SG1 fic: Five First Kisses
Aug. 8th, 2008 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineFive First Kisses
SG1 Jack/Daniel
4600 words, R
WARNING for character death.
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
abyssinia4077 for helpful brainstorming and jd_junkie, the fastest beta in the West.
I had five first kisses with the love of my life.
***
The first was an accident, an unfortunate cultural misunderstanding, a little nothing that the whole team elided from their mission reports without any explicit orders and ribbed me about low-key for a few weeks before a crazy virus turned everybody into cavemen and provided way more entertaining and more allowable mocking material.
We were still so new at this, so young -- well over 40, with a body covered in scars and a chest covered in medals, I felt the cold, invigorating rush of a wormhole and stepped out into a day-dream of a paradise planet thousands of light years away and felt so, so young. That seems bitterly ironic, now.
Carter was a half-step behind me to my right, and Teal'c mirrored her on the left. I still wasn't sure about her; knew she was a strong personality and a professional, knew (or rather, had been told by people I believed) that she was a brilliant scientist, but wasn't yet quite sure if she was the type of soldier I wanted to have at my back. Teal'c still felt overwhelmingly alien. We were forming into a team, could feel ourselves starting to fall into place and see the outlines of what we would be, and that process of becoming more than the sum of our parts was making us all a little giddy.
Carter and Teal'c were strangers who were coalescing into my team; Daniel was something else entirely. He had saved my life halfway across a galaxy, and the memory of him had kept me from eating my own sidearm in the time since. He made me want to live, propelled me up onto my roof at night to stare at the stars. The idea of him had become my guardian angel, but the actual reality of him, so different from how I remembered, so oblivious to what he meant to me, was still a stranger.
We stepped into a forest glade. There were butterflies. Multi-colored butterflies flocking around us, I kid you not. Ridiculous.
“So,” I asked, “does anybody see Bambi frolicking?”
Daniel wandered a few steps forward, dazed, turning around and around to look everywhere at once. He paused in one of the brilliant shafts of sunlight hitting the ground, gaping at the thousand shades of green.
“Jack,” he breathed. “It’s like--it’s like--stepping into an Impressionist painting.”
“There’s a cure for that, you know.”
He shot me a look of genuine curiosity.
“New prescription,” I said. His hand reached for his frames automatically, even as his glare turned withering.
Three hours later we were all lounging on low couches, playing "peaceful explorer charades" while Daniel talked at ninety miles an hour with the chieftain’s daughter. There was no technology, no sign of valuable trade goods, no information on our enemy, just food and drink and talk. Daniel informed us that the party had progressed to the drinking-game stage, and when I started to veto his participation he said things like "the alien 'I Never'" and "anthropologically fascinating" and "aren't you curious?" and I couldn't actually bear to turn him down.
Three minutes after that the party had degenerated to a level I hadn't seen since college, with people sticking tongues down each other's throats completely at random, as far as I could tell. Daniel said, "uh oh, Jack, we're in trouble now," and I felt the adrenaline spike raise my heart rate and sharpen all my senses, even as he beckoned me over with a slightly loose-limbed gesture. "You've gotta kiss me," he said, and I felt my heart rate surge another notch for an entirely different reason.
"I pass," I answered.
"But you do. It's Lyra's turn" -- a vague gesture at the same daughter, holding her drink and watching us expectantly -- "to pick who kisses, and she picked us. Gotta play by the rules."
"You wouldn't want to risk a diplomatic incident, would you, sir?" asked Carter with a smirk, and I experienced how it felt to have the terrible twins gang up on you for what may have been the very first time.
I looked to Teal'c for a little backup, but he simply said "I, also, find the idea of an interplanetary conflict to be most distressing," with what I only know now, in hindsight, to be barely repressed mirth.
I was outmanned and outgunned, and so, like a good soldier, I surrendered. “Geez. When they made me swear to serve my country, nobody said anything about this.”
I leaned in and our lips brushed, just the very lightest, slightest, driest contact of chapped skin, and then I pulled away again, before his dancing eyes and touchable hair undid me completely. There were sparks. There were sparks and there was lightning and there was a choir of angels singing Glory Hallelujah and there were five Gs at least pulling on my insides and there was no air in my lungs.
Daniel said, "See? Nothing to it," and turned and kept talking to Lyra.
***
A year later I held Daniel, drenched in sweat, sour with vomit, muscles spasming uncontrollably. I sat with him through a long day of cold-turkey hell, bringing him water, wiping down his face with a cold washcloth. At long last, when I couldn't do anything else for him, I wrapped myself around him and held tight while he shook, gave him all my body and all my strength to fight against as the next wave hit.
When it was over, he slurred, "Thanks, Jack."
I eased his limp body back down to the sheets and wiped his face one more time, and then I pressed my lips to his. He stirred, just a little, and pressed up against me with another faint noise. This kiss was almost as brief and chaste as the first, but there was a world of difference. This was intentional, deliberate, inexcused, undeniable.
When I pulled back again, Daniel was asleep. He never knew.
***
I apologized to Daniel. Held his hand to do it, caught and arrested over the second symbol of the dialing sequence, warm and gritty with the dust of the Eurondan tunnels. I craved every moment of contact with his skin I could get, perpetually conscious of the void between what I wanted and what I could have, and the press of my thumb against the flesh at the base of his palm seemed huge, monumental, important.
I apologized as best I knew how, no weasel-words, no caveats, no pointing fingers. He didn’t look angry then. Resentful, perhaps, but mostly he looked confused, scrunching his brows in bafflement and studying me like an anthropological puzzle box, like I was still hiding something, like my words weren’t as straightforward and sincere as humanly possible.
He maintained that low-key resentment through the debriefing, stating the facts simply and plainly, carefully steering his words away from anything that might be construed as “I told you so,” as though taking even that much satisfaction would interrupt his grudge.
That’s not fair. Probably he was trying to look professional in front of Hammond.
That night he knocked on my door. I was expecting him to come still a little resentful, but willing to be soothed, willing to let it slide into the background. There would be peace offerings; I would let him control the remote, and he would forgo olives on the pizza. Or something like that. I was flexible.
Instead, he slammed through my door before I could even open it all the way and spun on me, jabbing his finger into my chest and backing me straight against the wall with sheer force of anger.
“Where the hell do you get off?” He bypassed the ramp-up and the shouting, skipped straight to the very last step, the ice-cold, intense, terrifyingly low-decibel fury that I’ve only ever seen from Daniel. “Since when have you ever marginalized people under your command? Would you ever ignore Teal’c when his damned Jaffa Spidey-sense goes off? Would you ever tell Sam to shut up about a technical point?”
“Hey, I tell Carter to shut up all the time,” I protested. “This look familiar?” And I held up one finger in the 'Aht!' gesture, trying desperately to draw a laugh with a ham-handed parody of myself. It should have worked.
“No, you tell Sam to skip to the point, or to do whatever she needs to do without needing to explain to you. That’s not the same thing; it’s the opposite.”
“Daniel, I apologized,” I said, knowing that’s always weak.
“You apologized because the situation changed and you needed my cooperation, not for shutting me down. If they hadn’t turned out to be the fucking planetary Third Reich, you wouldn’t have apologized, but I would still have been right.”
That was the crux of it, for him. I honestly hadn’t thought of it that way, and the hell of it was, he was right. I couldn’t do anything but stare at him, pressing me back against the wall, crowding right into my space, his finger digging into my breastbone our only point of contact.
“So why is it, Jack,” he asked -- the cold fury was still there, but the question sounded sincere, not rhetorical, like he really wanted me to tell him -- “why am I the only one who gets sent to eat at the little kids’ table? Why am I the only member of the team you just don’t want to deal with? Why do you mock my work and trivialize my contributions? Why the jealousy of Ke’ra, why tear me apart during your undercover mission when you could have said so many less hurtful things for surveillance, why be so reluctant to trust me on Kheb?”
That was a hell of a grudge list. I knew he had more. “And we both know you’re a better leader than that. So, are you going to admit it?”
I didn’t.
He gave me thirty seconds, while his jaw worked in fury. At the end, when I was still quiet, he leaned forward and kissed me.
It was hard, and angry, and bruising. My teeth dug painfully into my lower lip under his onslaught. I stood there and took it, with my hands hanging limply at my sides, just took it as he nipped and pressed and thrust. It was my own personal hell.
When he was done, we were hard against each other. He left his hips there. Didn’t thrust or rub against me, but stayed there, making it clear that he knew.
I couldn’t even start to figure out what to say to him, so I went with, “You mean you do--”
“Want you?” he asked with a faintly ironic twist to his face. “I’ve been a widower six months, Jack, and you’ve consistently been an asshole to me for that whole time because of your inability to deal with your attraction. Why the hell would I sleep with you? You seriously think I’ll fuck you just so you can get it out of your system? I’m not handing out charity.”
His voice was savage and hurtful. “Never again. I will accept a lot, I will put up with a lot, but I will not stand for being told to shut up,” he said with thudding finality. "You will figure out how to deal with your little crush without marginalizing me, or I will ask to be reassigned. And this will never happen again.”
***
Daniel hadn't been back more than a week before he came to me at home. He wandered slowly around my house, trailing fingertips across surfaces that were new to him again, looking around with wide eyes. It was almost like we'd gone back seven years, like I was looking at him new from academia and awestruck by everything again. I could almost see the phantom fall of hair that I had never tangled my fingers in quite the way I wanted to.
He left one handing resting on my mantel, almost caressing, and said, "I don't remember everything, but your home feels very familiar to me."
"You were here a lot."
"I wish I remembered that."
Every cell in my body yearned towards him, standing there tall and straight and helplessly lost in my living room. But I couldn't risk it now, not when my team might finally come together again.
He walked toward me, carefully, deliberately. And stopped, just as deliberately, not quite touching me but just inside my personal space, just too close to be misunderstood. Daniel could always be understood when he wanted.
He watched me intently, with the kind of single-minded gaze he turned on me when I was making a command decision in the field, when lives hung on my next move. From only inches away, that look took on a whole new level of intensity. I gave a very slight nod.
Without a flicker of hesitation, Daniel closed the last gap and pressed his lips to mine. At the same time, he lifted his hands, right to press flat against my chest over my heart, left to curve possessively around the back of my neck with his fingers brushing the short bristles of my hair. Such slight touches, but I felt completely encircled, completely surrounded by Daniel.
Seven years of pent up love and lust and devotion and longing surged up inside me. I could feel myself, more convincing than the realest Virtual Reality, dipping him back for a crazy cinematic kiss, ravishing his mouth like the hero of some romance, ripping his clothes off and covering every inch of his body with mine, covering myself with his skin and his scent and him, taking him and owning him and reveling in him until no forensics in the world could tell where one of us ended and the other began.
At the same moment an entire lifetime of training reasserted itself, a lifetime of hiding and passing and carefully, desperately monitoring the touches, the affections I was allowed before I blew everything. Just as vividly I could see myself pushing him back, disentangling myself gently but with just the right edge of shock, joking and deflecting and re-establishing a friendship. It would protect my career. It would protect my ability to keep my team together. It would protect my ability to keep him close, take care of him.
The collision of my two most intense, most deeply held impulses left me stock-still and paralyzed with shock. I couldn’t do anything at all except make a tiny noise of desperate confusion. It didn’t matter; he pressed my mouth gently open and ran his tongue lightly along the inside of my lower lip. My entire world was sunk to our three precious points of contact, as he let his spit-slick lips slide across mine and explored my mouth gently and firmly, and my entire body sizzled and burned with sensation.
He broke the kiss and spoke softly. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, but I remember that I love you. I remember that I have for a long time. But if there’s a reason we can’t be together... well, I’ve forgotten that, or it just doesn’t seem important any more. I assumed I’d forgotten our first kiss, but from your reaction, I guess this was--”
“More or less,” I managed weakly.
“Well? Is this...”
I realized then how little I’d given him to work with, how unenthusiastic I must have seemed. I couldn’t leave him lost like that, all alone out on that ledge. So I did it, gave in to every stupid romantic fantasy, circled him in my arms and tipped him backwards like I was god-damned Clark Gable and then all but carried him to bed, old protesting back or not.
When I was sunk deep into him and rocking in long, steady thrusts, I think I told him I loved him too. I don’t know for sure. I was feeling his body open and loose and pliable under mine, watching as he threw his head back and writhed, feeling him dig perfect half-moon fingernail impressions into the meat of my shoulders, listening to him gasp and cry out my name, feeling the top of my head come off from the tight, slick, soft heat inside him. I was distracted.
I hope I said it.
I do remember later, when I was lying limp and wrung-out and stroking him through one last climax before we both dropped from exhaustion. I had him gathered up close in my left arm, right hand working him, lips pressed close to his ear. I said, “You’re mine now. Not letting you go, not ever.”
It turned out I was lying. Two days later, my world ended.
***
Six years after that, just past what the official paperwork declared my twentieth birthday, he knocked on the door to my tiny student apartment.
My hands dropped numb at my sides. He looked so much the same that I couldn’t blink, couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t swallow past the sudden clenching in my throat.
No matter how stricken I was to see him, he looked somehow worse off at seeing me. He said, “Jack,” in a single sharp exhale, like someone had punched him in the stomach, his face twisted in pain.
In that one word I could feel the end of this whole thing, the force that would tear down my reinforced wall between old self and new. If I let him call me Jack again I would be his Jack, and six years of carefully constructed and nurtured Jon would be gone like smoke.
“I go by Jon.” I stepped back from the door.
“Of course. I remember,” he said, and hung his coat where I pointed, and laid the folder he was carrying down on my table.
We sat down next to each other on my couch. It wasn’t much more than a glorified loveseat in the small space, and the lengths of our thighs were pressed together. He kept his eyes straight ahead. I put my elbows on my knees and gripped my hands together tightly, because otherwise I would reach over and lay a hand on his knee, would stroke his thigh or clasp his hand or do one of a thousand other things that our one night together had promised me were mine to do.
I waited. I didn’t think I could stand it, but I’ve learned many times over in my life that a man can actually stand almost anything, if he has to.
“Two weeks ago, General Jack O’Neill was killed in action offworld.” Daniel’s voice was careful and straightforward and blank. Exactly the same voice he had once used to describe to me the symptoms of radiation poisoning. The two things probably felt alike to him, feeling yourself die from the inside.
“I didn’t think we were still at war,” I said, stupid space-filler to cover me.
“We aren’t. He was caught in a civil dispute while on a diplomatic mission to the homeworld of one of our allies. He wasn’t a target.”
Wasn’t a target. What my people say when they mean “wrong place, wrong time.”
“He was trying to save... I was there and I couldn’t... do...”
That was when I realized that he was about to shatter, that making him try to keep talking would be cruelty. I could never be cruel to Daniel.
“Hey,” I said, feeling my voice lower and roughen with tenderness. “Daniel. I know.” My accent shifted a little North; my voice took on inflection patterns that I knew were his and not mine. Maybe that was crueler than letting Daniel talk.
“The will is in that folder.” The voice was back. “The house in Colorado is mine. The condo in DC is being sold to cover estate expenses. The cabin in Minnesota is yours. There’s money for you, as well. I’m executor. Anything of his you want, just let me know. I’ll get it to you.”
The house was his. That meant… that meant that in some sense, at least, I hadn’t lied to him all those years ago. “You were--”
And he said, “Yes. Six years,” and that’s when I saw it. Slim and not ostentatious, the gold barely standing out from his rich tan. He didn’t turn his head, but he must have sensed somehow my eyes on his hand, because he said, “He had his resignation all written. Just tying up diplomatic loose ends. We weren’t going to make a big deal of it, but.”
“Oh God, Danny.” I couldn’t seem to help calling him that.
“I miss you,” he said, and I heard him fall apart. Just heard it, in his voice, no catch and no sob, just the complete shattering that had threatened before. “Jack. You’re sitting right here next to me but I miss you so much.”
It’s funny, because that’s exactly what I would have said to him.
Then he kissed me. It was sudden and off-center and a little awkward. I was weak, weaker than I think I’ve ever been in nearly sixty years of life, and the moment for me to pull away passed.
The kiss changed, and I realized all at once how very well he knew me. He knew all my reactions, knew far more than he had learned in the one night I remembered. He sucked my lower lip in, nipped on it just a little, entered my mouth in a firm, possessive thrust that made me jerk and moan.
I was acutely conscious of how soft my lips were, of strange details, the way my molars seemed sharper and were missing my crowns. Hadn’t thought about that in six years. My face felt too smooth against his; the stubble coming in wasn’t thick or harsh enough. I felt my body respond with a speed it certainly hadn’t had last time. I didn’t know how to kiss him back, didn’t know his reactions the way he knew mine.
Finally, finally, I put a hand against his chest and pushed us apart. I realized, then, why the kiss had started out so oddly off center. Daniel’s eyes were still tightly closed, and I realized that they’d been closed since before he turned, that he hadn’t once yet faced me.
“Daniel. I’m not him. My name is Jon. I remember being your Jack, but I’m not--”
He opened his eyes, and I saw it hit him. I saw myself in his eyes: skin smooth and unlined, hair completely dark, slimmer than he’d ever seen me, not quite filled in yet around the shoulders.
He stood up and reached for his coat, hands shaking just a little. I didn’t dare try to help, didn’t even stand, knowing how close I would be in the tiny space. He was saying things about papers I needed to sign, a recommendation for a tax attorney, a memorial service, that I knew how to reach him if I needed anything at all. He didn’t seem to know where to look, and when I let myself glance at his face, I saw it burning with grief and lust and shame.
***
That was ten months ago. In another month, I will turn twenty-one and be reactivated at the rank of Colonel, unless I tell them otherwise now.
I could do it. I could step into the SGC in a month and stride through that circle with a weapon in my hands, a pack on my back, and a team by my side. Daniel would let me move in with him. It is, after all, my house. I would see him every day in the corridors and the mess hall and briefings, and see him at home on the weekends, and live out every dream that I have spent six years not dreaming.
It would be a covert op, and not the hardest I’ve ever run. My cover would be simple: Jack. It’s a role I know I can play. I would be Jack, in his words, his habits, his clothing, his jokes. Sooner or later, Daniel would start to slip. I would put in a transfer request, ask for Daniel on my team. It would be granted. I would watch his six offworld, and take him home at night, and I know I would succeed.
He would take me to bed. He would want me to be Jack, so desperately, and by then I would have forgotten that I’m not. Jon would be gone like he never existed.
Daniel would smooth over the rough patches of my missing memory. He would tell me about our times together, ignore any habits that are different, teach me all the ways to please him that I no longer know.
How long would it last? I wonder how long before Daniel starts to resent a body 25 years younger than his, hate being made to feel like a creep and cradle-robber. Or maybe resent the lack of the ring he had started to wear, the openness that was so welcome after so many years in hiding. He’ll realize, of course, that he probably won’t live to see me retire again.
Or it will be worse than that; he’ll realize all the in-jokes I don’t laugh at anymore, or chafe at having all the arguments a second time. Or I’ll just slip, in some way I can’t even predict. Some way or another, he’ll wake up, and then he’ll realize the massive, unforgivable con-job that’s been pulled on him. He’ll realize that he betrayed the man he loves by being fooled into accepting the cheap imitation.
Because I’m not Jack. I dress differently. I talk differently. I vote differently. I watch different movies. I don’t drink much anymore, after six years of having to go through humiliating contortions to get my hands on any. I picked up slang in high school and college that I would never have understood before. I tell people I’m gay now, if they ask directly, though I do tell them to keep it quiet; those are two words that never once passed my lips, last lifetime. I dropped the “playing dumb” routine in favor of finishing my degree by 20.
I don’t know if Daniel could fall in love with this new person. Lightning doesn’t often strike twice in the same place, in the same intersection of lives. Maybe he could, but not as Jack, and Jack is who I know I will become if I go back there. Jon is a fragile construct, too easily blown away by history and familiarity and longing. He needs to be nurtured a little longer, until I can look at Daniel and not feel this identity ripped out by its roots.
I’ll be involved in the Stargate program ‘til I die. I know too much, I have too much experience, I feel too deeply about that work to ever be completely separate. But I can pick up the phone and discuss alternative ways of being involved in the program.
When I hang up, a month before my twenty-first birthday, I put my head down and cry like I haven’t in forty-five years.
***
I shared five kisses with the man I love, and each one of them was, in a way, a first kiss. The first kiss; the first one I meant; the first time he participated; the first one he remembers; the first one in a new body. If we kiss again, it will be another first, but I don’t think that can ever happen. I just hung up the phone, and I’ve let go of all my plans, all my hopes, all my expectations.
Talk about releasing your burden.
I’ve never felt so empty, or so washed clean, or so calm.
SG1 Jack/Daniel
4600 words, R
WARNING for character death.
Thanks to
abyssinia4077 for helpful brainstorming and jd_junkie, the fastest beta in the West. I had five first kisses with the love of my life.
***
The first was an accident, an unfortunate cultural misunderstanding, a little nothing that the whole team elided from their mission reports without any explicit orders and ribbed me about low-key for a few weeks before a crazy virus turned everybody into cavemen and provided way more entertaining and more allowable mocking material.
We were still so new at this, so young -- well over 40, with a body covered in scars and a chest covered in medals, I felt the cold, invigorating rush of a wormhole and stepped out into a day-dream of a paradise planet thousands of light years away and felt so, so young. That seems bitterly ironic, now.
Carter was a half-step behind me to my right, and Teal'c mirrored her on the left. I still wasn't sure about her; knew she was a strong personality and a professional, knew (or rather, had been told by people I believed) that she was a brilliant scientist, but wasn't yet quite sure if she was the type of soldier I wanted to have at my back. Teal'c still felt overwhelmingly alien. We were forming into a team, could feel ourselves starting to fall into place and see the outlines of what we would be, and that process of becoming more than the sum of our parts was making us all a little giddy.
Carter and Teal'c were strangers who were coalescing into my team; Daniel was something else entirely. He had saved my life halfway across a galaxy, and the memory of him had kept me from eating my own sidearm in the time since. He made me want to live, propelled me up onto my roof at night to stare at the stars. The idea of him had become my guardian angel, but the actual reality of him, so different from how I remembered, so oblivious to what he meant to me, was still a stranger.
We stepped into a forest glade. There were butterflies. Multi-colored butterflies flocking around us, I kid you not. Ridiculous.
“So,” I asked, “does anybody see Bambi frolicking?”
Daniel wandered a few steps forward, dazed, turning around and around to look everywhere at once. He paused in one of the brilliant shafts of sunlight hitting the ground, gaping at the thousand shades of green.
“Jack,” he breathed. “It’s like--it’s like--stepping into an Impressionist painting.”
“There’s a cure for that, you know.”
He shot me a look of genuine curiosity.
“New prescription,” I said. His hand reached for his frames automatically, even as his glare turned withering.
Three hours later we were all lounging on low couches, playing "peaceful explorer charades" while Daniel talked at ninety miles an hour with the chieftain’s daughter. There was no technology, no sign of valuable trade goods, no information on our enemy, just food and drink and talk. Daniel informed us that the party had progressed to the drinking-game stage, and when I started to veto his participation he said things like "the alien 'I Never'" and "anthropologically fascinating" and "aren't you curious?" and I couldn't actually bear to turn him down.
Three minutes after that the party had degenerated to a level I hadn't seen since college, with people sticking tongues down each other's throats completely at random, as far as I could tell. Daniel said, "uh oh, Jack, we're in trouble now," and I felt the adrenaline spike raise my heart rate and sharpen all my senses, even as he beckoned me over with a slightly loose-limbed gesture. "You've gotta kiss me," he said, and I felt my heart rate surge another notch for an entirely different reason.
"I pass," I answered.
"But you do. It's Lyra's turn" -- a vague gesture at the same daughter, holding her drink and watching us expectantly -- "to pick who kisses, and she picked us. Gotta play by the rules."
"You wouldn't want to risk a diplomatic incident, would you, sir?" asked Carter with a smirk, and I experienced how it felt to have the terrible twins gang up on you for what may have been the very first time.
I looked to Teal'c for a little backup, but he simply said "I, also, find the idea of an interplanetary conflict to be most distressing," with what I only know now, in hindsight, to be barely repressed mirth.
I was outmanned and outgunned, and so, like a good soldier, I surrendered. “Geez. When they made me swear to serve my country, nobody said anything about this.”
I leaned in and our lips brushed, just the very lightest, slightest, driest contact of chapped skin, and then I pulled away again, before his dancing eyes and touchable hair undid me completely. There were sparks. There were sparks and there was lightning and there was a choir of angels singing Glory Hallelujah and there were five Gs at least pulling on my insides and there was no air in my lungs.
Daniel said, "See? Nothing to it," and turned and kept talking to Lyra.
***
A year later I held Daniel, drenched in sweat, sour with vomit, muscles spasming uncontrollably. I sat with him through a long day of cold-turkey hell, bringing him water, wiping down his face with a cold washcloth. At long last, when I couldn't do anything else for him, I wrapped myself around him and held tight while he shook, gave him all my body and all my strength to fight against as the next wave hit.
When it was over, he slurred, "Thanks, Jack."
I eased his limp body back down to the sheets and wiped his face one more time, and then I pressed my lips to his. He stirred, just a little, and pressed up against me with another faint noise. This kiss was almost as brief and chaste as the first, but there was a world of difference. This was intentional, deliberate, inexcused, undeniable.
When I pulled back again, Daniel was asleep. He never knew.
***
I apologized to Daniel. Held his hand to do it, caught and arrested over the second symbol of the dialing sequence, warm and gritty with the dust of the Eurondan tunnels. I craved every moment of contact with his skin I could get, perpetually conscious of the void between what I wanted and what I could have, and the press of my thumb against the flesh at the base of his palm seemed huge, monumental, important.
I apologized as best I knew how, no weasel-words, no caveats, no pointing fingers. He didn’t look angry then. Resentful, perhaps, but mostly he looked confused, scrunching his brows in bafflement and studying me like an anthropological puzzle box, like I was still hiding something, like my words weren’t as straightforward and sincere as humanly possible.
He maintained that low-key resentment through the debriefing, stating the facts simply and plainly, carefully steering his words away from anything that might be construed as “I told you so,” as though taking even that much satisfaction would interrupt his grudge.
That’s not fair. Probably he was trying to look professional in front of Hammond.
That night he knocked on my door. I was expecting him to come still a little resentful, but willing to be soothed, willing to let it slide into the background. There would be peace offerings; I would let him control the remote, and he would forgo olives on the pizza. Or something like that. I was flexible.
Instead, he slammed through my door before I could even open it all the way and spun on me, jabbing his finger into my chest and backing me straight against the wall with sheer force of anger.
“Where the hell do you get off?” He bypassed the ramp-up and the shouting, skipped straight to the very last step, the ice-cold, intense, terrifyingly low-decibel fury that I’ve only ever seen from Daniel. “Since when have you ever marginalized people under your command? Would you ever ignore Teal’c when his damned Jaffa Spidey-sense goes off? Would you ever tell Sam to shut up about a technical point?”
“Hey, I tell Carter to shut up all the time,” I protested. “This look familiar?” And I held up one finger in the 'Aht!' gesture, trying desperately to draw a laugh with a ham-handed parody of myself. It should have worked.
“No, you tell Sam to skip to the point, or to do whatever she needs to do without needing to explain to you. That’s not the same thing; it’s the opposite.”
“Daniel, I apologized,” I said, knowing that’s always weak.
“You apologized because the situation changed and you needed my cooperation, not for shutting me down. If they hadn’t turned out to be the fucking planetary Third Reich, you wouldn’t have apologized, but I would still have been right.”
That was the crux of it, for him. I honestly hadn’t thought of it that way, and the hell of it was, he was right. I couldn’t do anything but stare at him, pressing me back against the wall, crowding right into my space, his finger digging into my breastbone our only point of contact.
“So why is it, Jack,” he asked -- the cold fury was still there, but the question sounded sincere, not rhetorical, like he really wanted me to tell him -- “why am I the only one who gets sent to eat at the little kids’ table? Why am I the only member of the team you just don’t want to deal with? Why do you mock my work and trivialize my contributions? Why the jealousy of Ke’ra, why tear me apart during your undercover mission when you could have said so many less hurtful things for surveillance, why be so reluctant to trust me on Kheb?”
That was a hell of a grudge list. I knew he had more. “And we both know you’re a better leader than that. So, are you going to admit it?”
I didn’t.
He gave me thirty seconds, while his jaw worked in fury. At the end, when I was still quiet, he leaned forward and kissed me.
It was hard, and angry, and bruising. My teeth dug painfully into my lower lip under his onslaught. I stood there and took it, with my hands hanging limply at my sides, just took it as he nipped and pressed and thrust. It was my own personal hell.
When he was done, we were hard against each other. He left his hips there. Didn’t thrust or rub against me, but stayed there, making it clear that he knew.
I couldn’t even start to figure out what to say to him, so I went with, “You mean you do--”
“Want you?” he asked with a faintly ironic twist to his face. “I’ve been a widower six months, Jack, and you’ve consistently been an asshole to me for that whole time because of your inability to deal with your attraction. Why the hell would I sleep with you? You seriously think I’ll fuck you just so you can get it out of your system? I’m not handing out charity.”
His voice was savage and hurtful. “Never again. I will accept a lot, I will put up with a lot, but I will not stand for being told to shut up,” he said with thudding finality. "You will figure out how to deal with your little crush without marginalizing me, or I will ask to be reassigned. And this will never happen again.”
***
Daniel hadn't been back more than a week before he came to me at home. He wandered slowly around my house, trailing fingertips across surfaces that were new to him again, looking around with wide eyes. It was almost like we'd gone back seven years, like I was looking at him new from academia and awestruck by everything again. I could almost see the phantom fall of hair that I had never tangled my fingers in quite the way I wanted to.
He left one handing resting on my mantel, almost caressing, and said, "I don't remember everything, but your home feels very familiar to me."
"You were here a lot."
"I wish I remembered that."
Every cell in my body yearned towards him, standing there tall and straight and helplessly lost in my living room. But I couldn't risk it now, not when my team might finally come together again.
He walked toward me, carefully, deliberately. And stopped, just as deliberately, not quite touching me but just inside my personal space, just too close to be misunderstood. Daniel could always be understood when he wanted.
He watched me intently, with the kind of single-minded gaze he turned on me when I was making a command decision in the field, when lives hung on my next move. From only inches away, that look took on a whole new level of intensity. I gave a very slight nod.
Without a flicker of hesitation, Daniel closed the last gap and pressed his lips to mine. At the same time, he lifted his hands, right to press flat against my chest over my heart, left to curve possessively around the back of my neck with his fingers brushing the short bristles of my hair. Such slight touches, but I felt completely encircled, completely surrounded by Daniel.
Seven years of pent up love and lust and devotion and longing surged up inside me. I could feel myself, more convincing than the realest Virtual Reality, dipping him back for a crazy cinematic kiss, ravishing his mouth like the hero of some romance, ripping his clothes off and covering every inch of his body with mine, covering myself with his skin and his scent and him, taking him and owning him and reveling in him until no forensics in the world could tell where one of us ended and the other began.
At the same moment an entire lifetime of training reasserted itself, a lifetime of hiding and passing and carefully, desperately monitoring the touches, the affections I was allowed before I blew everything. Just as vividly I could see myself pushing him back, disentangling myself gently but with just the right edge of shock, joking and deflecting and re-establishing a friendship. It would protect my career. It would protect my ability to keep my team together. It would protect my ability to keep him close, take care of him.
The collision of my two most intense, most deeply held impulses left me stock-still and paralyzed with shock. I couldn’t do anything at all except make a tiny noise of desperate confusion. It didn’t matter; he pressed my mouth gently open and ran his tongue lightly along the inside of my lower lip. My entire world was sunk to our three precious points of contact, as he let his spit-slick lips slide across mine and explored my mouth gently and firmly, and my entire body sizzled and burned with sensation.
He broke the kiss and spoke softly. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, but I remember that I love you. I remember that I have for a long time. But if there’s a reason we can’t be together... well, I’ve forgotten that, or it just doesn’t seem important any more. I assumed I’d forgotten our first kiss, but from your reaction, I guess this was--”
“More or less,” I managed weakly.
“Well? Is this...”
I realized then how little I’d given him to work with, how unenthusiastic I must have seemed. I couldn’t leave him lost like that, all alone out on that ledge. So I did it, gave in to every stupid romantic fantasy, circled him in my arms and tipped him backwards like I was god-damned Clark Gable and then all but carried him to bed, old protesting back or not.
When I was sunk deep into him and rocking in long, steady thrusts, I think I told him I loved him too. I don’t know for sure. I was feeling his body open and loose and pliable under mine, watching as he threw his head back and writhed, feeling him dig perfect half-moon fingernail impressions into the meat of my shoulders, listening to him gasp and cry out my name, feeling the top of my head come off from the tight, slick, soft heat inside him. I was distracted.
I hope I said it.
I do remember later, when I was lying limp and wrung-out and stroking him through one last climax before we both dropped from exhaustion. I had him gathered up close in my left arm, right hand working him, lips pressed close to his ear. I said, “You’re mine now. Not letting you go, not ever.”
It turned out I was lying. Two days later, my world ended.
***
Six years after that, just past what the official paperwork declared my twentieth birthday, he knocked on the door to my tiny student apartment.
My hands dropped numb at my sides. He looked so much the same that I couldn’t blink, couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t swallow past the sudden clenching in my throat.
No matter how stricken I was to see him, he looked somehow worse off at seeing me. He said, “Jack,” in a single sharp exhale, like someone had punched him in the stomach, his face twisted in pain.
In that one word I could feel the end of this whole thing, the force that would tear down my reinforced wall between old self and new. If I let him call me Jack again I would be his Jack, and six years of carefully constructed and nurtured Jon would be gone like smoke.
“I go by Jon.” I stepped back from the door.
“Of course. I remember,” he said, and hung his coat where I pointed, and laid the folder he was carrying down on my table.
We sat down next to each other on my couch. It wasn’t much more than a glorified loveseat in the small space, and the lengths of our thighs were pressed together. He kept his eyes straight ahead. I put my elbows on my knees and gripped my hands together tightly, because otherwise I would reach over and lay a hand on his knee, would stroke his thigh or clasp his hand or do one of a thousand other things that our one night together had promised me were mine to do.
I waited. I didn’t think I could stand it, but I’ve learned many times over in my life that a man can actually stand almost anything, if he has to.
“Two weeks ago, General Jack O’Neill was killed in action offworld.” Daniel’s voice was careful and straightforward and blank. Exactly the same voice he had once used to describe to me the symptoms of radiation poisoning. The two things probably felt alike to him, feeling yourself die from the inside.
“I didn’t think we were still at war,” I said, stupid space-filler to cover me.
“We aren’t. He was caught in a civil dispute while on a diplomatic mission to the homeworld of one of our allies. He wasn’t a target.”
Wasn’t a target. What my people say when they mean “wrong place, wrong time.”
“He was trying to save... I was there and I couldn’t... do...”
That was when I realized that he was about to shatter, that making him try to keep talking would be cruelty. I could never be cruel to Daniel.
“Hey,” I said, feeling my voice lower and roughen with tenderness. “Daniel. I know.” My accent shifted a little North; my voice took on inflection patterns that I knew were his and not mine. Maybe that was crueler than letting Daniel talk.
“The will is in that folder.” The voice was back. “The house in Colorado is mine. The condo in DC is being sold to cover estate expenses. The cabin in Minnesota is yours. There’s money for you, as well. I’m executor. Anything of his you want, just let me know. I’ll get it to you.”
The house was his. That meant… that meant that in some sense, at least, I hadn’t lied to him all those years ago. “You were--”
And he said, “Yes. Six years,” and that’s when I saw it. Slim and not ostentatious, the gold barely standing out from his rich tan. He didn’t turn his head, but he must have sensed somehow my eyes on his hand, because he said, “He had his resignation all written. Just tying up diplomatic loose ends. We weren’t going to make a big deal of it, but.”
“Oh God, Danny.” I couldn’t seem to help calling him that.
“I miss you,” he said, and I heard him fall apart. Just heard it, in his voice, no catch and no sob, just the complete shattering that had threatened before. “Jack. You’re sitting right here next to me but I miss you so much.”
It’s funny, because that’s exactly what I would have said to him.
Then he kissed me. It was sudden and off-center and a little awkward. I was weak, weaker than I think I’ve ever been in nearly sixty years of life, and the moment for me to pull away passed.
The kiss changed, and I realized all at once how very well he knew me. He knew all my reactions, knew far more than he had learned in the one night I remembered. He sucked my lower lip in, nipped on it just a little, entered my mouth in a firm, possessive thrust that made me jerk and moan.
I was acutely conscious of how soft my lips were, of strange details, the way my molars seemed sharper and were missing my crowns. Hadn’t thought about that in six years. My face felt too smooth against his; the stubble coming in wasn’t thick or harsh enough. I felt my body respond with a speed it certainly hadn’t had last time. I didn’t know how to kiss him back, didn’t know his reactions the way he knew mine.
Finally, finally, I put a hand against his chest and pushed us apart. I realized, then, why the kiss had started out so oddly off center. Daniel’s eyes were still tightly closed, and I realized that they’d been closed since before he turned, that he hadn’t once yet faced me.
“Daniel. I’m not him. My name is Jon. I remember being your Jack, but I’m not--”
He opened his eyes, and I saw it hit him. I saw myself in his eyes: skin smooth and unlined, hair completely dark, slimmer than he’d ever seen me, not quite filled in yet around the shoulders.
He stood up and reached for his coat, hands shaking just a little. I didn’t dare try to help, didn’t even stand, knowing how close I would be in the tiny space. He was saying things about papers I needed to sign, a recommendation for a tax attorney, a memorial service, that I knew how to reach him if I needed anything at all. He didn’t seem to know where to look, and when I let myself glance at his face, I saw it burning with grief and lust and shame.
***
That was ten months ago. In another month, I will turn twenty-one and be reactivated at the rank of Colonel, unless I tell them otherwise now.
I could do it. I could step into the SGC in a month and stride through that circle with a weapon in my hands, a pack on my back, and a team by my side. Daniel would let me move in with him. It is, after all, my house. I would see him every day in the corridors and the mess hall and briefings, and see him at home on the weekends, and live out every dream that I have spent six years not dreaming.
It would be a covert op, and not the hardest I’ve ever run. My cover would be simple: Jack. It’s a role I know I can play. I would be Jack, in his words, his habits, his clothing, his jokes. Sooner or later, Daniel would start to slip. I would put in a transfer request, ask for Daniel on my team. It would be granted. I would watch his six offworld, and take him home at night, and I know I would succeed.
He would take me to bed. He would want me to be Jack, so desperately, and by then I would have forgotten that I’m not. Jon would be gone like he never existed.
Daniel would smooth over the rough patches of my missing memory. He would tell me about our times together, ignore any habits that are different, teach me all the ways to please him that I no longer know.
How long would it last? I wonder how long before Daniel starts to resent a body 25 years younger than his, hate being made to feel like a creep and cradle-robber. Or maybe resent the lack of the ring he had started to wear, the openness that was so welcome after so many years in hiding. He’ll realize, of course, that he probably won’t live to see me retire again.
Or it will be worse than that; he’ll realize all the in-jokes I don’t laugh at anymore, or chafe at having all the arguments a second time. Or I’ll just slip, in some way I can’t even predict. Some way or another, he’ll wake up, and then he’ll realize the massive, unforgivable con-job that’s been pulled on him. He’ll realize that he betrayed the man he loves by being fooled into accepting the cheap imitation.
Because I’m not Jack. I dress differently. I talk differently. I vote differently. I watch different movies. I don’t drink much anymore, after six years of having to go through humiliating contortions to get my hands on any. I picked up slang in high school and college that I would never have understood before. I tell people I’m gay now, if they ask directly, though I do tell them to keep it quiet; those are two words that never once passed my lips, last lifetime. I dropped the “playing dumb” routine in favor of finishing my degree by 20.
I don’t know if Daniel could fall in love with this new person. Lightning doesn’t often strike twice in the same place, in the same intersection of lives. Maybe he could, but not as Jack, and Jack is who I know I will become if I go back there. Jon is a fragile construct, too easily blown away by history and familiarity and longing. He needs to be nurtured a little longer, until I can look at Daniel and not feel this identity ripped out by its roots.
I’ll be involved in the Stargate program ‘til I die. I know too much, I have too much experience, I feel too deeply about that work to ever be completely separate. But I can pick up the phone and discuss alternative ways of being involved in the program.
When I hang up, a month before my twenty-first birthday, I put my head down and cry like I haven’t in forty-five years.
***
I shared five kisses with the man I love, and each one of them was, in a way, a first kiss. The first kiss; the first one I meant; the first time he participated; the first one he remembers; the first one in a new body. If we kiss again, it will be another first, but I don’t think that can ever happen. I just hung up the phone, and I’ve let go of all my plans, all my hopes, all my expectations.
Talk about releasing your burden.
I’ve never felt so empty, or so washed clean, or so calm.