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Jack stepped into Daniel's apartment, turned the lock in the doorknob, and waited for the door to click shut behind him before he moved past the entryway.
He set his cover on a side table on his way by.
Daniel was standing in the living room, on the carpet where he'd been fucking Mitchell not twenty minutes ago. He was wearing old jeans -- commando, judging from the way his package fell inside them -- and older sneakers, the kind that were so beat you could step into them laced and tied, when you thought you were going to have to run out fast. He hadn't bothered with a shirt. His cellphone was in his left hand. He had his glasses on. He'd had them on before, too.
The room still reeked of lube. The bottle still leaned against the leg of the coffee table, cap flipped up. Somebody had balled up the towel that had draped the table and thrown it into the corner of the sofa. Jack looked away, and his glance fell on the Hunan House cartons piled on the kitchen counter, the Shiraz bottle rinsed and drying in the sink, two glasses washed and upended in the drainer. He'd turned partway back for the door before he stopped himself.
"Jack," Daniel said softly, and started across the room.
Jack stiffened out of a slump he hadn't felt himself lapse into, and pivoted, facing to the flank instead of turning just his head. Daniel was still coming. Five feet. Two thirty-inch steps that Daniel was taking in five paces. Jack took a step to make it four. Just before their bodies met, at the corner of the carpet, he had a hyperaware moment of their bodies about to meet, come up flush against each other, an out-of-body visualization of himself and Daniel coming together, and felt an intense combination of disbelief and inevitability, somewhere between the awe of watching his first porn flick (holy christ I'm looking at real people really doing it) and the gut-freezing oh shit of witnessing a midair collision.
They embraced the way friends did, the way they always had, one arm up one down, but then kept going, sinking into each other, full-body, bellies flush, groins flush, thighs. Jack went half limp, as if that last step had taken everything he had left; Daniel had done the same. They hung on each other. Daniel didn't speak, so Jack didn't either.
Daniel's skin was cool and damp, thinly sheened with sweat that was evaporating to leave a chill, sweat he'd worked up grinding his hips into Mitchell's ass. His body felt and smelled like a body that had just had sex.
It was Daniel's body. It was delicious, precious, utterly familiar. It was home.
He dropped his face into the hollow of Daniel's neck. He wanted to taste him, lick the sweat up, drink him, breathe him. He wasn't hard; he wasn't turned on. He was shut down and profoundly exhausted. But he thirsted, hungered. He squeezed tighter; he couldn't stop himself. His eyes squeezed closed.
Daniel got heavier, leaning into him. They both swayed; they'd been standing here so long they were falling asleep on their feet. Daniel's head was tipped to the side, resting on his, an ache of bone on bone, a constant jab of glasses frame; the sharp stars on Jack's epaulets kept Daniel from resting his chin on Jack's shoulder. The top of Jack's ear was numb. His left knee hurt. He winced, trying not to squeeze any harder, trying not to keep Daniel from pushing back and away.
Daniel didn't push away, but his heartbeat jumped to double-time, and the skin under Jack's hand on the small of his back prickled. He lifted his head away from Jack's but not back far enough to look at him. "Will you stay?" he said. "Can you?"
Can you. Not did he have somewhere to be. Could he afford to be seen to spend the night in his old friend's private residence. That's what it had come to.
He'd stopped by to whisk Daniel off to a late supper somewhere. Assuming, among so many other things, that Daniel had snacked through dinner or ignored it or forgotten it, because that was what he'd always done. Jack needed to eat, but the thought of food turned his stomach. He didn't want to go out, he didn't want to deal with fixing himself a sandwich, he wasn't eating the leftover takeout from Daniel's date. He didn't want to sit up into the wee hours talking about this. He didn't know where he'd sleep. He didn't want to hassle with the awkwardness of working out where he would sleep. He didn't want to go back to his hotel. He didn't even want to go down to move his rental. They'd ticket it if he left it there overnight.
"I don't know," he said, finally. "I just don't want to let go. I'm afraid to let go."
"Yeah," Daniel said, and his racing heartbeat slowed. The combination said Same here.
Jack pushed back before he could think himself out of it. It startled Daniel but his face didn't register it, only his pupils. Jack kept one hand on him at the join of neck and shoulder, let the other drop. "How do I fix this, Daniel?"
Daniel started to answer, and then stopped. Then he said, "Maybe we should let go. Now, before it gets ..." He didn't finish.
"You don't mean my hand, do you."
"No."
Jack let that hand drop away too. He thought about turning for the kitchen again, maybe why he'd turned toward it in the first place, looking to see if Daniel still kept that fifth of bourbon up in the back of the cabinet, but it would be too depressing if it wasn't there, he'd be too pissed if it turned out Mitchell had drunk it and too ... hurt ... that Daniel didn't have one stashed anymore in case he visited. Alcohol was a bad idea right now anyway. "I'll do whatever it takes. I swear to God I will go down swinging. But I don't know what you want."
"Same here," Daniel said, out loud this time.
Jack forced the words out, forced the question: "What do you want me to do?"
Daniel's answer came in a burst. "I want you to stay. I want to clean up and air out this room, fix you a sandwich, take a shower and go to bed. I want you to fuck me, and then sleep, and then answer some questions, but I don't even know if you're wired that way so I need to ask you the questions first, but I don't want to talk. Not tonight. I did a shitty thing letting Mitchell go and I feel like shit. I shouldn't have let him go and I'm glad he's gone and I'm just a shit and I can't even, I can't even -- Fuck." He turned, snatching his glasses off, and raised the hand still holding the phone to rub his knuckles across his eyes.
"You couldn't have stopped him," Jack said, to Daniel's back.
"Did you try?" Daniel asked tiredly, as if it were some rote question he was obliged to ask. Then he said, "No, don't answer that. I don't want to know. Not tonight."
"OK," Jack said, slowly. Slowly floundering.
Daniel straightened and said, to the wall over the sofa, "I want to live with you, just live where you live, be where you are, jerk myself off for the rest of my life if I have to. I know you love me but I didn't know it was that way. I know you're not gay but I think maybe you're not bi, either, I think maybe it's possible to be in love with someone without wanting sex, and I'm afraid to find out that's what this is and I don't even know why it should matter, I would live celibate the rest of my life if it meant I could sleep where you sleep, just go to sleep at night knowing you'd be there when I woke up and get up in the morning knowing you'd be there again at the end of the day, and I can't have that either way so what difference does it make? I don't want to be your downfall. That uniform's part of your skin. It's what you are. I don't want you to fight for me. I want to find some galaxy or dimension so far away that I can't ever be your weakness. I begged you not to walk away without talking about this but I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to work it out, I want you to give up and walk away and not lay this on me, your whole fucked-up duty complex, your loyalty to a barbaric, close-minded institution." He whipped back to face Jack, eyes fierce and red-rimmed. "I want you to sleep in my bed tonight. I want to go down on you, right now, and show you how good I am. I want you to want me. I'm afraid you don't want me. I'm afraid you love me and don't want me, and I don't know how I can live with that. I want to promise you anything if you'll just say you won't go."
"But you don't want to talk."
Daniel smiled a little, returning the smile in Jack's voice, but it turned sad right away and he said, "Not if you're going to say things I can't stand to hear. No."
"I'm not gonna say those things, Daniel."
Daniel cocked his head, smiled a little more, with heartbreak in his eyes, and said, with bitterness brittle and delicate as iced lace, "Promise?"
Jack didn't make promises lightly, forget when someone's heart was on the line. He thought back over all the verbiage Daniel had just spewed and all the unspoken words that had passed between them over the last half-hour, let them filter through the tactical sieves in his head the way he'd sort intel to find the one piece that was critical to completing a mission. When he'd done that, when he was sure, he said, "I promise." Then he slipped the front buttons of his jacket, shouldered it off and tossed it over the arm of the sofa where the towel wasn't. "I love you and I want you. I've always wanted you. I'll stay tonight. I don't know about anything else."
Daniel's gaze had followed the jacket. "Gonna have to have the uniform cleaned."
"It's a suit, Daniel. It's just a suit-and-tie with some metal on it." He unclipped his tie and tossed it after the jacket, half conscious of staking a claim on that end of the sofa, annoyed by the significance the smallest act took on in Daniel's metaphor-rich environment. "So I'm bunking in with you, right?"
Abruptly Daniel was in motion, shoving his glasses onto his face and his cell into his pocket, dipping down to snag his T-shirt off the floor where Jack hadn't seen it past the coffee table. He punched into it, grabbed the towel, scooped the bottle of lube up inside it, stepped past the kitchen divider to stuff them both in the step-open trash can, dumped the takeout debris on top of them, pulled the bag out and tied the ends off. Jack winced on Mitchell's behalf. "It was the first time it went that far," Daniel said, and put a fresh bag in the can, and put the wine bottle in a blue recycling bag. "Handjobs in the locker room, blowjobs at his place last week -- "
Jack growled, "Daniel ... "
" -- but he was never in my bed. That's all I'm saying."
"That fucking well is all you're -- "
"It was just sex. It might have turned -- "
"God damn it, Daniel -- "
" -- into more than that but it was still just sex."
"Not to him it wasn't."
Daniel froze with his hand on the over-sink cabinet door he'd opened, then reached in for the dish he'd been going for. "I'll make you a sandwich. You can eat while I shower."
"Forgot to include that in the list of things you didn't want to hear tonight, huh?"
"I have enough on my plate dealing with you." Daniel opened the fridge to pull out bread and cold cuts. Jack hated bread that was cold from the fridge; when he used to be offworld so much that his bread would go bad, he'd just buy fresh. He hadn't come home to moldy bread in a long time. "I'd rather deal with my other fuck-up tomorrow, and I'm fairly sure he'd prefer that too." Daniel dropped two slices of bread in the toaster as Jack was coming over to snatch them from his hand and drop them in the toaster. They stood in silence until the toaster popped.
Daniel took the toast out with a thumb and two fingers on each slice, dropping them quickly onto the plate and then sucking his left and right fingertips in turn while the other hand laid squares of ham and Swiss across the toast. Jack always used plastic tongs to keep from burning his fingers. Daniel always burned his fingers. Jack never complained about the spit getting on his sandwich. But when Daniel reached for the container of condiment packets collected from months of takeout, Jack said, "You put mustard on that thing and you're gonna regret it at about three a.m."
"I'm out of mayo."
"I'll live. You're eating half of it anyway." Daniel hated mayonnaise.
"Zantac's in the medicine cabinet. I got tired of digging around for it in that kit in the closet." He put the assembled sandwich on its plate into the microwave. "I'm too lazy to pan-fry this and I'm out of butter too."
"Won't need the Zantac, then."
They stood in silence until the microwave dinged. Daniel took the plate out, burned palms this time, and stepped to the kitchen table to set it down. "Here," he said. Jack slid a knife from the cutlery block he'd bought Daniel two years ago when he got fed up with Daniel restocking all his silverware and tools from the five-and-dime, as if another yearlong disappearance was a given, as if there was no point owning anything but disposable crap nobody'd even have to schlepp to Goodwill next time his apartment was cleaned out. The house had bugged Daniel, because when you had a house, even a rental the size of a yard shed where Jack came from, you started Accumulating Stuff, and the only nice things Daniel wanted to have were the kind your estate could donate to a museum. Jack moved next to Daniel and cut the sandwich in half with the Henckels five-inch utility knife and lifted half of it over. "Here," he said. He waggled it when Daniel didn't take it. "Before all the cheese drips out, huh?"
They ended up sharing the sandwich at the table, hunched together over the single plate when nobody bothered to get up to grab a second one. Jack could reach the fridge from his seat, so he snagged a Coke. They drank from the same bottle.
"So I'll shower while you move your car," Daniel said, when the plate and bottle were empty. "You can take 3G's space in the garage if the other guest spots are full, she's out of town."
"Screw the shower, Daniel. You can't wash this off or bag it up. It happened. No reason it shouldn't have happened, discounting the whole ... " He gave a military, teammate, yadda handwave, then grimaced at his hand, at himself.
"They'll ticket you at two if you don't move it."
"I'll eat the ticket."
"You mean you'll have your old pal the sheriff fix the ticket."
"No, I mean I'll eat the ticket." Slowly, clearly, Jack said, "I'll pay the fine."
Daniel shoved his elbow over the back of the dinette-set chair and gave him a direct You're not talking about the parking citation, are you look. "You can't afford that fine."
"Yeah, I didn't think so either. Forgot how much I had in the bank. I can cover it. Keep the marshals from the door. But there's a snag."
"Get out."
"It'll put you in it. You have better things to do."
"Will it stop me going through the gate? Because except for, possibly, you, I don't have anything better to do than that."
"I don't think it'll stop you going through the gate," Jack said. Softly, holding Daniel's gaze, because he wasn't just talking about the gate, and because Daniel had just told him the only thing he needed to know, really, ever, in the universe: what would make Daniel happy. And it made him happy, and he was starting to smile, and he didn't know if he should maybe sit on that, because, hello, tied-up trash bag by the sink, good guy kicked to the curb outside, hellish fight and a lot of personal reparations around the corner -- and the insolence in Daniel's eyes was hiding wariness, and maybe if Jack didn't seem suitably bitter about it all Daniel wouldn't believe what Jack was trying to tell him. But Evelyn Wood had nothing on Daniel. Daniel had already seen the smile, saw the shape of it under his face before it came to the surface. There was already no point in trying to hide it. Jack was worn out from hiding. Daniel was already starting to smile back.
"Might stop you going with me for a while, though," Daniel said. Surprising him, because the words didn't sync with the affectionate smile in the eyes and around the edges of the mouth, but Daniel never had been a one-track guy.
"That was gonna be true anyway," Jack said. His gaze dropped down to Daniel's chest, the wide-spaced nipples that he'd ached to touch for a decade, that always pricked up sharp whether Daniel was hot or cold, that maybe he was allowed to at least look at now, a strange heady almost-freedom. Had his own secondary track working now, apparently. Tertiary. Quaternary. Whatever. "Gotta make sure the door's open on this end and the right crowd's got control of it."
"I can help you with that," Daniel said. With effort, Jack pulled his gaze from the path it was on -- a slow curve over the bend of slim hips into the flex of thighs around the bulge cupped gently in the washed-thin softness of old jeans, overlaid with the burned-in visual of the shiny-slick erection he'd glimpsed what felt like hours ago. He looked up into Daniel's face and saw a fresh, bright heat under the fond warmth: Daniel didn't just mean the politics of gate administration. The chill mist of wariness had burned clear off to reveal a combination of offer and dare.
"I could use your help," Jack said, honestly, and he really did mean the politics -- should have been calling on Daniel all this time, shouldn't have tried to bull through on his own, needed that thorn in his side to keep him awake, keep him alive, needed Daniel's skills and perspective and Danielness -- but he was kind of talking about the other stuff too. "Daniel ... I, ah ... " He cocked his jaw, looked away.
With the barest shift of his weight and the arrangement of his body and legs in the seat, Daniel retracted into himself. "It's a lot," he said. "All at once. So soon. I'm in no position ... I have no right to ... "
The withdrawal pushed Jack harder than anything else Daniel could have done. "No right to flirt with me?" he said sharply. "No right to correctly assess that as a pretty fucking jaded fifty-six-year-old man I'm damned embarrassed to admit I'm gonna need a hand in the bedroom? No right to offer job assistance I should have asked you for three years ago?"
"Three years ago I was leaving too."
"And then you didn't."
"And by then you were gone."
Jack turned his seat, grabbed the sides to lift it underneath him and turned the whole crappy chrome-tube plastic-upholstered five-and-dime dinette-set chair to face Daniel's, and leaned forward, and put his hands on Daniel's thighs. "And I stayed gone. I pulled out and watched the engagement from on high instead of rolling up my sleeves and doing something about it. Wrong when you did it, wrong when the Alterans did it, wrong when I did it. If I'd been there from the start, Mal Doran would never have gotten close enough to slap that bracelet on you, and a whole lot of people in this galaxy would still be alive today, and a whole lot of people in another galaxy would still be enslaved, and can we not do this tonight?" His hands were squeezing too tight. Daniel wasn't wincing, but the quads under Jack's palms had tensed to steel. Jack eased his grip.
"Oh god," Daniel said, voice choked soft. He looked down. "God."
Jack followed Daniel's gaze, and saw his own thumbs rubbing absently along the inseams of the old denims. Stroking Daniel's inner thighs. "Dammit," he whispered, betrayed by the swelling in his crotch, the swelling in Daniel's, the stab of guilt for what he'd interrupted before. He'd only been reaching out, making contact, not making a pass. He hadn't meant to try to turn this into ...
Daniel spread his thighs, slowly enough not to dislodge Jack's hands. An invitation for Jack to slide them up, palm the length defining itself inside the jeans, run thumbs over the tightening bulge underneath. Jack slid his gaze up. Their eyes met, held. Jack slid his hands up. Daniel's eyes went hurt and yearning. Jack stilled his hands just shy of Daniel's groin, frowning a question he didn't know how to ask. Daniel pressed one hand down over one of Jack's and took a handful of Jack's shirt in the other. Jack couldn't tell if he was going to be pushed away or pulled in for a kiss. After a while he understood that Daniel was just holding him in place. Just holding him there, holding him still, because he could.
When Daniel was working a problem through, collecting the data he had and processing it deep in the mysterious folds of his brain, he looked off to the side. When he already had the answer and he was buying the time and patience to articulate it, he looked up to the ceiling or the sky. When he had the answer but he was angry and working to control himself, he looked down. Now he kept looking straight at Jack, prolonged eye contact so direct and unwavering that it was hard for Jack to hold; it was as penetrating a stare as any general or drill sergeant had ever hit him with, and he fought the impulse to go to attention, fix his gaze at a point somewhere over Daniel's shoulder.
"What?" he whispered, finally, when he couldn't take it anymore. "What?"
"I've made a lot of bad judgments in the past three years and turned into somebody I don't like very much. That Prior thing kicked my ass and I've been tortured one too many times. I'll never be more than a visitor on Atlantis and I've had it up to here with the Ancients. I've learned all I care to about the builders of the gate system. What interests me now is how the gated, post-Goa'uld galaxy is evolving. How the scattered, isolated remnants of terrestrial and extraterrestrial cultures will develop and influence each other. I want to start with a survey -- a taxonomy. It'll take me a few months to do the groundwork on paper based on the data I've already gathered. I can do that work in Washington. I can help you transition the program while I'm there; it's something I should be doing anyway, something I've let slide, defending the scientific and academic uses of the gate against the entities that constantly subvert them to defense. I'm exhausted and I need a break and sitting around isn't restful for me but doing something different is. I'll come to D.C. with you. Tonight, tomorrow, Monday, whenever you're going. I can pack what matters to me in ten minutes. But I'm going with you -- not later, not in secret. If you're really willing to take this shot, then we're doing it now, and we're doing it together."
"Before we have sex?" Jack said, only partially mock appalled.
"That depends on whether you ever let me get into the shower."
Jack made a show of looking around. It gave him a respite from the intensity of Daniel's eyes and from the aching sweetness of Daniel's smile. "None of this reject furniture from the set of That Seventies Show comes anywhere near my townhouse."
"Actually it's more nineteen-sixties."
"So I'm off by ten years." He turned back to Daniel, looked straight at him. "That makes twice tonight."
"Fortunately for my general mobility, I'm not attached to the furniture. So are we doing this?"
"Yeah," Jack said, thinking about the man he'd turned into without Daniel beside him, thinking about the man he'd been before he'd walked through the gate with Daniel the first time, thinking how simple the equation was, an idiot could see it. "Yeah. We're doing this."
Daniel set him back with gentle firmness, gave his hand a squeeze and a pat, got to his feet. "I'm hitting the shower. That fifth of bourbon's still up in the cabinet if you want it."
"Nah." Jack got up to follow him down the hall, and Daniel said, "You might want to grab the hat and take the three-star jacket off the couch, Sam and Teal'c have keys too," and Jack walked past the couch without looking at it and said, "Serve 'em right if they barge in without knocking." By then he stood just short of the bathroom door. He could hear Daniel's jeans unzip, rustle down, the pocketed cellphone thunk on the tile through a muffling of denim. A blast of water in the bathtub, the soft clunk of the diverter, the breathy rush of the shower. His shirt and slacks and shoes felt too formal, too tight, but he was struck with a strange shyness about taking them off, about shedding his uniform and getting naked in Daniel's world where every action Signified.
Sometimes fear was a first-alert system you should listen to. Sometimes it was nerves and uncertainty. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.
He stepped around and through the door, unbuttoning his shirt. On the other side, Daniel was holding the curtain open for him.