painful occasion warrants it. If you can't fulfill those expectations then tell me now and I will think about reassigning you or Doctor Jackson."

O'Neill swallowed. "I think I can fulfill those expectations, General. I may not know until I step through the 'gate the first time after…after so long away, but I think I can still…be a good team leader. I need to ask Teal'c and Carter –"

"Major Carter and Teal'c have already been in to tell me that they see no reason why you should not lead SG-1 as before. Teal'c did observe that he would prefer if it you 'washed the sand from behind your ears' first but I think that was a literal rather than metaphorical preference on his part. Both of them have expressed total confidence in your leadership despite your enforced time away from the SGC. Major Carter said she has no doubt you will still remember how to shoot a P-90 when the occasion requires it."

Hammond was touched by how close to tears O'Neill looked and the husky tone to his voice as he lowered his gaze. "They're good people."

"Smart people too, Jack. They both recognize a good leader when they have one. They don't think you're going to let them down. I don't think you're going to let them down. I suggest you have faith in our judgment for now, and when you and Doctor Jackson have had some time to recover from your ordeal, I expect to see you back here, ready, willing, and able to lead your team through the Stargate."

O'Neill was unashamedly swallowing now. "Yes, sir. Thank you." He looked up and made eye contact and Hammond saw how moved he was. "Will you tell Daniel?"

Hammond smiled. "I'll be glad to." He rose to his feet and patted O'Neill gently on the shoulder. "Now go and find a bunk somewhere, Jack. I'm giving you two weeks to recuperate, and given that Doctor Jackson has a lot of possessions he's no doubt going to want your help unpacking and several artifacts of possibly vital significance he'll want to examine, I think you're probably going to be glad of this one night in the SGC to catch up on your sleep."

Only after Hammond had ushered the man out of the door, did he sit down, take a deep breath, and then drain his glass of whiskey. The malt tasted smooth on the tongue and then burned a comforting path all the way down to his gut, snatching a little air from his lungs en route. He hadn't actually broken any rules, but he had just bent some to the point where they could be used for a boomerang. Was he snatching at the comfort of the familiar? Ignoring the writing on the wall, this the very first step in an error of judgment that may lead to the inevitable death of good people whom he would later look back to this moment and know he could have saved? Was he endangering Teal'c and Major Carter simply because, after having lost half of his flagship team for so long, he didn't want anything to prevent SG-1 going back through the 'gate again, just as they'd used to, whole and perfect? Or was it a sound instinct, that instinct he had relied upon so many times in the past, telling him that O'Neill was as good a man and as good a team leader as he had always been, and that whatever he and Doctor Jackson might think had altered in their relationship, all they seemed to have truly done was make something concrete that had previously been nebulous.

Every time harm had come to Daniel Jackson in the past, O'Neill had taken it about as badly as it was possible for a man to take any setback or sorrow. He still had vivid memories of the savage rawness of O'Neill's grief as he smashed Hammond's car window after thinking the archaeologist had been burned alive in front of him. Even on the first mission out, when Jackson had been in the process of falling in love with the woman who had later become his wife, and when O'Neill had undoubtedly still been hoping to salvage his own marriage, O'Neill had listened to Daniel Jackson instead of his standing orders and then lied in an official report for that young man's sake. Hammond didn't believe they had deepened their relationship while stranded together, it had already been as deep as the Grand Canyon, they had simply resolved it. They had worked out the reason for their latent annoyance and frustration with one another and found a solution. If anything, he thought the team would run more smoothly now than it had before. Having two members of a four person team smoldering at one another with unresolved romantic tension and all the accompanying negative emotions that engendered had not made for a cohesive unit. The way he saw it, O'Neill and Doctor Jackson had resolved an unsatisfactory situation. He was not intending to examine too deeply the way in which they had resolved it, he was just going to assume that the better understanding they had reached would be a good thing in the long run.

It had always been a long shot to have Doctor Jackson on the team. As with Teal'c, there had seemed more reasons not to have him on SG-1 than there were to want them there. But, also as with Teal'c, it had worked. SG-1…worked. The way miracles did. The way he had known it would. A whole greater than the sum of its parts. It was worth taking a chance to keep that team together for as long as possible, especially when it was a chance Teal'c and Major Carter were themselves so eager to take. They wanted O'Neill and Doctor Jackson back, they'd made that clear. Under any circumstances, they would rather be together than apart. It was Teal'c who had said that nothing had truly changed except for O'Neill and Daniel Jackson's perceptions of their friendship, to others they were as they had always been. Others, perhaps, had always seen more clearly than they had themselves the strength of their tie to one another.

Much verbal tap-dancing had been indulged in, dance steps so neat and subtle his late wife would have been amazed. Slower than usual sentences with carefully selected words. Nothing stated or admitted. Little said but everything nevertheless communicated. They knew. Carter and Teal'c knew. They didn't care. It wouldn't matter. It had always been like this. Always, from the beginning. Those two, a couple, a unit, an extra dimension to their relationship that defied description. Sex was meaningless, new icing on a very old cake, the recipe fundamentally unchanged. Essentially, Major Carter's expressive blue eyes seemed to say, all that had truly happened on that island was that Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Daniel Jackson had finally caught up with the rest of the world in realizing what their relationship actually was. To no one else did it come as any great revelation.

Hammond sighed and closed the file he had been keeping on the search and rescue of his missing people. The decision was made and it sat right with him, a warmth like that whiskey. O'Neill knew how much he was being trusted and he would be worthy of that trust, Hammond had no doubt of that, and in the meantime he could finally afford to exhale after what felt like months of holding his breath. His people were home again, and that was what mattered. Mission accomplished with no loss of life. Restoration achieved. Tonight, for the first time in more nights than he wanted to count, he believed he would sleep well. He hoped his dead wife would visit his dreams again, the way she did sometimes, when he was at his most troubled or contented, and that when he woke tomorrow he would still be able to smell the perfume she always used to wear.

***

Another beautiful morning on Tollana. Strange to take this walk in the company of both Jack O'Neills. Stranger still to take this walk in the company of the man who had usurped him in his ex-lover's affections. Daniel darted a glance around at their company. Sam and Teal'c were walking together as if joined by an invisible thread, bound by recent events, he thought, he could see what the loss of himself and Jack had done to them in the way they clung to one another. Jackson was looking up at the sky as he walked, and although he would never have admitted it to Jack, Daniel had to admit the guy did look very…young. Was it the hair? Or the glasses? Or just his general demeanor? O'Neill was hovering near at hand as if he thought the younger man was perennially poised to trip, ready to catch him if he fell. Daniel had to smile at that, it was silly, but more than a little sweet.

It was a shock to notice that Jack was as close to him as O'Neill was to Jackson. Daniel frowned. He was sure Jack didn't hover in case of imminent disaster though. They were long past that point with one another. Maybe they just took comfort from close proximity. He knew he did. It felt right to be by Jack's left shoulder, the sound of their matched footsteps a pleasant music to his ears.

Narim was there to meet them, offering kind words of welcome and a special smile for Sam as their fingers touched. She was too conflicted, still grieving for Martouf, but so grateful to the handsome Tollan. Daniel wondered if they'd slept together while he and Jack had been gone. He hoped Narim didn't get his heart broken just because he and Jack had left Sam in need of comfort. When she and Narim nodded to one another there was a quality to Sam's smile that made him think something had taken place between them, a softness there, a little wistful, a little guilty, thinking that in another world and another time, they could have been together, but it was just too complicated here. He knew that look too well. He and O'Neill had mirrored it to one another in so many of those shabby motel rooms.

It was a relief to turn back to O'Neill and Jackson and see two people whose lives were so free of complications. They were going home together and they were happy. O'Neill looked tired, certainly, pretty much exhausted, in fact, and Daniel suspected the entropic cascade devices, however effective they might be, had only been imperfectly successful. Every now and then, he noticed, O'Neill or Jackson would wince a little, and although they didn't blur in and out the way Doctor Carter had done, they did look as if they were at least getting pins and needles. Daniel wondered if he would have been prepared to risk his corporeal integrity to cross dimensions and galaxies to help save the ex-boyfriend of the man he loved. Maybe a few years ago--the mental place this Jackson seemed to be felt more like someone he had used to be, than someone he now was--but would he do it now? He looked at Jackson's face, such clear skin and wide eyes, so open to everything, full of trust and blithe confidence in the world around him. Yes, okay, Daniel would probably have gone, but he was damned sure he would have bitched about it a lot more than this guy was doing.

It was strange to see both Jack and Colonel O'Neill in their dress blues, those subtly different ribbons on their chests, both of them looking pressed and ironed and military and handsome. Daniel thought the silver hair really suited Jack better than the brown. Yes, O'Neill looked younger than Jack did, but Daniel thought Jack looked sexier. He doubted Doctor Jackson would agree with him though.

He looked across at the young man again and saw himself as he had used to be. Except the only time he had ever looked like this was on Abydos, in that brief year of happiness he and Sha're had shared under the shifting desert skies. Jack had brought a refugee back from the wreckage Apophis had wrought, bewildered, angry, stubborn, scared. This version of Daniel Jackson, for all the unruly fair hair now getting in one eye, was none of those things. He was happy and secure, as someone is who knows that he is loved.

As Daniel watched, he saw O'Neill reach across and tuck a strand of the younger man's hair behind one ear. "You'll go blind."

A look of mild exasperation from Jackson, who had been trying to read something in Tollan. Had Captain Carter taught him Tollan? Daniel hadn't mastered that language yet. Then a smile, almost a leer, "I thought that was what I had you for – to prevent that."

O'Neill laid a finger across the young man's mouth, a very gentle finger, more of a caress than a reproof. "Hush, this is the PG-13 dimension, remember? No one has sex here or their head explodes."

"Is that right?"

"That's an absolute anthropological fact, Doctor Jackson. And just one of the many reasons why you would find it really boring here and should come straight home with me."

Daniel felt the tiniest pang, just because once upon a time he had been the guy O'Neill was trying to lure back to his own dimension, the guy O'Neill had been flirting with in that sweet not-so secretive way of his. It wasn't that he begrudged Jackson his happiness with this man, at all. He didn't. He was glad for Jackson, and, after being the one seduced onto his knees by this man he did get a kick out of the thought that inter-dimensional karma had now decreed O'Neill should be a hopeless slave to the Daniel Jackson of his own dimension. O'Neill wasn't so much putty in Jackson's hands, as pure marshmallow. A fitting payback indeed for all those people he had seduced over the years with those sexy whispers and skilful fingers and scarily accurate knowledge of where even total stranger's erogenous zones were situated. It was just the openness of it he missed. Of being flirted with by someone who made it clear he wanted to seduce him. Nothing about his and Jack's relationship could be open. Not if they wanted to go on doing the job that they loved.

Jackson was gazing up at O'Neill and Daniel noted in some surprise how much taller than him the older man was. It was only two inches on their personnel files, which sounded like nothing at all, but despite the length of Jackson's legs, their eyeline was quite different. Jackson had to look up to his dress blues clad lover and was doing so now, hair shaken back from his face, lips slightly moist, a besotted expression on his face he probably thought he was managing to hide. Everything about their relationship was so damned simple, and shiny, and new, and sweet, and impossibly romantic. Their life was just one long round of candlelit suppers, red roses, love poetry, and very wild sex, only sporadically interrupted by the occasional alien abduction. And he was glad for them, glad for the man who had bought him dinner and kissed him and made him feel good about himself, and for that other version of himself who had been an orphan for so many years, and who had trouble believing himself worthy of love. He wasn't someone who had ever had a problem with happy endings, even long after he had stopped believing it was something he was ever going to find.

They walked out of the sunlight and into the cool pastels and trinium gleam of the Tollan interior decoration, bubbles rising in a turquoise liquid set into a pillar which Jack always dismissed as 'alien lava lamp décor' but which Daniel had to admit did soothe him in the way it was no doubt intended. And there was the mirror, portal to pan-dimensional adventure, a subtle energy radiating from it, like the suppressed danger of a thousand perilous worlds.

The mirror was so different from the 'gate. It still exerted the same fascination for him. Daniel looked at it, the beauty of the frame, a stone like glass, or else a glass like stone, he wasn't sure which. But when the 'gate was sending travelers to a different part of the universe it showed them how magnificent it was, that violent splash of blue, powerful enough to disintegrate the unwary, the shimmering seduction of the event horizon. A huge stone ring, in a usually sacred place, the hieroglyphs and inner crystals of the DHD. All pointers to tell anyone that this was an object of great power and significance. The mirror, by comparison, was deceptively plain, and yet it could take the traveler not just to another part of their own galaxy, but to a different dimension altogether, and there was nothing to tell the unwary that, just a low level hum, a faint flicker of static electricity. It sent a tiny lap of light across its surface now, across the mirror that didn't reflect any of them, that was the only clue to how dangerous it was. Sam had told him black holes were like that, nothing you could see before it was too late and you were sucked in and lost forever. He couldn't believe now that he had ever contemplated just touching that mirror and going, thinking any dimension he ended up in would be better than his own.

A hand closed on his arm and he looked up to find Jack standing next to him. "Don't touch it."

"I'm just looking at it."

"Yes, but other people look with their eyes, with you, it always involves…touching."

Daniel gazed at him for a moment. This was the same man who had told him he was deadweight. The same man who had slashed his own skin open with a knife and risked blood poisoning and agonizing death to save him. The same man whose kiss could light a fire… He forced himself to think of other things before moving freely became an impossibility. Not making eye contact he murmured quietly, "I'm not going anywhere."

"Well, not without me, you're not."

If they had been born into a dimension where it wouldn't have been against the regulations for them to kiss, they would have kissed then. Kissed and kept on kissing. Daniel looked at Jack's mouth and moistened his lips, sighing inwardly, because although this was the dimension he definitely wanted to be in, some aspects of it really sucked.

"Take this with you, Colonel. A gift from the Tollan of this dimension to the Tollan of your dimension…"

They both turned to find Narim pointing to the narrow bracelet around Colonel O'Neill's arm. Technology the other Tollana hadn't perfected yet. Daniel had taken a brief look at it and seen that the metal was probably trinium based and that the different colored panels on its seemed to have faintly pulsing lights, but there had been no markings or carvings on the bracelet. Like too much of Tollan technology and architecture for his taste, the general impression had been smooth and featureless.

"And you are feeling none of the sensations described by Doctor Samantha Carter when she suffered from entropic cascade failure?"

O'Neill grimaced. "Actually, you kind of feel it all the time. The doohickey stops it going any further than a millisecond but it can't prevent it starting. So you basically feel like you're about to bust out of your skin. Constantly."

Sam looked up. "Like the iris in front of the 'gate – so close to the event horizon that nothing has time to reassimilate, but not stopping the process from beginning, just completing."

O'Neill nodded. "Yeah, pretty much. It's a kind of…weird feeling. Like a permanent grating in your nerves."

"Why didn't you say something?" Daniel demanded.

The man looked at him for a long moment. "It wasn't important."

"You could have stayed in your own dimension," Jack pointed out. Daniel suspected Jack would have preferred that anyway, although he and O'Neill did seem to have come to, if not a true understanding, at least a cessation in hostilities.

"What? And rob Daniel of the chance to get himself killed in new and interesting ways? Why would I want to do that?" O'Neill looked at the younger man beside him affectionately but Jackson was looking at Daniel.

"Jack needed to be here. And I needed to be with him. And as things turned out, you needed me anyway, so it was just as well I came."

"Yes, there are two more Patterson monkeys in the world because of you." Daniel smiled at him, then let his gaze drift back to O'Neill. "And about a hundred more gray hairs on Colonel O'Neill's head."

Jackson looked between Jack and O'Neill. "I think the gray suits them, don't you?"

"Oh, definitely." Daniel's smile widened. "It's distinguished."

"Very – distinguished – good word. Adds that certain man-of-the-world, cosmopolitan, rakish quality, I think. Very attractive. Very sophisticated."

Jack appeared unamused. "We have gray hairs because you scare the shit out of us, and no amount of sweetening it with dinky adjectives makes up for what you've done to us."

Daniel realized it was the first time Jack had referred to himself and O'Neill as 'us', admitted in anything except the most negative way that they had sprung from the same DNA. O'Neill was nodding emphatically. "What he said. Don't think the next time you do something more than usually terrifying that throwing a few 'distinguished's at me is going to make up for it."

Jackson's tongue flickered across his lips. Daniel's lips were always getting dry and it was automatic to moisten them. He'd never thought anything of it until he saw the way Jackson did it, a darting caress of tongue across mouth while his gaze stayed fixed on O'Neill, the look in his eyes making it clear that what had begun as unconscious mouth-moistening was now undoubtedly a deliberate come-on. "I may be able to find other ways to make it up to you, Jack. I have some books about the Spartan culture that suggest certain…methods of reparation that I think you may find acceptable."

Daniel wondered if the way O'Neill looked now was how he'd looked when Sha're had kissed him in front of everyone. All he remembered was all the blood leaving his brain and going straight to his groin as she let him taste the food in her mouth. A guy looked kind of silly when he was standing in front of an audience, unable to disguise his arousal while his groin got harder and harder. Daniel watched in fascination as the tongue flickered across Jackson's mouth again. That guy could play O'Neill like a fish. This was the 'innocent little Daniel Jackson' to whom Kawalsky hadn't wanted to talk about threesomes? Daniel was still in the starting blocks of depravity compared with this guy. He felt another slight pang of loss as he realized Jackson and O'Neill had done things in bed that he probably never would. His Jack hadn't the mileage that Jackson's O'Neill did, didn't know all those tricks. It occurred to him that perhaps sometimes old dogs could learn new tricks, after all, and even if Daniel didn't have the library full of ancient porn Jackson obviously did, there was always the Internet. And perhaps some things were better learned for the first time together anyway.

Taking pity on O'Neill, who looked as if he wanted to bid them farewell, but thanks to Jackson's tongue-tease wasn't really in a fit state to move, Daniel crossed over to where he was standing, so close to that mirror with its faint flicker of blue light.

It was strange to be near to him and not be the focus of his attention. He didn't even want his attention, he loved the Jack he loved far more and was delighted O'Neill and Jackson had finally found one another, but it was strange, all the same. "Thanks for everything, Colonel. Jack and I would be dead if it wasn't for you. He may be hiding it well but he really does appreciate it." He half-smiled. "I appreciate it too."

"Hey, no problem. Just glad we could help. There can never be too many Daniel Jacksons in the universe." O'Neill made as if to hug him and then stopped himself. They winced at one another, both letting the other knew they understood, the bad spouses who had cheated on their partners and been forgiven but weren't allowed to transgress again, or even give the appearance of transgression. They shook hands instead and the man's hand felt just like Jack's, the skin slightly rough from work, but so warm, and strong, those beautiful fingers life had broken and bashed a little out of shape. O'Neill's eyes were as kind as ever, a lot of warmth in their brown depths. "Take care of yourself, Doc. Don't scare the old guy too much. Watching you get hurt is never going to make any Jack O'Neill's top ten fun list."

"Oh, and you take such good care of yourselves, of course." Daniel could feel the tears far closer than he would have thought. He supposed the connection between them would always be there. Because it was so much weaker than the bond he shared with his Jack O'Neill, he'd forgotten how strong it still was.

"Bye, Doc." They did hug after all, but gingerly, as if they each had brittle bones, keeping their groins away from one another, only their upper bodies briefly touching.

Narim adjusted something and an image flickered into life in the mirror. Daniel saw a familiar figure gazing intently into the glass and managed a smile. Just how often did Kawalsky come to the mirror to look for them? Was there a permanent watch set on the thing over there and this just happened to be his shift or was the major camped there 24/7 with sandwiches and a vacuum flask? Either way he was glad to see the man's face. "Hey, Kawalsky." He waved and the man waved back, holding up two thumbs in relief, grinning and scanning what he could see of the room.

O'Neill also waved and seemed to follow Kawalsky's frantic mouthing of words without difficulty. He nodded. "He's right here. He's fine." He reached out and snagged Jackson by the jacket, towing the younger man out of a conversation with Sam. Jackson went on talking to her as he was tugged, hardly seeming to notice he was now moving of someone else's volition.

"Our Sam would love to know about… Oh, is it time to go? Hello, Kawalsky. You see, I told you I'd be fine."

"He can't hear you, Danny." O'Neill ruffled his hair affectionately and made lots of hand gestures to Kawalsky while pointing at Jackson that Daniel guessed suggested imminent death narrowly averted on several occasions. Kawalsky made a brow mopping motion in return and shook his head at Jackson.

The young man looked suspiciously at O'Neill. "What did you just tell him?"

"That you're fine, of course. What else would I tell him?"

"I thought we agreed he didn't need to know about the lava?"

O'Neill sighed and shrugged. "You know me when I've had a few drinks, Daniel. It may just slip out."

Jackson put his head on one side. "What do you want to not tell him about the lava?"

O'Neill looked around at the listeners. "Let's negotiate when we're home. After a shower. Or maybe during a shower. During a shower would probably be best."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're a dirty old man?"

"More people than you've had hot dinners."

Daniel realized this was it, their last chance to converse. They all knew that once O'Neill went through the mirror they would never see him or Jackson again, and yet this was the first man he'd ever had sex with, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Abruptly he said, "What about the disks?"

"Disks?" O'Neill looked confused.

"The ones we found in the other universe. You were going to check them out for information. Did you learn anything from them?"

Jackson looked up. "Oh, we got rid of those. All the information on them had been obtained under torture. It wouldn't have been ethical to use anything we learned from them anyway so we decided it was much better to just incinerate them. Our Tok'ra did it."

It was very difficult not to smile. Jackson was fiddling with his pack as he spoke, not aware of that embarrassed grimace O'Neill was giving. Daniel felt a small glow of triumph because O'Neill had ended up doing what he had said, even if it was a different version of himself that had persuaded him. Their relationship was certainly subtly different from the one he and Jack shared, theirs seemed to be based on O'Neill doing whatever Jackson said and Jackson kissing him absently on the nose from time to time, but it still seemed to work okay. "That's good to know," he observed.

O'Neill shrugged his shoulders in an admittance of defeat. "See you around, Doc. I'll give your love to Kawalsky."

It wasn't easy to find a smile because as goodbyes went this was one was a little tough, on the other hand he had reached the stage where he just wanted it to be over. "You do that."

As O'Neill reached for the mirror, Jack was there. He held out a hand, intense and serious, even a little smile as he met the man's brown eyes. "Thank you. For everything. For helping Daniel the first time you met him. For risking your necks to come and save us. I'm truly grateful."

Daniel felt so proud of Jack he couldn't stop it showing on his face. He looked at Jackson looking between them with that sweet expression of approval, moved by them, their vulnerability and their strength, the maddeningly loveable package that was Jack O'Neill, and feared his own expression was just as doting.

O'Neill shook Jack's hand briskly and nodded. "Under the circumstances, Colonel, it seemed like the least I could do." He lowered his voice to add: "Look after him."

"You know I will." There was no hint of offence in Jack's voice. He nodded at Jackson. "Take care of yours too. A retractable dog leash might be a start."

"It's actually top of my shopping list."

Jackson heard the last bit and looked between them, blinking in confusion. "What?"

"Nothing." O'Neill patted Jack on the shoulder. "See you around, Colonel."

"I hope not, Colonel."

O'Neill grinned, a flash of white teeth, his old Errol Flynn-style swashbuckling grin, then nodded to Narim, smiled at Teal'c and Sam, murmured a last goodbye, and then they were leaving. Jackson turned as they touched the mirror and Daniel saw his expression, which was gentle and kind, and perhaps a little pitying. Daniel realized Jackson thought he had got the long straw, and Daniel the short; thought Daniel had settled for second best. He felt the indignation bubble up at the realization, mouth open to refute it, and then realized it was better just to let it go. If the Daniel Jackson in O'Neill's dimension thought his colonel was the brightest and best in the whole pan dimensional soup kitchen, let him. Daniel knew better. He waved again, a farewell smile, brighter and a little breezier than he felt, plastered on his face, and then Narim switched off the mirror and it was over. This time, it was truly over, and it was just him and Jack, at last, with the people with whom they were meant to be.

Daniel smiled and Jack leaned across and clasped a hand in his hair, their foreheads touching briefly, just like friends greeting one another after a long absence – Daniel thought it was something men who were just friends would do, anyway. He hoped so, because they were doing it, and Sam and Teal'c could see them.

"Are you ready to go home?" Jack asked tenderly. "Because I don't know about you, but I'm beat."

"Home sounds good." Daniel closed his eyes and felt the warmth of Jack's skin against his. "Home sounds wonderful, in fact." He reached out for Sam and Teal'c and she was there in a moment, he breathed in her perfume as he felt her arm go around his back and wrapped his around her waist, feeling how bony she was, wasted with anxiety. He hugged her close, but gingerly, afraid of bruising her. He'd never thought of her as fragile, but they had worn each other too fine. He inhaled, still keeping his eyes closed and there were all the scents he needed around him, candle wax and that faintly scented oil that always made Teal'c's skin such a comfort, Jack's so familiar aftershave, Sam's perfume and the herbal tang of her shampoo. Her skin was so soft against his face after Jack's stubbled jaw. Still with his eyes closed he found Teal'c's back and touched it, hugged Sam a little tighter, felt her grip him in return, felt Teal'c's fingers gently rub his arm, and there they were, all wrapped in an unshakeable embrace, a circle of friends, total greater than the sum of its parts. For this, it was worth crossing any galaxy, enduring any peril, to come back to this, and to Jack later, in the darkness and the eager silence and a very different embrace.

Daniel felt tears on his cheek and opened his mouth to tell Sam it was okay, they were home now, then realized he was the one crying and Sam the one whispering to him so gently that it really was over, they really were back, SG-1 was back, and everything was just the way it was always meant to be.

***

He still listened for the sound of the sea. O'Neill sighed as the lost echoes whispered in his mind. Echoes of the waves against the beach, echoes of the gulls, the sound the palm trees made at night. They would fade, were already fading, but he didn't want to let them go just yet. Their leaving of the island had been so violent, so fraught with danger, he hadn't fully had a chance to mourn it. So, that was why, a week after he had waved goodbye to his doppelganger through the Tollan 'gate, in the shadowy gloom of his bedroom, he was still letting go of their cabin, and the gullsong, and the perpetual music of the sea upon the sand.

One sound he had carried with him and could hear still was Daniel's breathing, the same steady rhythm he had listened for in the darkness of their shelter when the world rippled beneath them like a lioness awakening from sleep. O'Neill turned to look at him and eyelids flickered, long eyelashes lifted, and blue eyes gazed at him in a way that made his knees stop aching, and his back stop twanging in an instant.

"Can't you sleep?" Daniel licked his lips, the way he always did on waking, hair a little mussed, smelling warm and sweet.

"It's the waking up and not knowing where I am." He softened it with a smile, but he did dream of volcanoes erupting, of bullets hitting Daniel, of bushes burning and the scream of a world dying in a flurry of ash and flame.

Daniel inched closer to him so their sides were touching and put an arm across his chest, resting his chin on O'Neill's shoulder. "You're where I am."

O'Neill bent and nuzzled his head, inhaling the scent of him. "I know."

They both knew this was temporary. The USAF had refused to authorize paying for Daniel's apartment in his absence, not when he was listed as 'missing, believed killed'. What else could they do when the last report they had of him was as someone riddled with alien gunfire? So, Daniel had come back to no home, and all his possessions, even the grand piano, neatly packed into wooden boxes and held in a warehouse. As he had pointed out, somewhat bitterly, to anyone who would listen, it would have probably cost less to keep up the payments on his apartment than pack up everything he owned and carry it off to a USAF facility. Daniel had grabbed back the books straight away, of course. The office artifacts. The personal possessions without which he could not live for even a few days without starting to hyperventilate. The two suitcases of belongings O'Neill had stored for him after he went to Abydos had grown considerably since then. Things brought back from the 'gate, no doubt, or else inherited from Nick, or the remainder and reminders of his life with Sha're, O'Neill wasn't sure which. In the past, they had always tried to leave one another clearly delineated areas of personal space. Well, perhaps not so clearly delineated, but both of them had too many minefields in their personal history to make it possible to just pick up an item at random and say 'Where did you get this?' There was always the risk it would turn out to be a present from a dead or divorced wife, a dead parent or child.

A homeless Daniel could take temporary shelter in his best friend's house. That was fine. And they could delay finding the perfect apartment for a while, a few weeks anyway, but eventually Daniel would have his own place again, and O'Neill would have his guest room back instead of filled with Daniel's books. They would still snatch time together, of course, spend evenings and nights and days and missions and vacations together, but there would be times when everything would feel empty again, and the evenings would pass slowly, and the nights be filled with the wrong kinds of silence, but for the moment they could snatch another stolen interlude out of the main stream of their lives, one where they lived together and could sleep in the same bed, without fear of interruption. He bent and kissed Daniel's lips, and even if the setting was different, the taste was the same. They were less salty now and he didn't smell of sweat and sunlight, only of soap and sleep, but the underlying Daniel flavor was exactly the same, and the warmth of his body was every bit as comforting as when the tide had rolled in and the palm trees swayed gently in the warm night breeze.

Their tongues touched, then wrapped around one another lazily. The sex had been earlier, this bed christened many times now, a point they had to keep proving to one another that they were home and their desire hadn't fizzled when the prospect of imminent death wasn't hovering over them like an ash cloud. In fact sex had turned out to be even better on a bed with a soft mattress and a shower just off the bedroom, and lube that didn't smell of fish, and food that could be eaten without hours of preparation. Civilization had turned out to be just fine, after all, although they still both flinched a little from crowds, and traffic sounds, and had felt so dehydrated by forced separation from the sea for the first few days they had driven into the mountains to sit by a river and let the sound of the restless water soothe them.

Even the low hum of the telephone sounded loud in the stillness. Daniel finished kissing him and then turned over to pick it up. A mistake, of course. But they hadn't been born knowing how to handle this, they were still learning. He winced apologetically then said, "Hi, Sam."

O'Neill looked at the clock. Three a.m. Carter's wake up from her nightmare time. Needing to know what was real and what was dreamed, both equally vivid. Daniel was saying the same things as last night. Yes, they were alive. Yes, they had been missing, that was all true, but they were back now. Did she want him to come over there and pinch her? Carter's voice was a muffled murmur of sound, words he couldn't quite make out, but Daniel's answers made it pretty easy for him to guess the question.

"No, you didn't wake me. What about…oh, Jack...?" A glance in his direction. "He's in his room."

Not a lie. O'Neill was indeed in his room.

"No, not the guest room. Remember? Jack's storing a few books for me. His couch is comfortable though."

Not exactly a lie either. O'Neill thought his couch was very comfortable. The fact Daniel wasn't actually sleeping on it was neither here nor there.

"No, I don't expect you woke him. He sleeps pretty deeply."

And again, when he was asleep he slept deeply and Carter had indeed not woken him. Perhaps this was part of what being a linguist was about, a certain mastery over words.

A penitent-sounding murmur from Carter and a shrug from Daniel, "Who cares if you did? He can make me some coffee." A pointed glance in O'Neill's direction.

O'Neill sighed. Who but an addict wanted a stimulant at three in the morning? Who but a complete jerk got out of his nice warm bed to make aforementioned addict his drug of choice at that hour of the morning when it would only make him hyper and cranky? Well, the other O'Neill no doubt. That guy was probably running around in his dressing gown every night trying to keep Jackson provided with caffeine and chocolate while the guy squinted at artifacts and compensated with blow-jobs. No way was that an equal relationship. That O'Neill was just a hapless slave to his hormones and Jackson's baby blues. Which kind of served the guy right so he wasn't going to lose any sleep over it. It was just cosmic justice, perhaps, that as a payment for doing all those damned distasteful things, O'Neills the dimensions over got to fall in love with the most unsuitable and maddening people they could find, at least two had ended up with Carter – and dead, and at least two had ended up with Daniel, and – so far at least – alive but decidedly traumatized. The mirror still freaked him out and the thought of all those different universes gave him a buzzing pain in the head, like a bluebottle trapped in his cerebellum, but a glimpse of one world where a Jack O'Neill was happily married to Sara and watching Charlie play softball would have been nice. It had to be out there somewhere. Perhaps if Narim went on with his experiments and ever found one, he could take a picture to let O'Neill know how that looked.

He noticed he was in the kitchen and the floor was cold on his bare feet. Daniel was still talking to Carter, he could hear the low hum of their conversation seeping out from the bedroom. Teal'c had called earlier. He always sounded so awkward about it, as if the telephone was some strange creature he shouldn't really handle, difficult for a hundred year old Jaffa to admit he needed to touch base with reality after kel no reem, but that was the truth. O'Neill thought they might have to record a message on the answering machine saying: "Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson aren't in right now, but it isn't because they're in another dimension or even in a different part of the universe. They just popped out for groceries. They really will be home soon." But it would just be tempting fate to ever record something like that. Sure as eggs were eggs they'd get stranded off world again the very next mission out. Better just to field phone calls from twitchy teammates.

He made the coffee, fetched the square bottle of Jack Daniels they had purchased together as a private joke and affirmation, picked up two glasses, realized why Sara had always told him to use a tray but stubbornly persisted in carrying them all gingerly without one, coffee splashing on his nice polished wooden floor, glasses clinking perilously. All the while, Carter was still talking. Daniel was just making soothing noises of agreement now, reassuring her about something. As he entered the bedroom, O'Neill saw the duvet had slipped down so that it barely covered Daniel's modesty, and O'Neill admired the classical shape of his back, those broad shoulders tapering to that narrow waist, lean muscle beneath the smooth skin, perfect ass almost exposed. Carter was probably picturing Daniel in pajamas but he was beautifully naked. He wondered how Carter would react if he mentioned Daniel's unclothed state. Sighing, he knew that teasing her wasn't an option. He bet she wore pajamas though, she just wasn't the babydoll nightie type. A shame, really. She and Daniel could have sleepovers in their jammies. In some universes they were probably step-siblings. In others they would be married. That was a freaky thought. Think about that too much and he would get a little tetchy at her calling up his other half at three in the morning while Daniel sat there in the altogether cooing at her down the phone.

He climbed into the bed gingerly and nuzzled his shoulder before proffering the coffee. Daniel, took the mug and smiled at him, sipping gratefully while telling Carter she hadn't done anything wrong and he was sure Narim understood how things were, it was only a few months since Martouf had died, no one could expect her to just shake off a loss like that in a hurry. There was plenty of time, Daniel said, and some relationships were worth taking slowly. No point in rushing something that was meant to mature gradually.

O'Neill smiled at that and stroked Daniel's thigh, thinking all the same that he sounded like the monk guy. Any minute now he was going to start talking about bulrushes and meals not being cooked in a slow enough oven getting unpleasant chewy bits in them or the like. Wasn't Carter reassured yet? He loved her to pieces but, sheesh, she was getting neurotic in her old age. Strike that. Probably not safe even to think that. Daniel had told him many times that if he ever mentioned the words 'biological clock' in front of Carter it would probably be the last thing he ever did with an unventilated viscera. Apparently there were some things about which women just had no sense of humor. O'Neill mimed putting down the phone. Daniel rolled his eyes at him in protest. O'Neill made yanking wires out of the wall motions and Daniel gave him a blood-freezing glare.

"What was that, Sam? Sorry, Jack was… Yes, he's awake. No, it wasn't the phone. They're probably playing hockey in Estonia or something. You know how many channels he has. Oh, anything with balls as far as I can tell. He'd watch a lacrosse tournament just to have a commentator yelling in his ear. Sure you can come apartment hunting with me. I've got all those months of back pay to spend so something with a sunken bath should suit me fine…."

O'Neill sighed and poured them both a glass of whiskey. As Daniel drained his coffee and placed the mug on the bedside locker, O'Neill put the glass in his hand and then clinked his against it, mouthing 'Cheers' at him. Daniel gave him a gentle smile in return, held the receiver against his chest momentarily and whispered 'Cheers' back. O'Neill spilt a drop of whiskey onto Daniel's bare back and then bent his head to lick it off. He heard Daniel's voice tighten, a gasp from the moment when his tongue made contact with skin, and then he was speaking rapidly, "Got to go, Sam. Jack wants me to watch the game with him. I know. We must both still be on Island Time. Sweet dreams." A pause. "Love you, too." Then the receiver was replaced very gently.

"You two are so sappy." O'Neill spilt another drop of whiskey down his back, noticing the way it so slowly hurdled the knots of his spinal column before he bent to lick it off.

"We just don't have the intimacy issues some other people of our acquaintance have." Daniel took a sip of whiskey, closing his eyes as the burn of it hit the back of his throat.

O'Neill looked up, licking his lips. "You're sappy and you know it."

"I wasn't the one who cried all the way through 'Brian's Song'."

They kissed, whiskey-flavored tongues burning from the aftermath of the liquor. Comforting to know that even if they both turned into lushes they'd still taste good. They pulled back reluctantly, needing air, and Daniel said a little breathlessly, "You can go to sleep, Jack. I'll still be here when you wake up."

"I know. For now, I just wish…" He didn't finish the sentence. No point. They both wished they could be here like this forever, with no deception necessary. Daniel had broken a glass just yesterday, asking what kind of world did they live in that was less evolved than an ancient Athenian society that condoned slavery and didn't allow women the vote? Launching into a rant against the narrowness of small town bigotry that could infect an entire continent of such scope and magnitude as theirs. The whole damned universe at their fingertips and they had to skulk in the shadows, lie like criminals every time they came home. O'Neill had let him have his rant, feeling like the shore when the waves beat against it. Sometimes it was better just to let the sea have its day of wrath, its tempests and its storms. This was just the time and country into which they had been born. They hadn't shaken off the nineteen fifties that successfully yet, that was all, but they had microwaves and hot water and they knew things about the stars that made his head spin, could do incredible things in surgery, bring dying kids back from the brink. Sometimes anyway. Three thousand years ago in some places now full of ruins and old dust he could have had a wife and a lover with no real social opprobrium, and Charlie wouldn't have killed himself with O'Neill's gun because his gun wouldn't have existed, but Sara would have died in childbirth and Charlie with her because they didn't know how to do transfusions back then, and even if he'd still hooked up with Daniel he would have lost him too when his appendix burst. So he still preferred now and having clean water out of the faucet at the flex of a wrist, and he would put up with the bigotry and hypocrisy and general unquestioning brain-aching stupidity of some of the people with whom he shared a planet because he believed it was getting better, not worse. Daniel always ranted about people who saw human evolution as a progression. He knew too much about what had been lost on the journey. But O'Neill believed in happy endings. He needed to believe things were getting better even if sometimes the evidence out there didn't seem to support it. He hadn't got where he was today not believing in the impossible, and, as he'd told Daniel after that rant to end all rants, Daniel should be grateful for that, as Daniel was certainly a Webster's definition of impossible and O'Neill had always believed in him.

Now, Daniel ran a hand across O'Neill's chest, long elegant fingers as tapered as a piano player's, absently stroking the graying fuzz upon his skin. He bent his head and mouthed a nipple, more reflective than seductive, then kissed a line down O'Neill's ribcage, still a little absent-minded, tongue touching skin the same way he ate while reading. O'Neill inhaled as he felt a warm tongue lap gently down his ribs, across his abdomen, to nuzzle at his hip. A thumb stroked curiously across the faint line of hair from his navel to his groin, his body like some fascinating instrument Daniel was contemplating playing. Daniel rubbed his face gently against O'Neill's skin and closed his eyes. O'Neill felt poised between wanting and not wanting Daniel to start coaxing him into hardness, always glad of an orgasm, but too tired to go through the preliminaries to get there right now. But Daniel just kept stroking his thumb across that downy fur above O'Neill's limp loins, his face resting on O'Neill's hip.

"What…?" O'Neill enquired after a moment.

Daniel looked up. "We're here, that's all. Somewhere I never thought we'd be." O'Neill patted his chest invitingly, and with a last stroke of O'Neill's abdomen, Daniel wriggled sleepily up the bed. "We got home."

He knew that 'home' wasn't just this grid reference in the galaxy, but this relationship. From self-deception and infidelity and near-death and too many near-misses to count, they had finally made it into the same bed in the same universe at the same time.

It was as if the full magnitude of it had just hit him, and, looking around the bedroom, O'Neill realized it was something he was still grappling with himself. Everything he'd thought lost forever found once again. He still had all those pictures of Charlie, could put a video in the VCR if he was feeling brave enough and watch the tape Sara had made for him when he'd been away on some damned mission and Charlie had taken his first steps. Listen to her commentating to him through tears of happiness and frustration: "I wish you were here, Jack. I wish you were here." Daniel still had the books in which his parents had written their names, could still run his fingertip across his father's neat black print, could look at photographs of them smiling and remember better days. Carter and Teal'c were a phone-call away to talk to, a short car ride away to see, and not lost forever beyond an uncrossable galaxy anymore. Reality had waited for them. Even love had waited for them, patient and faintly amused it had taken them so long to get where they were meant to be.

Daniel smiled, looking around the room himself before gazing back at O'Neill. "We're home, Jack. We're really home." And then his eyes asked a question to which the only possible answer was a kiss.

The End.

Notes:

Disclaimer: Stargate Sg-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author.