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brainofckTitle: Summer Vacation: The Multiple Time Loops Ending
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
muck_a_luck, posting in brainofck
Pairing: Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Jack travels back in time and interrupts the summer vacation of a recently dissertated Daniel Jackson, PhD, PhD.
Content/warnings: French poetry? Is that a warning?
Words: 3379 words
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only.muck_a_luck and brainofck
The Matrix: Summer. The Matrix is located here.
Beta:zats_clear
Back to Part 1
"It's not working," Jack said.
"How can you be sure?" Daniel asked, showing his occasional true genius for missing the obvious.
"Because if it were working, I wouldn't be here!" Jack said, voice rising in panic. "Daniel, it's not working!"
"Mac," Daniel said, placatingly.
It was all Jack could do to restrain himself from hitting and kicking the artifact. Selene already thought he was certifiable.
He closed his eyes and forced his fists to unclench.
"It's not going to work," he said, very softly. "Because, as you just pointed out, this one is broken."
"Okay," Daniel replied, possibly realizing for the very first time that Jack's whole story wasn't some sort of elaborate come-on, but that Jack actually believed it.
"I need to think," Jack said abruptly, and left the room. His feet carried him back up to the roof. It was hot, the heat of the day still pouring off the tar and gravel of the roofing material, though the sun was setting. He grabbed up his pack, already stuffed with his smaller arms and his tac vest. The P-90 was a bigger problem. He couldn't leave it in good conscience, though, in gang-ridden Los Angeles. He finally settled on wrapping it inside the tarp.
He looked up at the crunch of footsteps on the roof gravel.
Daniel stood there. Impossibly young. Impossibly beautiful. He wondered which Daniel had wished for him? His own best friend, longing for him from afar, or this boy, fumbling his way through layers of self-discovery? He wondered how much of today had been the result of whichever Daniel's wishes? Did his Daniel wish Jack were gay, so that Jack would return his affections?
Jack hated super-powerful alien races with a renewed passion.
"You really are who you said you were," Daniel murmured, mostly to himself. "And you can't go back."
"I think that's probably the situation," Jack said. The calm in his own voice scared him. He had slipped in to operations mode without even realizing it – distancing himself from his own life – compartmentalizing his own emotions – setting them aside to focus on the task at hand, just as he had been trained.
"What are you going to do?" Daniel asked. "You could stay. Here. With me," he offered, not giving Jack a chance to answer. "I want you to stay."
"I can't do that, Daniel. There's an annoying voice in the back of my head I call 'Carter' telling me that I need to minimize my impact on the timeline, and maybe, if the theories are right, the timeline can self-correct for minimal inconsistancies."
Even as he was speaking, he was parallel processing. He had a couple of big caches he had set up in 1982 and 1983. They had supplies, weapons, equipment, and, most importantly, false identity papers. They were stockpiles he had never needed and they had been raided by the time he had checked them when he was Stateside in June 1987. He remembered three bank accounts, too, related to those false identities, that had been completely drained. He had losses to the tune of about $30,000, and considering he had been planning to use that for the deposit on their first house, he had been pretty pissed. But he had never been able to track down the bastards that had ripped him off.
"How are you supposed to 'minimize your impact?'" Daniel asked, sounding both skeptical and imminently logical.
"I can disappear," Jack said, brushing past Daniel as he headed for the stairs down. "Looking back over my life, I even know how I did it," he continued. "So don't worry about me. I know what to do."
"Mac," Daniel called after him. The sound of his voice stopped Jack in his tracks. Turned him around and sent him running back across the roof. He looked crushed. To Jack's complete horror, it appeared he might be about to cry. Jack wrapped his arms tight around him.
"It's my fault," Daniel said, his voice muffled in Jack's shoulder. "Yesterday, I was reading about Rimbaud and Verlaine, and I was thinking about passion and love." His lips were moving against Jack's neck.
"And I wished that I could know, today, my true love, so I would recognize her when I saw her. God, it was the stupidest, most childish thing I have ever thought! And I was sitting there, right by the broken monument when I thought it."
Jack's hands were moving soothingly over Daniel's back, holding the youth to him, making hushing, cooing noises in his hair.
"Daniel," he said softly, his own anger and frustration washed away. "It couldn't be your fault," he assured him. "We just figured out the thing's broken."
"Well, I don't see why you have to leave," Daniel said stubbornly, arms tightening around Jack, hands gripping hard onto his belt and pack. "Stay."
"I can't stay, Daniel. This isn't how we're supposed to meet."
Jack pushed the young man away from him, looking into his red-rimmed eyes.
"We're supposed to meet and start something huge, historic, and magical together. You're supposed to save me, and then we're supposed to save the world. Together. The only way for that to happen is for me to go, and for you to be… you. Don't let go of the things you know are right. Fight for them, even when it seems like everyone is against you. And trust me, when things are as bad as they can possibly get, that's when the most amazing things are going to start happening to you."
Daniel sniffled and gave him a lopsided smile.
"That sounds a little Jonestown to me," he said. Yeah. Maybe Jack had laid it on a little thick.
"Gotta go, Daniel," Jack replied.
"Where?"
"It's probably better if you don't know," Jack replied.
"Do you need money?" Daniel said.
Money would make things a lot easier.
"No," Jack lied. "If you've got some spare cash, I stole a couple hundred bucks from a woman on the fourth floor yesterday. You could pay her back for me."
Daniel took a deep breath and blew it all out.
Jack leaned in and kissed him goodbye. The kiss was long and gentle and sweet, and held all the promise of a lifetime of happiness and love and belonging. He broke off the kiss and looked into the impossible blue eyes that were searching his face for any sign of hope.
Then he turned and walked away.
He didn't look back.
He stood at the foot of the long, winding gravel road and saw exactly what he expected. A for-sale sign.
For years, people in town had talked about the weird, reclusive guy who had bought the property next-door to his cabin. It was big – sixty acres or so. The guy had apparently gotten it for a song when the previous owner was going bankrupt. He only came into town about twice a year. Jack had never met him. But people who knew Jack asked him if maybe he had an uncle or somebody living in town now. Because the guy looked just like him, but maybe twenty years older.
Jack used to shrug it off. He never saw the guy, though he suspected he came down and fished in his lake. He'd find old boot prints in the embankment sometimes. But the tracks were grade A USAF combat issue, and there were no fish in the lake anyway, so what did Jack care if a veteran of a horrible war got some peace in the woods? Jack hoped that someone would have the same consideration for him one day.
Daniel looked at the place where Jack had been, and didn't panic.
He knew exactly what he had done.
That didn't stop Sam from freaking out. The three of them thoroughly searched the facility, then called in reinforcements.
Daniel begged off the search and went straight home.
Jack was leaning against the wall in the hallway outside Daniel's apartment, waiting for him.
"It was my fault," he admitted, walking past Jack to unlock the door. "I have been trying to figure you out for years, knowing that eventually you were going to disappear. The monument reminded me of the one from that summer, and I wished you would just get a clue. It was only when you disappeared into thin air that I realized what I had done."
Daniel held the door open for him, and Jack sauntered in, hands thrust deep into his pockets.
Daniel's heart caught in his throat as he looked at him. He was still in pretty good shape for a man his age. He was almost seventy, now, in his timeline. His dark brown eyes were lightening, turning to a faded blue as he aged. His hair was silver, still close-cropped, and his face was more lined. He was thin to the point of gauntness.
His gaze on Daniel was intense. Then Daniel was being crushed.
"God, it's good to see you," Jack breathed against his ear, his voice rough and cracked, as if he hadn't spoken in years. "You have to promise me you won't try to fix this. Just let it go. It's nobody's fault. Just let it go, Daniel."
Jack pushed him away, gripping him tightly by the shoulders. He thin fingers were strong and hard, digging into the muscles of Daniel's arms. Jack shook him.
"Promise me you won't try to fix it. I don't know if I can lose you again."
He was far too old for field operations, and General Hammond arranged for a quick honorable discharge. Jack settled back into his home.
"It's weird, I've been gone fifteen years, but the milk hasn't even gone bad," he said to Daniel over the phone.
After his retirement party, Jack never set foot back in the mountain. Daniel knew that the Pentagon considered bringing him on salary as a civilian consultant, but it seemed that Jack had been living in isolation somewhere in Minnesota for the past fifteen years, and the psych assessment suggested he might not be entirely mentally sound. People were reluctant to revoke his clearance, but at the same time, nobody wanted him involved in anything particularly sensitive anymore, either.
Jack had been out of the game for years, as far as he was concerned. He was too old to bring his tactical knowledge to bear in the field any longer. The Pentagon decided a nice, cushy retirement was really the best thing.
Daniel tried to spend every possible minute of downtime at Jack's. He kept waiting for Jack to open up, but he never did. It was hard, being there with him, and feeling like all he was seeing was a shell. The Jack who trusted him implicitly was long gone.
Daniel still wanted him. It was so strange, to have a Jack now who finally understood how Daniel saw him. Yet, Daniel still didn't know how to touch him the first time. So many years of being friends with Jack, and now their one shared encounter was years behind them both.
They were standing on the deck, side-by-side, enjoying a couple of beers and the crisp October afternoon, leaning against the rail and each other and looking out over the yard, the grill just heating, no meat on it yet.
Daniel was watching Jack from the corner of his eye. That profile, so handsome, hardened by years alone. Suddenly, he just did it. He reached out and ran one caressing finger over the back of Jack's hand, noting how straight his fingers still were. His hands were still beautiful and artistic, strong and expressive.
A tremor went through his friend, where they were pressed together as if joined at the hip.
"Daniel," he croaked, his bottle slipping from suddenly weak fingers. "I can't," he whispered. "I can't do it again."
He turned and walked into the house. Surprised, Daniel didn't follow him, just watched him as he leaned hard against the kitchen counter, head dropping as he hunched in on himself, and for the first time Jack looked to Daniel like an old man.
Daniel tried not to think of all the things Jack could have done in that time he was in Minnesota.
Though one day, it got the best of him.
He was sitting watching hockey with Jack, who was glowering at the Maple Leafs and muttering darkly, when it just slipped out.
"You could have warned me."
"About what?" Jack asked absently.
"Apophis? Sha'uri? You could have picked up the phone and made a call."
Jack went very still for a moment. Then he unfroze and took a long, long drink of his beer.
"I lived all the anniversaries, year after year, but wrong-side out," he ground out. "After 1988 I stopped having calendars. I didn't listen to the radio. I didn't watch TV. I worked really, really hard on not knowing what day it was."
"And yet, you were waiting outside my apartment for me on the exact day I came back from P5X-432," Daniel shot back.
Jack stood, walking stiffly out of the room and down the hall towards the bathroom and bedroom. Daniel bit his tongue and waited for Jack to come back. He didn't. Daniel figured that was the end of the conversation and went home.
At – Daniel squinted at the clock – 2:36 am, his phone rang.
"'Lo?" he answered.
"Charlie," Jack said, and hung up.
Daniel never raised the issue again.
Another day, he let himself in to find Jack sitting in his favorite arm chair with a book, empty beer bottle beside him.
"What do you think, Daniel?" Jack asked, and read aloud:
"You think that's how we should have felt when we met the little grey guys? I can't get creeped out about Thor that way, but maybe that was just a failure on my part…"
And that was when Daniel knew he had to fix it.
First, he wished that none of it had ever happened.
He knew right away that hadn't worked, because he was standing there alone with the obilisk and he knew it had all happened. He could remember with crystal clarity Jack's appearance in Lunada Bay that day in 1985.
He sighed, resting his head against the cool stone, and tried to think what the next best thing was he could wish for Jack.
When he realized what he was going to wish, he knew why Jack didn't want him to fix it. Because Jack had been standing in his hallway. And what he was about to wish – well, he hadn't been standing in his own hallway, had he? It couldn't have ended well, or Jack wouldn't be so closed off. If this were the right thing to do, Jack would be reaching out to him instead of flinching away.
And yet. Daniel knew it was what he had to do. Because obviously he had already done it.
With a deep breath, he swallowed hard and wished for Jack.
He heard Daniel yelling a long way off.
"Jack! It's me! Please don't zat me! Or shoot! Or whatever! Jack?!"
Jack didn't know whether to be pleased or annoyed.
Over-fucking-joyed beat them both.
He couldn't even remember how he got Daniel in his arms. His Daniel. Not reed thin, slender, sun-blond Daniel, but Teal'c-trained, short-haired, kick-ass Daniel. In the back of his mind, the alarm bells were already going off. If Daniel was here, then something had gone wrong. If it had gone right, Jack would be there. But six months of living alone, speaking to no one, trying hard not to even be seen, by anyone made you glad for a little company, almost no matter how you got it.
He was holding him so tightly. Daniel was laughing breathlessly.
"I'm sorry," Daniel gasped. "I know you said not to try to fix it, but I couldn't stand seeing you like that."
"I don't know what you're talking about, and at the moment, I don't care," Jack replied. "You can tell me the whole stupid story of failure later. Bed now."
"Okay," said Daniel. And to Jack's ears he sounded strangely sad.
He knew when it happened because Daniel stopped coming through his door. Stopped calling him.
When Carter and Teal'c showed up, Carter's eyes red, Teal'c looking grim, Jack just motioned them in.
"His grave's in Minnesota," Jack said. Carter opened her mouth, then snapped it shut.
"You could have warned us, O'Neill," Teal'c said gravely.
"Nothing I said would have mattered," Jack replied tonelessly. "It already happened. He lived with me in Minnesota for three years, then got sick and refused to go to the hospital."
Carter's eyes widened in understanding, filling with tears all over again.
"We worked hard to stay under the radar. Daniel said he couldn’t go to the hospital. It would involve us with other people. Doctors and nurses would notice us. He would use resources that might be diverted from other patients."
"The possibilities for how you could impact other people in a hospital setting would be huge," Carter whispered.
Jack felt tears on his face. He knew he couldn't live through this again. Jack had tried to warn Daniel. But Jack had also known Daniel wouldn't listen, because if he had, Jack wouldn't have any reason to warn him.
"Carter, I need you to help me with something," he said. "We have to destroy it."
Carter dialed him out. He left with a sledge hammer and a pick ax.
He never came back.
Epilogue
Daniel sighed. Even on a project as big as this one must be…
"Well, this should read: 'A million years into the sky is Ra, sun god, sealed and buried for all time...' It's not 'door to heaven." Daniel crossed out the word and replaced it, reading, "'…His Stargate.'"
Catherine laughed.
"Well, so why is the military so interested in 5,000 year old Egyptian tablets?" Daniel asked her.
"My report says 10,000."
Daniel turned around to dispute this ridiculous figure with the idiot who had just spoken in behind him.
"Afternoon, Colonel," Lieutenant Kawalski saluted.
Daniel's mouth fell open in shock.
"Um, do I know you?" Catherine asked pointedly.
"I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill from General West's office. I'll be taking over from now on."
Daniel's heart was racing. It was him. Younger. Eyes hard, jaw set, uniform perfect. Not Mac, but Colonel Jack O'Neill.
Mac's – well, Col. O'Neill's, apparently – impact on Daniel's career had been profound. He hadn't let go when he knew he was right. He had fought despite the fact that people refused to believe. Though over the last few years, he had often wondered when things would get as bad as they could possibly get, because he was damned ready for something wonderful to happen in his fucked up life.
Sometimes he had wondered if he were crazy, believing the stranger he had met on the beach, claiming to be from his future.
Now, Daniel looked at this closed, dangerous man, and knew that now was the time, that he was going to save him, and together they were going to save the world, and sometime, in the future, he would see an obelisk to Thor and Col. Jack O'Neill would disappear into the past. Then Daniel could go and find Mac, whereever he had disappeared.
"This figure 10,000 is ludicrous. I mean, Egyptian culture didn't even exist…" Daniel argued quietly to Dr. Shore and tried not to be distracted by thoughts of salvation.
Back to Part 1
Click here for The There and Back Ending. (This is the happy ending version. Yay!)
Author:
muck_a_luck, posting in brainofckPairing: Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Jack travels back in time and interrupts the summer vacation of a recently dissertated Daniel Jackson, PhD, PhD.
Content/warnings: French poetry? Is that a warning?
Words: 3379 words
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only.
muck_a_luck and brainofckThe Matrix: Summer. The Matrix is located here.
Beta:
zats_clearBack to Part 1
"It's not working," Jack said.
"How can you be sure?" Daniel asked, showing his occasional true genius for missing the obvious.
"Because if it were working, I wouldn't be here!" Jack said, voice rising in panic. "Daniel, it's not working!"
"Mac," Daniel said, placatingly.
It was all Jack could do to restrain himself from hitting and kicking the artifact. Selene already thought he was certifiable.
He closed his eyes and forced his fists to unclench.
"It's not going to work," he said, very softly. "Because, as you just pointed out, this one is broken."
"Okay," Daniel replied, possibly realizing for the very first time that Jack's whole story wasn't some sort of elaborate come-on, but that Jack actually believed it.
"I need to think," Jack said abruptly, and left the room. His feet carried him back up to the roof. It was hot, the heat of the day still pouring off the tar and gravel of the roofing material, though the sun was setting. He grabbed up his pack, already stuffed with his smaller arms and his tac vest. The P-90 was a bigger problem. He couldn't leave it in good conscience, though, in gang-ridden Los Angeles. He finally settled on wrapping it inside the tarp.
He looked up at the crunch of footsteps on the roof gravel.
Daniel stood there. Impossibly young. Impossibly beautiful. He wondered which Daniel had wished for him? His own best friend, longing for him from afar, or this boy, fumbling his way through layers of self-discovery? He wondered how much of today had been the result of whichever Daniel's wishes? Did his Daniel wish Jack were gay, so that Jack would return his affections?
Jack hated super-powerful alien races with a renewed passion.
"You really are who you said you were," Daniel murmured, mostly to himself. "And you can't go back."
"I think that's probably the situation," Jack said. The calm in his own voice scared him. He had slipped in to operations mode without even realizing it – distancing himself from his own life – compartmentalizing his own emotions – setting them aside to focus on the task at hand, just as he had been trained.
"What are you going to do?" Daniel asked. "You could stay. Here. With me," he offered, not giving Jack a chance to answer. "I want you to stay."
"I can't do that, Daniel. There's an annoying voice in the back of my head I call 'Carter' telling me that I need to minimize my impact on the timeline, and maybe, if the theories are right, the timeline can self-correct for minimal inconsistancies."
Even as he was speaking, he was parallel processing. He had a couple of big caches he had set up in 1982 and 1983. They had supplies, weapons, equipment, and, most importantly, false identity papers. They were stockpiles he had never needed and they had been raided by the time he had checked them when he was Stateside in June 1987. He remembered three bank accounts, too, related to those false identities, that had been completely drained. He had losses to the tune of about $30,000, and considering he had been planning to use that for the deposit on their first house, he had been pretty pissed. But he had never been able to track down the bastards that had ripped him off.
"How are you supposed to 'minimize your impact?'" Daniel asked, sounding both skeptical and imminently logical.
"I can disappear," Jack said, brushing past Daniel as he headed for the stairs down. "Looking back over my life, I even know how I did it," he continued. "So don't worry about me. I know what to do."
"Mac," Daniel called after him. The sound of his voice stopped Jack in his tracks. Turned him around and sent him running back across the roof. He looked crushed. To Jack's complete horror, it appeared he might be about to cry. Jack wrapped his arms tight around him.
"It's my fault," Daniel said, his voice muffled in Jack's shoulder. "Yesterday, I was reading about Rimbaud and Verlaine, and I was thinking about passion and love." His lips were moving against Jack's neck.
"And I wished that I could know, today, my true love, so I would recognize her when I saw her. God, it was the stupidest, most childish thing I have ever thought! And I was sitting there, right by the broken monument when I thought it."
Jack's hands were moving soothingly over Daniel's back, holding the youth to him, making hushing, cooing noises in his hair.
"Daniel," he said softly, his own anger and frustration washed away. "It couldn't be your fault," he assured him. "We just figured out the thing's broken."
"Well, I don't see why you have to leave," Daniel said stubbornly, arms tightening around Jack, hands gripping hard onto his belt and pack. "Stay."
"I can't stay, Daniel. This isn't how we're supposed to meet."
Jack pushed the young man away from him, looking into his red-rimmed eyes.
"We're supposed to meet and start something huge, historic, and magical together. You're supposed to save me, and then we're supposed to save the world. Together. The only way for that to happen is for me to go, and for you to be… you. Don't let go of the things you know are right. Fight for them, even when it seems like everyone is against you. And trust me, when things are as bad as they can possibly get, that's when the most amazing things are going to start happening to you."
Daniel sniffled and gave him a lopsided smile.
"That sounds a little Jonestown to me," he said. Yeah. Maybe Jack had laid it on a little thick.
"Gotta go, Daniel," Jack replied.
"Where?"
"It's probably better if you don't know," Jack replied.
"Do you need money?" Daniel said.
Money would make things a lot easier.
"No," Jack lied. "If you've got some spare cash, I stole a couple hundred bucks from a woman on the fourth floor yesterday. You could pay her back for me."
Daniel took a deep breath and blew it all out.
Jack leaned in and kissed him goodbye. The kiss was long and gentle and sweet, and held all the promise of a lifetime of happiness and love and belonging. He broke off the kiss and looked into the impossible blue eyes that were searching his face for any sign of hope.
Then he turned and walked away.
He didn't look back.
He stood at the foot of the long, winding gravel road and saw exactly what he expected. A for-sale sign.
For years, people in town had talked about the weird, reclusive guy who had bought the property next-door to his cabin. It was big – sixty acres or so. The guy had apparently gotten it for a song when the previous owner was going bankrupt. He only came into town about twice a year. Jack had never met him. But people who knew Jack asked him if maybe he had an uncle or somebody living in town now. Because the guy looked just like him, but maybe twenty years older.
Jack used to shrug it off. He never saw the guy, though he suspected he came down and fished in his lake. He'd find old boot prints in the embankment sometimes. But the tracks were grade A USAF combat issue, and there were no fish in the lake anyway, so what did Jack care if a veteran of a horrible war got some peace in the woods? Jack hoped that someone would have the same consideration for him one day.
Daniel looked at the place where Jack had been, and didn't panic.
He knew exactly what he had done.
That didn't stop Sam from freaking out. The three of them thoroughly searched the facility, then called in reinforcements.
Daniel begged off the search and went straight home.
Jack was leaning against the wall in the hallway outside Daniel's apartment, waiting for him.
"It was my fault," he admitted, walking past Jack to unlock the door. "I have been trying to figure you out for years, knowing that eventually you were going to disappear. The monument reminded me of the one from that summer, and I wished you would just get a clue. It was only when you disappeared into thin air that I realized what I had done."
Daniel held the door open for him, and Jack sauntered in, hands thrust deep into his pockets.
Daniel's heart caught in his throat as he looked at him. He was still in pretty good shape for a man his age. He was almost seventy, now, in his timeline. His dark brown eyes were lightening, turning to a faded blue as he aged. His hair was silver, still close-cropped, and his face was more lined. He was thin to the point of gauntness.
His gaze on Daniel was intense. Then Daniel was being crushed.
"God, it's good to see you," Jack breathed against his ear, his voice rough and cracked, as if he hadn't spoken in years. "You have to promise me you won't try to fix this. Just let it go. It's nobody's fault. Just let it go, Daniel."
Jack pushed him away, gripping him tightly by the shoulders. He thin fingers were strong and hard, digging into the muscles of Daniel's arms. Jack shook him.
"Promise me you won't try to fix it. I don't know if I can lose you again."
He was far too old for field operations, and General Hammond arranged for a quick honorable discharge. Jack settled back into his home.
"It's weird, I've been gone fifteen years, but the milk hasn't even gone bad," he said to Daniel over the phone.
After his retirement party, Jack never set foot back in the mountain. Daniel knew that the Pentagon considered bringing him on salary as a civilian consultant, but it seemed that Jack had been living in isolation somewhere in Minnesota for the past fifteen years, and the psych assessment suggested he might not be entirely mentally sound. People were reluctant to revoke his clearance, but at the same time, nobody wanted him involved in anything particularly sensitive anymore, either.
Jack had been out of the game for years, as far as he was concerned. He was too old to bring his tactical knowledge to bear in the field any longer. The Pentagon decided a nice, cushy retirement was really the best thing.
Daniel tried to spend every possible minute of downtime at Jack's. He kept waiting for Jack to open up, but he never did. It was hard, being there with him, and feeling like all he was seeing was a shell. The Jack who trusted him implicitly was long gone.
Daniel still wanted him. It was so strange, to have a Jack now who finally understood how Daniel saw him. Yet, Daniel still didn't know how to touch him the first time. So many years of being friends with Jack, and now their one shared encounter was years behind them both.
They were standing on the deck, side-by-side, enjoying a couple of beers and the crisp October afternoon, leaning against the rail and each other and looking out over the yard, the grill just heating, no meat on it yet.
Daniel was watching Jack from the corner of his eye. That profile, so handsome, hardened by years alone. Suddenly, he just did it. He reached out and ran one caressing finger over the back of Jack's hand, noting how straight his fingers still were. His hands were still beautiful and artistic, strong and expressive.
A tremor went through his friend, where they were pressed together as if joined at the hip.
"Daniel," he croaked, his bottle slipping from suddenly weak fingers. "I can't," he whispered. "I can't do it again."
He turned and walked into the house. Surprised, Daniel didn't follow him, just watched him as he leaned hard against the kitchen counter, head dropping as he hunched in on himself, and for the first time Jack looked to Daniel like an old man.
Daniel tried not to think of all the things Jack could have done in that time he was in Minnesota.
Though one day, it got the best of him.
He was sitting watching hockey with Jack, who was glowering at the Maple Leafs and muttering darkly, when it just slipped out.
"You could have warned me."
"About what?" Jack asked absently.
"Apophis? Sha'uri? You could have picked up the phone and made a call."
Jack went very still for a moment. Then he unfroze and took a long, long drink of his beer.
"I lived all the anniversaries, year after year, but wrong-side out," he ground out. "After 1988 I stopped having calendars. I didn't listen to the radio. I didn't watch TV. I worked really, really hard on not knowing what day it was."
"And yet, you were waiting outside my apartment for me on the exact day I came back from P5X-432," Daniel shot back.
Jack stood, walking stiffly out of the room and down the hall towards the bathroom and bedroom. Daniel bit his tongue and waited for Jack to come back. He didn't. Daniel figured that was the end of the conversation and went home.
At – Daniel squinted at the clock – 2:36 am, his phone rang.
"'Lo?" he answered.
"Charlie," Jack said, and hung up.
Daniel never raised the issue again.
Another day, he let himself in to find Jack sitting in his favorite arm chair with a book, empty beer bottle beside him.
"What do you think, Daniel?" Jack asked, and read aloud:
- You know how you can find things under rocks that will just about go crazy digging in and curling up, trying to get away from the light? That's how you feel, when you're close to an Alien, or even when you're in contact with one by comset for more than a minute or two. You wish you had something to burrow into. Everything goes on red alert, and everything you've got to feel with is screaming ALIEN! ALIEN! You're glad then, let me tell you, you're very glad then, that you're not expected to be friendly. Just polite, that's all, even after all the training they give you here. Just polite. [4]
"You think that's how we should have felt when we met the little grey guys? I can't get creeped out about Thor that way, but maybe that was just a failure on my part…"
And that was when Daniel knew he had to fix it.
First, he wished that none of it had ever happened.
He knew right away that hadn't worked, because he was standing there alone with the obilisk and he knew it had all happened. He could remember with crystal clarity Jack's appearance in Lunada Bay that day in 1985.
He sighed, resting his head against the cool stone, and tried to think what the next best thing was he could wish for Jack.
When he realized what he was going to wish, he knew why Jack didn't want him to fix it. Because Jack had been standing in his hallway. And what he was about to wish – well, he hadn't been standing in his own hallway, had he? It couldn't have ended well, or Jack wouldn't be so closed off. If this were the right thing to do, Jack would be reaching out to him instead of flinching away.
And yet. Daniel knew it was what he had to do. Because obviously he had already done it.
With a deep breath, he swallowed hard and wished for Jack.
He heard Daniel yelling a long way off.
"Jack! It's me! Please don't zat me! Or shoot! Or whatever! Jack?!"
Jack didn't know whether to be pleased or annoyed.
Over-fucking-joyed beat them both.
He couldn't even remember how he got Daniel in his arms. His Daniel. Not reed thin, slender, sun-blond Daniel, but Teal'c-trained, short-haired, kick-ass Daniel. In the back of his mind, the alarm bells were already going off. If Daniel was here, then something had gone wrong. If it had gone right, Jack would be there. But six months of living alone, speaking to no one, trying hard not to even be seen, by anyone made you glad for a little company, almost no matter how you got it.
He was holding him so tightly. Daniel was laughing breathlessly.
"I'm sorry," Daniel gasped. "I know you said not to try to fix it, but I couldn't stand seeing you like that."
"I don't know what you're talking about, and at the moment, I don't care," Jack replied. "You can tell me the whole stupid story of failure later. Bed now."
"Okay," said Daniel. And to Jack's ears he sounded strangely sad.
He knew when it happened because Daniel stopped coming through his door. Stopped calling him.
When Carter and Teal'c showed up, Carter's eyes red, Teal'c looking grim, Jack just motioned them in.
"His grave's in Minnesota," Jack said. Carter opened her mouth, then snapped it shut.
"You could have warned us, O'Neill," Teal'c said gravely.
"Nothing I said would have mattered," Jack replied tonelessly. "It already happened. He lived with me in Minnesota for three years, then got sick and refused to go to the hospital."
Carter's eyes widened in understanding, filling with tears all over again.
"We worked hard to stay under the radar. Daniel said he couldn’t go to the hospital. It would involve us with other people. Doctors and nurses would notice us. He would use resources that might be diverted from other patients."
"The possibilities for how you could impact other people in a hospital setting would be huge," Carter whispered.
Jack felt tears on his face. He knew he couldn't live through this again. Jack had tried to warn Daniel. But Jack had also known Daniel wouldn't listen, because if he had, Jack wouldn't have any reason to warn him.
"Carter, I need you to help me with something," he said. "We have to destroy it."
Carter dialed him out. He left with a sledge hammer and a pick ax.
He never came back.
Epilogue
Daniel sighed. Even on a project as big as this one must be…
"Well, this should read: 'A million years into the sky is Ra, sun god, sealed and buried for all time...' It's not 'door to heaven." Daniel crossed out the word and replaced it, reading, "'…His Stargate.'"
Catherine laughed.
"Well, so why is the military so interested in 5,000 year old Egyptian tablets?" Daniel asked her.
"My report says 10,000."
Daniel turned around to dispute this ridiculous figure with the idiot who had just spoken in behind him.
"Afternoon, Colonel," Lieutenant Kawalski saluted.
Daniel's mouth fell open in shock.
"Um, do I know you?" Catherine asked pointedly.
"I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill from General West's office. I'll be taking over from now on."
Daniel's heart was racing. It was him. Younger. Eyes hard, jaw set, uniform perfect. Not Mac, but Colonel Jack O'Neill.
Mac's – well, Col. O'Neill's, apparently – impact on Daniel's career had been profound. He hadn't let go when he knew he was right. He had fought despite the fact that people refused to believe. Though over the last few years, he had often wondered when things would get as bad as they could possibly get, because he was damned ready for something wonderful to happen in his fucked up life.
Sometimes he had wondered if he were crazy, believing the stranger he had met on the beach, claiming to be from his future.
Now, Daniel looked at this closed, dangerous man, and knew that now was the time, that he was going to save him, and together they were going to save the world, and sometime, in the future, he would see an obelisk to Thor and Col. Jack O'Neill would disappear into the past. Then Daniel could go and find Mac, whereever he had disappeared.
"This figure 10,000 is ludicrous. I mean, Egyptian culture didn't even exist…" Daniel argued quietly to Dr. Shore and tried not to be distracted by thoughts of salvation.
Back to Part 1
Click here for The There and Back Ending. (This is the happy ending version. Yay!)
[4] from Native Tongue, by Susan Hayden Elgin.
If you're interested, all my stories, in order, from one page. Also, my fiction recommendations.
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Date: 2008-07-14 05:55 pm (UTC)That's always been the weird thing about time travel for me. If it happened in your own past, and you caused it, then by the time you reach your own present and the point of going back in time, the thing you caused already happened. So it should already be part of your timeline. So can you ever really "change" your own life by going into the past and changing something? Anyway. *points up*
I very pleased and happy you liked it so much. Thank you!
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Date: 2008-07-14 06:02 pm (UTC)Except it completely should! Really that was meant as pretty much the highest praise I could come up with to dish out, there.
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Date: 2008-07-14 06:10 pm (UTC):D