dragojustine | SG1 Fic: Timing

Timing
SG1 Jack/Daniel (and possibly Sam/Teal’c)
Rated G, 2400 words
AN: I owe

wyomingnot a drabble. She prompted me with “Jack/Daniel, timing, temerity” (well, and Tupperware, but I couldn’t get any traction on that). This happened. It’s not a masterpiece, but I had fun (also, I fail at drabbling). Hope you enjoy.

"I want to tell them. It's time."

"Absolutely not."

"Jack, this is important to me. This is important. SG1 is the most family I've ever had, and I don't lie to family. Not about something this big."

"You get over it," Jack said, hating the nasty undertone to his voice, hating the way his subconscious moved to bait Daniel into a different argument, hurt him to distract him.

Daniel wouldn't be distracted, and if he was hurt, Jack didn't see it past raising his bottle for a long pull.

"Are you worried about their reactions? Because I've talked to Teal'c about Chulak culture enough to know that he has no particular taboo, and I've talked to Sam about -- well, about a range of political hot topics, and from the aggregate of those opinions I'm pretty certain she'd be all right too."

Daniel was settled next to him on the couch, angled three-quarters towards him but not quite head-on. He was leaning against Jack just a little, the front of his shoulder against Jack's bicep. Not cuddling, nothing that claimed ownership or demanded a response, just contact. His lips moved in Jack's peripheral vision, but Daniel seemed fine with talking to his end table while Jack talked to the TV.

Jack remembered facing off against an alien bear-thing three weeks and seven planets ago. Daniel had said to him, quiet and calm, "Hey Jack. Look at the trees over there."

Jack had snapped "Too busy watching Smokey here. Maybe when he stops looking like he wants to rip your throat out, I'll take a look at your fascinating trees."

"No, really, Jack. Look over there."

Daniel had explained later, something about eye contact and aggression, told him to watch dominant dogs in a park, the way they carefully avoid eye contact without dropping their heads, dance around confrontation without ceding dominance. Sometimes Jack resented the way Daniel played him like a rusty instrument. He thought, screw it, and turned to look at Daniel head-on.

"I'm not worried about their reactions," he said. "But just because you feel guilty lying to them is no justification for forcing them to lie for us."

"You think it won't hurt Sam, to find out one day and realize we didn't trust her with it?"

"Sure, that'll hurt her. You know what'll hurt her worse? Being caught in an official inquiry one day and having to decide between betraying us and perjuring herself. She's a tough woman; she can stand some hurt feelings, but that might just completely destroy her."

Daniel watched him for a long time, long enough for Jack to feel his hackles start to rise, for him to start to itch to force Daniel to look away, for him to put down the eye contact body language bit as just one more thing Dr. Jackson was right about.

"You might as well stop searching, Danny boy. The two of us, we don't ever get to have that kind of external validation. Do you really want it so bad?" Daniel flinched visibly at that. He may be the expert at manipulating all Jack's alpha-male impulses, but Jack was equally expert at prodding every one of the "guilty abandoned orphan" bruises on Daniel's psyche. Ends justify the means. Jack wanted to take a shower.

Just as he was about to lift the bottle and drain it, Daniel reached out to take it from him. He set it down on the end table and spoke very carefully. "You're wrong about the validation. But you're right about not making them lie for us."

***

Every other Friday or so, working around their off-world schedule, was team night. The pattern was always the same. Sam would head home and change her clothes, tidy, putter, do whatever it was she did for an hour. Teal'c would swing by and pick her up on his way from the base, and the whole team would gather at Jack’s.

The team nights were good. Card games, movies, laughter. Sam's brilliant smiles and Teal'c's unexpected humor and Daniel, always Daniel, his presence always right there by Jack’s side, his shape there in the corner of Jack's eye. Jack didn't stare, didn't touch more than normal; didn't have to, because the team night was only the beginning for them.

As the evening wore down, Daniel would start drinking. For certain values of drinking, that is. Sometimes half a beer would go down the sink, sometimes his bottle and Jack would get quietly mixed up so that Jack got the beer and Daniel just ended up with the empty, sometimes he would just carry his shot glass back into the kitchen and open the cupboards in there, clink a little ice. By the time Carter started making those "better let you get some rest" noises, Daniel had always plausibly had three drinks in the last hour. He usually went to get another right around then, and he never seemed to hold them very well. He was a good actor. Didn't overplay it.

Their routine probably won Daniel a reputation as both a lush and a lightweight, but Carter always had two herself and she seemed to like teasing him about the lightweight part.

She would stand, and Teal'c would nod goodnight and pick up his keys. Carter would say, predictable as clockwork, "Do you need Teal'c to drop you home?"

Daniel would look to Jack, a quick check of his welcome, a friend who wouldn’t impose automatically, and Jack would say, "He can sleep it off."

And that was the start of their real weekend, the frantic Friday evening and the long, leisurely, glorious Saturday.

Except this week, the pattern was shot all to hell. Daniel had paced in the kitchen until Teal’c and Sam arrived, and then stayed standing and restless as they shed jackets and cracked a bag of chips. He seemed twitchy and off-kilter as they circled for a card game, and didn’t settle into the warm, relaxed companionship that Jack craved on these evenings.

Teal'c dealt (seven card stud, in his ongoing quest to master every known variety of poker), but sometime during the second betting round, Carter pulled a folded sketch out of her bag and said, "Daniel, I almost forgot to ask you. Does this remind you of --"

Then Daniel was saying. "Yes, they almost look --" and Carter was asking, "Do you think the inscriptions we found near the other one --" and Daniel was racing out to his car for his laptop and some reference material.

Jack and Teal'c played a few more hands while Daniel and Carter said things about "geothermic reactions" and "large-scale harvesting" and "self-powering stabilization."

Teal’c seemed to be giving the game all his attention as he and Jack played through several more hands, but he spoke up several times to describe structures he had seen on Goa’uld worlds and relate conversations he had had with Jaffa engineers. Jack slid a horribly half-assed bluff straight past him.

It was getting late, and Daniel hadn’t started drinking yet. Unless this discovery was going to lead to him scrapping their whole weekend and heading back to the base, he should start. Jack put away the cards and wandered to the kitchen, bringing back a beer. He opened it and set it down by Daniel’s elbow.

Daniel took a single distracted swallow. Jack retreated to the couch to give the geeks their space. When he looked again, after forty-five minutes of flipping back and forth between sports channels, Daniel’s beer was untouched. Okay, then. Fair enough. No other way to send that message without being obvious; Daniel’s choice anyway.

At some point the sounds of a pen scratching on paper shifted from Daniel writing translations to Carter writing equations, and their conversation shifted in tone just that little bit that Jack knew meant they might have answers for him.

“So,” he asked. “The verdict?”

“Sir, this might be the key to large-scale extraction of geothermal energy from tectonic fault lines.”

Jack did the eyebrow thing.

“Efficient renewable energy. Possible suppression of earthquakes. Possible engineering implications for unstable ground.”

“Big honking space gun applications?”

“Not so much, no, sir.”

Jack nodded. “Right, kids. Have fun.” He reached for the remote again.

It was late enough now that for Daniel to stay after Sam and Teal’c left would raise serious eyebrows. Jack started to run scenarios in his head and couldn’t make any of them work. He had no way of knowing if Daniel had actively decided not to stay tonight after their earlier conversation, or if it was happening that way by careless default.

That wasn’t fair; this wasn’t careless. This was Daniel working, being absorbed in his work. Being, in short, the very person Jack wanted so badly. It might be unfair of Jack to expect Daniel to shoulder all the weight of deception, as well. Daniel hadn’t signed any pledge that his Friday nights belonged to Jack, and no law prevented him from driving home tonight and coming back later in the weekend. But if he chose not to do that…. Jack wasn’t sure this new, fragile thing would support Jack dropping by Daniel’s house without an invitation. That might be too much a violation their careful, unspoken terms, by which Daniel came to Jack and chose when to withdraw. That kind of invasion might constitute just a little too much direct eye contact.

He slowly accepted the inevitability of a weekend alone and began forcing his body to accept it as not a big deal. Relax all his major muscle groups, carefully shift on the couch trying to feel his way into his normal late-evening sprawl, force his shoulders down from where he could feel them bunched around his ears. Okay.

There was a sudden clatter from the table where Daniel and Carter were working, and he heard Carter burst out with, “oh, shit!”

“You’re letting the Marines rub off on you.”

“Sorry, sir.”

The shuffling of papers sounded a little frantic, so Jack craned his neck around. “Okay, what did you break?”

“Nothing, nothing. I just remembered that Cassie’s school play opens tomorrow.”

Daniel was helping her gather papers with a bemused expression. “Yes, at seven p.m. What’s the hurry?”

“I promised I would show up early in the morning with a toolbox. They’re having problems with one of the sets.” Carter glanced back and forth from Jack to Teal’c. “Sorry to be so abrupt, but I really -- do you mind, Teal’c?”

“I do not,” Teal’c said, and moved to the door.

Right, now we come to it, thought Jack, as all four of them converged in the front hall.

He could see the realization hit Daniel and Carter at once, all of a sudden, and would have laughed at their sudden expressions of twin befuddlement. But Daniel’s response was to reach for his jacket, and Jack had to school his face towards careful neutrality. It was okay to show a certain amount of annoyance; they had, after all, pretty much ditched him in his own home. But bone-deep hurt and frustration were a no-go.

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels a little. Daniel still hadn’t put on his jacket, was hunting through his pockets where it hung, his face completely turned away from the three of them. Jack wondered if he would be able to read it even if he could see it. Was Daniel planning some other little deception, misplaced keys, or simply stalling till Sam and Teal’c got out of there? Or was he turning away only to hide the residual resentment of their fight?

Sam opened and closed her mouth once, at a loss without her usual line. Then she said brightly, “Guess you’ll stay and sleep it off, Daniel?”

Jack froze, paralyzed by confusion and a sudden adrenaline rush right behind that. In the corner of his eye, he saw Daniel clutch the fabric of his jacket and crumple it between his fingers. Jack said, “Carter,” too slow on his feet to put together a sentence or even pull his fists out of his pockets.

Teal’c nodded to him, and then slipped out the door without a word. Jack heard the thunk of his car unlocking.

Carter was still smiling, and said, quick and earnest, “Guess I’ll see you at the play. Goodnight, sir,” as though she had decided that the best way to have this conversation was to brazen straight through it as though they weren’t having this conversation. He could have kissed her for that, until he saw the tension around her eyes, the brittleness of that smile, the way she carried herself a little too straight and her shoulders a little too square.

He was their CO, whatever else he might be, and there was no question where that ranked on the priority scale. Daniel had made himself scarce, slipped around the corner to the kitchen when he wasn’t looking. Smart man. If he had ever owed her anything, he owed it to her to at least let her know where to aim her anger. Keep Daniel from going down under friendly fire, at least.

“He wanted to tell you,” he said. “I wouldn’t let him.”

Her whole body stiffened by just the slightest fraction, and her eyes flicked off his face to fix straight ahead over his shoulder for just a heartbeat. That was body language he didn’t need Daniel to read, and he braced himself, started re-aligning his expectations to cope with what they would be now: A cordial relationship between an officer and her superior, respectful and distant.

But that only lasted a flicker, and when she looked at him again the tightness around her eyes was gone and her smile was slight and genuine. “I understand,” she said. “Don’t get caught, sir.”

“Do my best,” Jack answered, and reached out to open the door for her. Teal’c was waiting on the other side. Jack heard Daniel’s nearly-silent footsteps come up behind him, pausing at his right hand and just a half step behind. Sam looked between them, then Teal’c held out his elbow and she took it. They turned away, and Sam rested her head very slightly against his shoulder as he escorted her to the passenger door.

***

Confidential to

quarryquest: I would, but I haven't seen Morgan or Merlin yet! I'll have to owe you a raincheck.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

paian

hating the way his subconscious moved to bait Daniel into a different argument, hurt him to distract him -- Love this, and all the arguments that are unspoken under this opening debate. They're so clearly coming from such different places, and assuming things about each other that I-as-reader suspect are in error (Daniel thinks he's worried they'll be homophobic when Jack's really not; Jack thinks Daniel needs external validation when he really doesn't), and maybe I'm 'right' or 'wrong' but I love the way what's here describes both of them with so much depth in such a small space and yet leaves ample room for the reader too.

Daniel seemed fine with talking to his end table while Jack talked to the TV -- Love this and all the aggressive-eye-contact musing that follows.

Love the description of how they usually set up Daniel's staying-over, and how that sets up how much the pattern's been disrupted. Love how Jack responds and marshals himself as he works through the various signals, and the whole way this portrays the kind of silent continuation-of-a-fight that couples can have, and the genuine way Daniel and Carter really are doing team stuff, really engaged in it, and Jack's recognition that that's the Daniel he wants. And how the way Teal'c slips out says it all -- his silent action a clearly articulated statement. And I love that they knew, that they saw through it all along. Of course they did. It's just right.

“I understand,” she said. “Don’t get caught, sir.” -- Priceless. ::hugs Carter:: Also love the nuances of the exchange that precedes that, and how the bleakness of that glimpse of the stripped-down-to-cordial relationship Jack steels himself for works like a shadow to give depth to the picture of the relationship they do have.

From:

(diary of a dilettante and fangirl)

SG1 Fic: Timing

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