“JACKSON, GET DOWN!” 

Cam’s voice carries across the building and Daniel responds instinctually, hitting the ground before he even has a chance to register what is going on around him. Gunfire is loud in his ears and debris goes flying around him; even as he shields his head with one arm, he casts a quick gaze around the wide-open room to look for his pack and his weapons. 

They’re out of reach, of course. Keeping low to the ground, very aware of the bullets whizzing by overhead, he starts to crawl in that direction. Behind him, he can hear Cam giving very terse orders to his team, ordering them to cover him so he can get to Daniel. He tries to lift his head and look over his shoulder at what is going on, but ducks again when a particularly sharp piece of stonework comes flying past, cutting across his face. Sparing only a brief moment of regret for the translations he’s never going to get to finish if the temple is destroyed, he hauls himself the last few feet to his pack. 

He’s no longer an active member of an SG team, but since he still goes off-world, Jack hasn’t allowed him to stop logging regular hours at the range, as picky as ever about his deployment readiness. It’s a matter of mere seconds from the time his fingers brush the cold metal of the familiar P-90 until his back is against the wall and the gun is loaded and he’s swinging it up, intending to support his team. Instead, he gets only a brief moment where he takes in the chaos of men in brown robes engaged with the SG team. locks eyes with Cam across the remaining twenty feet that spans between them, and then the roof between them comes crashing down.

“Cam!” Daniel scrambles back to his feet as soon as the dust has mostly cleared, flicking the safety back on on the P-90 so he can swing it over his back and investigate the rubble. It stretches from wall to wall here, with no exits on his side. Thankfully it’s not dark, skylights overhead providing plenty of natural light, but the ceiling is far too high to hope to exit that way. A quick examination of the whole stretch of wreckage dissuades him from trying to shift any of it, for fear that it’s holding up what remains of the ceiling. 

Crap! He has to settle for trying to listen to the now muffled fight raging on the other side, which continues only for a very short time before silence falls. Standing silently with both hands pressed against the tumbled pieces of wall and ceiling, he allows himself the fleeting fear that it won’t be SG-1’s voices he hears when someone calls out - or any voices. If the attackers had killed SG-1, they might well leave Daniel for dead. 

There’d been no sign of any habitation here, and Cam’s team had been here for several days before Daniel Gated in with no encounters of any sort, making it seem like the kind of really safe mission where he could just show up, do some archaeology, and go home. So safe, it had seemed, that he hadn’t even bothered to call Jack in D.C. and let him know he was going off-world. Jack. Daniel winces to himself - Jack is not going to be pleased. 

“Daniel?”

It’s Vala’s voice carrying through the stone and he allows himself the surge of relief, momentarily closing his eyes and dropping his forehead against the smooth, cool slab of ruin directly in front of him. 

“JACKSON!” 

That’s Cam’s bellow, and he realizes he hadn’t responded to Vala. “Here!” he calls back, apologetically. “I’m fine!”

“I told you he’d be fine,” Vala says, presumably to Cam, who doesn’t respond to her.

“Just hang on and we’ll see about digging you out,” Cam calls to him, and Daniel shakes his head before remembering that they can’t see him. Something scrapes on the other side of the wreckage and the whole structure creaks ominously.

“Wait!” he snaps and then takes a deep breath in the ensuing silence as everyone stops moving. “Cam I think you better get an engineering team in here. This is pretty precarious.”

“Damn it,” Cam’s voice is low but it carries through anyway, and Daniel can hear him sigh. “You’re right. I’ll send the kids back to the Stargate for help and Vala and I will stay here. You sure you’re alright?”

“Um,” Come to think of it, Daniel feels a little light-headed, and as the adrenaline wears off, his left ankle hurts something fierce. 

“That’s a yes or a no, Daniel,” Cam growls on the other side of the rubble.

“I’m alright,” Daniel tries to sound cheerful as he makes the lie. It’s not like there’s anything they can do right now for Daniel from that side. There’s something wet on his forehead, but he assumes it’s sweat and absently wipes it on his sleeve. “Bumps and bruises. Everyone okay on your side?”

“Everyone’s fine. Payne got grazed, but nothing more serious.” The temple rumbles unpleasantly around them again, and Daniel eyes the perilously stacked tons of crumbled ruin. Thank goodness we aren’t far from the Gate, he thinks, and finds his sentiment echoed by Cam who says solidly, “It’ll just be a few minutes.” His words are accompanied by the distant sound of the Stargate engaging, which means it should be ten minutes, fifteen tops, before the rescue team can be collected and returned to their aid. 

“I’m just gonna go sit by the wall,” Daniel says after another shifting in the pile causes dust to be filtered down onto his head. There’s no direct response from Cam besides an affirmative grumble, so he limps to the back corner, picking up his pack on the way. Time to do a little first aid and see how badly he just lied to them. Sliding down to the ground, he pulls up his pant leg to investigate the ankle. It’s swollen already and visibly bruised - he doesn’t remember injuring it, so he doesn’t know how bad it is under the surface. The tall military boot is offering some support and he doesn’t want to be shoeless if they have to make a run for it later, so he forgoes taking off the boot to do a real wrap. Instead, he just loosens the laces and wraps a supportive bandage as best he can, and then tightens the laces again, biting down on the collar of his shirt to keep from making any noise that might alert Cam and Vala to what he’s doing as he pulls the bandage and laces tight. 

Just before he pulls the leg of his pants back down over his bandage, something red drips onto the white wrap. He blinks at it a minute, puzzled at the way it seems to swim in and out of focus, before lifting a curious hand to his head. It comes away bloody, and his head swims again. It really isn’t his day. He just needs to sit a minute, and then he can get up and take pictures of as much of these writings and mosaics as he can while he’s waiting.

“Daniel?”

“C’mon, Jackson,”

Someone’s touching him, lightly tapping his face, and another set of hands is taking his pack and his gun. Daniel tries to open his eyes, which feel incredibly gritty, against the light that makes his head hurt. Both Vala and Cam are leaning over him, and there are other people moving beyond them, making a ton of noise. He wants to cover his ears, but one arm feels asleep between his shoulder and the wall and the other is in Vala’s hand, her fingers lightly resting on his pulse points. 

Cam is wiping at Daniel’s head with something that stings faintly and smells like disinfectant, but he stills at seeing Daniel’s eyes open. “Hey, sunshine. Back with us?”

“Wha happened?” Daniel slurs, squinting. 

“You fainted,” Vala says helpfully from one side, while Cam gives him a Look, even as he presses some gauze to the gash on Daniel’s head, following it up with a quick field bandage.

“‘I’m alright?’ ringing any bells?” he says sarcastically. “You scared the crap out of us, Jackson.” 

“Mitchell, we gotta go. This whole place is coming down sooner or later.” Hand freed to push his glasses up his nose, Daniel recognizes one of the engineers usually deployed with SG-15. They do appear to have shored up quite well around the opening they’ve created in the wreckage, but he can also see it’s a stop-gap measure at best. 

“Yeah, on it,” Cam agrees and looks back down at Daniel. “Anything else hurt?”

“Busted my ankle,” Daniel admits, pulling up just enough of his pant leg to show the edge of bandaging. 

“All right. Vala, grab his gear and get out of here. We’re right behind you.” She does so with surprisingly little resistance - Daniel has the stray thought to wonder when she got so good at following orders, and then Cam is hauling him to his feet, wedging his shoulder under his arm, and he has to focus on coordinating moving with the other man as they hurry out of the temple and back towards the Stargate. Vala, already there, begins to dial Earth as the engineering team assembles behind them, putting equipment back into cases and loading it onto the MALP, chattering amongst themselves.

“The General is going to kill us,” Cam mutters, glancing sideways at Daniel’s head. 

“Us?” Vala stands up, sounding alarmed. “Oh no, this time none of this was my fault.”

“Sorry,” Daniel murmurs, and Cam just pats his shoulder absently.

Cam takes him straight to the infirmary, where he’s deposited on a gurney next to a loudly complaining Payne, who is unhappy about having been left behind when his partner and the engineers Gated back to the planet to rescue Daniel, even though the nurse hasn’t even finished his stitches yet in the time they were gone. Normally, Daniel quite likes the young man who is one of the three people Cam had hand-picked to take Sam, Teal’c, and Daniel’s places on SG-1, but right now the noise is not helping his headache. 

Thankfully, Cam doesn’t seem to have any patience left for his young airman either. “Payne! Give it a rest,” he orders, but his eyes are on Daniel. There are two nurses there already, one taking Daniel’s vitals and one removing his boot and the bandage around his still swelling ankle as gently as she can. 

“Yes, sir,” Is the automatic response, but then the kid looks over at Daniel himself and smiles sheepishly. Apparently, they can see the headache on his face. “Sorry, Doctor Jackson.”

“I’m fine,” Daniel insists, earning himself a snort from Cam and a less-than-impressed look from Doctor Lam, who joins them, starting her exam with Daniel’s ankle, frowning over its tenderness and the way he inhales sharply when she presses on it. 

“People who are ‘fine’ don’t generally show up in my infirmary with head wounds, Doctor Jackson,” she scolds him, moving to gently remove Cam’s field dressing from Daniel’s head. “I hear you passed out?”

It sounds just slightly more dignified than Vala’s version of ‘you fainted’, so Daniel shrugs his agreement.

“Well this is pretty superficial, so I’m going to say it was probably more of a concussion issue than anything else. Did you hit your head?”

“I don’t remember,” he says honestly. “There was a lot of debris flying around, and it happened so fast.”

“Well, in any case, let’s get some scans to be sure. And I’ll want scans of that ankle, too.” She looks over at Payne, and then Cam. “Captain, you can stop harassing my nurses and get out of here. Don’t get that bandage wet and I’ll want to check those stitches tomorrow. Colonel, go tell the rest of your team that Daniel’s going to be fine, so they’ll settle down and let my staff do their exams.”

Cam offers her a jaunty salute, pats Daniel’s shoulder one last time, and disappears.

In the end, he’s only in the infirmary for about an hour. His ankle is sprained, not broken; his head doesn’t even need stitches, just a butterfly bandage; and the rest of his injuries really are just bumps and bruises. Lam would have liked him to stay for observation, worried about his concussion, but she’s no Janet Frasier and without anyone else around to insist he play it safe, he charms her into letting him go with just the promise to stay at the Mountain overnight so she can check on him every couple of hours.

Not, he thinks as he settles in at his desk, freshly showered and glad to be free of dust and dirt and blood and back in clean BDUs, that I have anywhere else to go. 

Daniel doesn’t keep a residence in Colorado Springs anymore. Mostly retired from Fieldwork (on paper, at least), he works full-time from D.C. with Jack. While he does come and go from the Mountain frequently, neither of them have downtime here enough to justify a house or apartment; they have base quarters and that’s sufficient. In fact, Daniel had tried to convince Sam when he retired that he didn’t need quarters at all, the couch in his office was sufficient, but Jack had put his foot down and Sam predictably assigned quarters on Jack’s say-so. 

Still, they mostly don’t get used nowadays if he’s here without Jack - with Sam away commanding the U.S.S. Hammond, Landry retired, and Teal’c off-world, Cam is the only one around who has much hope of getting Daniel to do anything he doesn’t want to do, and Cam doesn’t see anything wrong with Daniel sleeping on the couch (‘I don’t see what the fuss is about, it’s a nice couch,’ had been his exact words the last time). 

As soon as he enters his office, Daniel tosses the crutches Lam had foisted on him over in the corner by said couch and hobbles over to his desk, sorting through what he left there. Lots of things to do before he leaves or take back to Washington, but nothing so pressing that he can’t download all the pictures he’d taken on the planet this morning and start working through his notes. He wants to solve the mystery of where those people had come from so they can safely send a team back to see if anything survived the collapse of the temple. The writing is unfamiliar but there are sprinklings throughout of symbols he thinks are closely related to the last of the Four Races, the Furlings, whom he would dearly love to find before they retire from the program for good. 

If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone how he knew. He just did - he always does. The faint awareness drags him out of his work, from the papers and pictures and books spread in chaos across the broad table. 

He hadn’t flipped on the overhead light when he came in (only his desk lamp), so he has to blink away the spots as he looks out into the room. It takes a moment for the figure, dimly lit only from the hall lights, to resolve into a recognizable shape. Still, he knows who it is even before his eyes have fully adjusted. 

“Jack!” he stands up, ignoring the way his ankle protests, and moves around to the front of his desk. “You’re supposed to be in D.C..”

“So are you,” his partner says brusquely, pushing off of the door frame and walking towards him. Daniel tries to meet him in the middle, but he takes a step wrong, and his ankle protests loudly, giving out underneath him. He expects the hard concrete floor of the SGC to be looming up at his face, but instead, hard hands catch him and lift him bodily back towards his heavy desk. “For god’s sake, Daniel, get off that ankle,” Jack barks. 

Daniel looks into his partner’s face and chooses to sit down on the edge of the desk. Oh yeah, his husband is fuming. “What are you doing here?” he asks, dumbly, trying to buy some time. Jack was supposed to be busy at some military shindig or anoter - he shouldn’t have even gotten Daniel’s note that he was headed to the Mountain until he got home late in the evening, and he shouldn’t have been suspicious about what was taking him so long until at least - Daniel checks his watch, startled to realize it’s about 4 AM - dinner time. Jack hasn’t responded, simply arched an unimpressed eyebrow, so Daniel complains, “Who called you?”

“Damn it, Daniel, you should have called me,” Jack scowls at him, stepping back and crossing his arms over his chest. He’s wearing his leather flight jacket, one of Daniel’s favorites, and he admires the way it stretches across his body in all the right places, the buttery leather leaving just the right things up the imagination. “You’re retired from active deployment, and you agreed to talk to me before you took any off-world consults!”

Regretfully, he pulls his attention away from his husband’s shoulders to focus on Jack’s flinty gaze. “You were busy,” he makes the excuse, flimsy as it sounds now. “And it was with Cam! They’d checked it out, it was just going to be a quick trip, it was perfectly safe-”

“Obviously it wasn’t!” Jack roars, and Daniel winces. Intellectually, he knows that Jack just gets this way when he gets worried, and he could never really be afraid of his partner, but that doesn’t mean he deals well when Jack gets shout-y. He knows better now that Jack loves him, that this is never the end of them, so he handles it better than he had early on in the relationship, but he still hates it. He can’t quite look into Jack’s face, but he still rallies on Cam’s behalf. 

“They’d been there days with no signs of any inhabitants. It should have been completely safe - and don’t chew on Cam over this, I’m the one who volunteered to go, I told him I was cleared to go.”

“I already paid Mitchell a visit,” Jack growls.

“Jack!” Daniel protests, appalled, and jerks his head up to glare at his lover. Poor Cam - Daniel’d scared him enough today, he didn’t need Jack to ream him out on top of that. Jack liked Cam, and on most days they were friends, but Cam was still military enough that pissing off General O’Neill was still a big deal that overshadowed any friendship they cultivated on the side. “He was just doing his job, and doing it well.” 

“Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t,” Jack doesn’t quite cede the point. “And what were you doing?”

“I was also doing my job!” Daniel proclaims, reaching behind him to drag over some of his notes of the writing on the wall and his journal from Earnest’s planet. He’s already running a finger down the page, trying to find the matching passage to show Jack. 

“You can do your job here, in your office! Let the young kids go off and risk their lives to bring you back the pictures and the rubbings and the videos and the scribbles,” Jack says grimly. “Daniel you almost died. You could have been shot, you could have been caught in the cave-in, you could have bled out on the other side before they got to you.” His voice has gone quiet, even gruffer, and Daniel’s heart squeezes. This is fear, his mind supplies. He’s afraid. Leaving his hand marking his spot on the page, he looks back up at his husband. “Daniel, you promised me you were done going through the gate unless we could go together, or at least talk about it first.”

He had promised that, and he feels guilty for not caring about breaking that promise until Jack was standing here in front of him. It’s just...the Furling...he’d gotten caught up in it, and everything else went out the window. It wasn’t fair to Jack; when DADT had been repealed and they’d let this thing between them grow and blossom, Jack had been reserved. He’d admitted one night that he hadn’t allowed himself to pursue Daniel before not because of the military, but because he didn’t think he could let Daniel in all the way and then lose him, and it wasn’t like Daniel’s track record for survival was good. 

Daniel had originally just promised to be more careful, and they’d managed. Even after they got married, he’d stayed on SG-1 for another couple of years. It wasn’t until he’d died again about a year ago now, his heart restarting only on Lam’s table after a mad rush back through the Gate, that Jack had broken down and asked him to retire from Fieldwork. He is over fifty now, after all, and Jack argued he was more valuable training mini-Daniels to accompany every front line team than in the field himself. Daniel, shaken by another brush with death, had agreed, and he’d stuck by that vow until this morning, when Cam had shown him the writing inside this temple. 

“I’m sorry, Jack, really,” he whispers, resting a hand on his husband’s arm. “I got caught up in it, and I wasn’t thinking. Forgive me?” 

“Got caught up in what, exactly?” Jack huffs, softening a fraction but not ready to let go of his Mad. Daniel knows he might not, not entirely, until he gets over the other Big Feelings. 

But he still wants to know what Daniel is doing; wants Daniel to share this discovery with him, or he wouldn’t have asked. “You’d never guess -” excitement bubbling back up to the surface, Daniel lifts the book in his lap, pointing to both it and his notes as he starts trying to explain, words tripping over each other to escape. “Jack, I think it’s the Furling! I don’t recognize most of this language but look this is scattered throughout and it’s obviously an offshoot of the Furling that we read on Earnest’s planet, look at how this word and this word are the same? And I think maybe they’ve just changed alphabets, maybe merged with another language, because a lot of these words in this other writing seem to have the same number of letters and flow to the sentences. And the structure of the temple was a little bit like some of the Ancient architecture but it could never have been primitively made, even the materials were unique; clearly it was made by someone very advanced-”

There is a warm hand on the side of his face, Jack’s left because Daniel can feel the smooth surface of his wedding ring on his skin. He interrupts Daniel’s tumbling dialogue by kissing him, deeply enough to make Daniel forget where he was in his explanation. The first kiss ends, Jack starting to drawback, but Daniel hears himself make a little noise and he leans forward into his partner, seeking, and Jack kisses him again on a possessive growl, his right hand coming to above Daniel’s knee in a way that isn’t entirely work-safe, sending a thrill and a shiver up Daniel’s back. 

This time when he draws back, Daniel does too, looking into eyes that are soft now with affection instead of hard with fear-turned-anger. “You scared me, Spacemonkey.” Jack’s voice lingers gently, his hand still warm on the side of Danie’s face. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and then because he won’t ever get enough of being able to do this at work after so many years, he turns his head to kiss Jack’s palm. “I love you, Jack.”

“I love you too,” comes the immediate response, and Daniel revels in knowing it’s the truth.