Everything went to shit pretty quickly. To be fair, it was a terrible plan, it was just the only plan they’d had. Jack hates having Jonas and Daniel on the Goa’uld ship without backup, but he and Sam are needed to fly the X-302 and Teal’c to deal with Yu. But Yu doesn’t show up, and they have no way to retrieve their civilians before Anubis’ ship disappears into hyperspace. He’s left stranded in the X-302, which was barely retrofitted in time for this mission, and certainly can’t go on a hyperspeed pursuit.
He really can’t believe they lost Daniel barely two weeks after getting him back. Thankfully, Sam doesn’t try to engage him in conversation more than just the barest necessary communication to get them home. He catches her several times watching him with a worried expression, but she leaves him to his despairing thoughts. When the Kelownans show up only a few hours after he and Sam return planetside, Jack wonders (not for the first time) about Daniel’s good luck. They have a much better chance of getting their boys back if they can find Anubis’ ship, and it sounds like maybe the Kelownans have.
The Kelownans are worried about their own skins, mostly. Jack just wants to get his people back. After they are told where they are in the Kelownan compound, he looks to Sam, and she agrees the communicator should work, a hopeful look on her face. She pulls it out of her pocket and hands it to him. Leaving her to make nice with the natives, he turns away.
“Daniel? Daniel, come in. This is O'Neill.” He pauses for a long moment and receives no response. His gut starts to churn. When they’d last made contact, Daniel had told them that Jonas was captured. He knows there’s a good chance Daniel has been captured in these intervening hours as well. Anubis will be far more interested in Daniel than Jonas. Jack’s memory helpfully supplies the images of Daniel’s drawn, anxious face when he’d spoken of Anubis on Abydos, as well as ideas of the horrible things Anubis could do to his archaeologist. He tries one more time, his voice ringing with a clipped and impatient edge. “Daniel?”
“Jack!”
A rush of quelling relief. Whatever is happening, Danny is alive and in possession of his communicator. Hearing Daniel’s strained voice, Sam turns away from the Kelownans and comes to stand beside Jack. “What is your situation?”
“I'm hiding,” somehow, Daniel makes it sound like small talk. The banter is so familiar, he has to fight a grin. “What's yours?”
“Carter and I are on the planet.”
“You're going to have to be a little more specific, Jack. I haven't had time to look out a window lately.”
In any other situation, he’d be annoyed at their archaeologist's snippiness in the middle of a mission, but now it’s too much of a good sign. Daniel had hinted at remembering things in the locker room, but there hadn’t been time to sit down and unpack what that entailed. But ever since Jack had gotten a little frustrated and callous in the first briefing back that Danny had come to, his partner had been walking on eggshells around him. This sarcasm, however poorly timed, is welcome. “You are hovering over Jonas's homeworld.”
“Why?” comes Daniel’s voice from the communicator, and Jack can just see his face in his mind’s eye - the puzzled little scowl, eyebrows drawn down over his eyes and mouth slightly open.
“I wish I knew.” He glances back at the Kelownans, but they are impatiently waiting for him and Sam to pay attention to them. The fact is, they can’t get onto this ship without these people’s help. And Daniel and Jonas would neither one probably appreciate it if Jack let the Kelownans get blown to bits, despite that they probably deserve it. “Are you in any immediate danger?”
“Depends what you mean by immediate,” comes the impertinent response.
“Daniel,” he growls warningly, rolling his eyes. Imagine, missing this. His team was delightfully good about the chain of command and military respect while Daniel was gone.
“I'm fine,” Daniel’s voice is strained, and Jack regrets the growl just a little. He imagines his partner is a little stressed, up there on the enemy spaceship with half his memories and his teammate captured. On cue, Daniel starts talking rapidly. “I found the location of Jonas's cell from the ship's computer. I'm on my way there now. I have just got a couple of problems.”
“Like...what?” Problems is not what Jack wants to hear.
“Well, I'm not sure how to shut off the force-field protecting his cell yet.”
Jack waits for a second, but nothing else is forthcoming. “You said a couple,” he prompts.
“Yeah, actually I'm a little lost at the moment.” There’s a pause, and Jack knows it’s Daniel taking a deep breath on the other end before imparting more bad news. He’s reassuringly predictable. “And, I've only got about three hours left before the Tok'ra isotope wears off and I'm visible to the ship's sensors.”
“So…business as usual then, huh?” Jack sighs and catches Sam smiling even as she’s looking away.
“I don't know,” Daniel pauses, “is it?”
“Yes.” Medical advice and his own conflicted feelings be damned, Jack should have spent the last two weeks glued to Daniel’s side. He claims he just started to remember in the couple of days leading up to the mission, and that was with no help at all now when they need him at his best. If Jack had helped him remember, he thinks, perhaps he wouldn’t have to hear that nervous uncertainty in his partner’s quiet voice. Still, he tries to instill confidence in him. “We do this kind of thing all the time.”
“Ah, well, good,” Daniel says flippantly, “that's comforting then.” It seems he has as little regard for his own life as he’s ever had. Right then and there, Jack makes himself a promise. When they get home, he’ll sit down with Daniel and hash everything out. Their past, their present, their future...whatever the outcome, it’s cruel to leave Daniel hanging in the unknown like this, just because Jack is afraid his lover won’t take him back; that a year of enforced separation won’t have been enough for Daniel to forgive him for being a complete idiot. He can only hope and pray that Daniel has changed his mind.
But first, they have to get them rescued.
Crisis averted. Anubis stymied. Jonas Quinn headed home to Kelowna. Daniel, sitting in his living room, with at least some measure of his memory back. Under the pretense of getting another beer, Jack takes a minute to watch Daniel laughing with Sam and Teal’c. He’d hesitated to accept the team dinner invitation, but the rest of their team had chivvied and cajoled and gently bullied him into it. Now, Jack’s mission is to somehow convince him to stay when Sam and Teal’c head home.
Turning away from the living room, Jack reaches into the fridge and takes out two bottles. As he’s turning around, though, a bigger, dusty bottle on the counter catches his eye. Daniel doesn’t like beer, so he hasn’t been drinking very much, but maybe a different beverage would tempt him more to loosen his tongue and his inhibitions. Jack puts one of the beers back in the fridge and digs around in a nearby drawer for a corkscrew, uncorking the bottle of wine and then loosely stopping it back up. Taking a couple of wine glasses from the nearby cabinet, he heads back into the living room.
They turn to look at him, and he holds out the bottle towards Sam first. “Carter?”
“I’m good, sir,” she shakes her head, smiling, and raises her beer, which still has several drinks at the bottom.
Jack turns to look at Daniel, who is sitting beside Teal’c. His beer is still mostly full on the table in front of them, but he hasn’t taken a drink of it in quite a while. “Daniel?” Jack holds out a glass.
Daniel hesitates, throwing a questioning look at Sam. “Sam just mentioned needing to get going soon, and I don’t want it to go to waste,” he declines quietly.
“You know Carter just thinks her experiments are more fun than us. The night is young, why don’t you stay?” Jack wheedles, giving the bottle of wine an inviting little swish. “We can play a game of chess or two. I’ll take you back to base later.” Daniel still hesitates, looking from Sam to Teal’c.
“You should stay, Daniel,” Sam says, “I do need to get back to the PCR machine before it times out tonight but I’m fine to drive. You’ve been bored out of your mind stuck in that little room on base for weeks.”
“I will be Samantha Carter’s designated vehicle operator, Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c assures Daniel with a slow incline of his head. “You should imbibe of your wine spirits and relax.”
Jack considers sending his teammates gift baskets for backing him up but forces his expression to stay neutral and welcoming as Daniel eyes him nervously. He holds Daniel’s uncertain gaze for a long pause, and then finally Daniel reaches out to take the glass and the bottle from him with a quiet, “Okay. A game of chess sounds nice.”
While Daniel’s busy carefully pouring himself a glass of wine, Jack watches Teal’c and Sam exchange a look and then finds himself on the receiving end of two narrowed stares, clear warnings against hurting their newly rediscovered teammate’s fragile feelings. He puts on his best innocent face and wanders over to lift the chess set off of a shelf above his DVD collection. As he is bringing it back over to the table, Sam finishes her drink and stands up, followed shortly by T. “Thanks for dinner, Sir,” she says, “Goodnight, Daniel. See you guys on Monday.”
“‘Night, Sam, Teal’c,” Daniel smiles gently, saluting them with his wine glass.
Jack sets the chess set down in front of him. “Why don’t you set this up while I see everyone out?” he proposes to Daniel and then follows the rest of the team to the door. Pulling on his hat while Sam shrugs into her jacket, Teal’c opens the door to allow her to pass first but Sam hesitates, looking back at Jack. “Sir….Jack….,” She has on her ‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this to my commanding officer’ face, but whatever it is, her loyalty to Daniel is strong.
“Spit it out, Carter,” he responds quietly, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Just be gentle with him,” Sam offers after a long pause. “Janet said he probably still doesn’t remember everything, and he could easily choose to not remember.” Teal’c nods along with her words, standing a little straighter in the doorway and frowning forbiddingly. Jack doesn’t need the reminder - Fraiser had given him a twenty-minute lecture on the subject earlier that day; he is more than aware that she thinks part of why Daniel’s not remembering Jack as fast as everyone else is because their relationship was associated with stronger emotions - both the positive and the negative. She hadn’t been shy about telling him all of the times she knew of that Colonel O’Neill had been a jerk to his best friend.
“I’m not going to kill him and bury him in the backyard,” Jack rolls his eyes. That doesn’t seem to reassure his teammates. He scowls at them for a minute, and then adds, “I’ll be nice. But if he’s remembering things, my shortcomings included, we have to talk about it.” He really, really can’t believe he’s admitting that to her, but what can he do? He needs her to leave so he can get Danny a little drunk before and they can have these conversations. Sam, Teal’c, and Janet think Daniel’s remembering a rocky friendship, and the reality is so much worse.
That is apparently more reassuring, and Sam smiles at him and walks through the door. Teal’c holds his gaze for a minute longer and then slowly inclines his head before following her out to the car. Jack closes the door behind them and stares at it for a minute before wandering back into the living room. Daniel has set the chessboard up on the small table by the window and he’s staring out into the gathering twilight. On his way over, Jack picks up his beer and also the wine bottle, wanting it closer for refill purposes.
Settling into the chair opposite Daniel, Jack glances down at the board. Daniel’s set him up with the white pieces, so he obligingly reaches out and moves a pawn. As the piece clicks quietly down onto its new square, Daniel turns towards the table and stares down at the board, but doesn’t make a first move of his own. When the pause stretches uncomfortably long for Jack, he knocks his foot against Daniel’s under the table. “Earth to Daniel.”
Startled blue eyes jerk up to meet his, and Daniel stumbles through, “Um. Sorry. What?”
“Do you remember how to play the game?” Jack flicks his gaze downward to indicate the chessboard.
“Oh. Yeah,” Daniel smiles, just a little crack of sheepish apology that doesn’t linger on his face. “I was just distracted. I actually never forgot a lot of really abstract things, like the rules to games and languages and recipes.” he moves a pawn of his own, and then takes a sip of his wine. “I just didn’t have any memories of doing them, or learning them.”
That sounds like a particularly bizarre form of hell - especially since Jack guesses a lot of what Daniel did remember would have been completely foreign to the people of Vis Uban. He thinks he should be thankful to Oma for dropping their boy in a tribe of friendly people, instead of xenophobic ones….if he wasn’t too busy being pissed off that she’d stolen Daniel’s memories in the first place.
Maybe she thought they needed to earn him back.
They play through the first game making small talk about what has been going on around the SGC in the past year. Daniel wants to know all about what Cassie has been up to, and Ferretti, and Fraiser, and Hammond, and his other particular friends. Thankfully, though Jack often tries to play the ‘clueless colonel’, he takes his job as the base’s second in command pretty seriously and has always been good at keeping a finger on the pulse of the men and women under his command, so he has plenty of stories to share.
Daniel finishes his second glass of wine about the time they finish the second game and is looking a little flushed. He looks down into his empty cup and mumbles, “This is really good.”
In the process of reaching forward to pour more into his glass, Jack pauses, hand freezing in midair, and gives him a long look. “I should hope you think so,” he says matter-of-factly, “since you’re the one who picked it out.” Daniel slowly lowers his glass to the table and glances up at Jack and then over to the bottle. He reaches out after a minute and takes it, looking down at the label and running a finger over it, absently. His eyes are far away, but Jack waits patiently to see what he’ll say.
“We went to the vineyard with Sam and Teal’c. You knew I wanted to go and meant for it to be a date, but you mentioned it to Sam and couldn’t think of a good reason why they shouldn’t come with us.” It had been such a nice day, even Jack hadn’t been able to stay annoyed at having the extra company. There’s actually a picture on the shelf behind Daniel of the four of them sitting on a sunny patio at the vineyard. “I liked this one so much, you bought a whole case. I remember.”
“Jack,” he starts just as Jack says, “Daniel,”. Their eyes meet again and Jack gives a little gesture for Daniel to go first. The younger man takes a deep breath and looks down, a deep frown etched into the wrinkles between his eyebrows. “I remember a lot. But I don’t remember everything.”
“I know,” Jack replies quietly. “Fraiser said there might be things you never remember. That memory loss is poorly understood even before we add aliens.”
“Did she tell you her theory on why I don’t remember things? About us?” He’s determinedly not looking at Jack, peeling absently along the edges of the bottle label.
“Yeah, she did.” Jack doesn’t elaborate.
“Does she know? About….us?” The words are barely a whisper, Jack nearly has to lean closer to catch them.
“Not that we’ve ever told her,” he says, “but she’s our doctor as well as a friend and she’s pretty observant.” Daniel’s eyes go a little wide and flick towards the couches where they’d spent the evening with their friends. Sometimes, he really is an open book. Jack shakes his head. “No, nobody knows. It wouldn’t be fair to Carter as an officer. And while I do have my suspicions about what Teal’c thinks, you always said it wasn’t fair to tell Teal’c and not Sam.”
Daniel stares down at the table for a minute, struggling to remember. Jack can see the conflict wash over his face as he stands abruptly, putting the bottle down on the table with a sharp click and walking over to stand by the window, arms wrapped around himself. Putting down his own drink, he stands up slowly and wanders that way, propping himself up with one shoulder on the wall nearby.
“Hey. It’s okay.” The scathing look that is aimed at him from under heavy eyelashes indicates that Daniel very much disagrees. “It is,” Jack insists. “Nobody is going to get upset if there are things you don’t remember. Least of all me. And I can see how much it’s frustrating you, so in this case, we’re gonna ignore Doc’s recommendations. If you need me to tell you about something or someone, just ask.”
“You can’t tell me you’re just okay that I can’t remember things like...like…,” he trails off for a minute, clearly trying to come up with something of great enough importance. “Like the first time we kissed! Or...or,” Daniel has to unwrap his arms from his middle to gesture vigorously - Jack’s glad his wine glass is still sitting on the table, or they’d be cleaning red wine out of the carpet now. “Or what kind of..of sex we have! I don’t even know how we got together!”
“I am telling you that,” he keeps his tone quiet and even, and doesn’t move. Everything that Daniel says gives him hope, but he wants his partner to choose to come to him, so he doesn’t move. “I wish you could remember those things, because you want to, but if we have to make new memories, I’m still in.”
The arms creep back around Daniel’s chest; that’s all the warning Jack has. “What about the next time I make you mad? I remember enough. I d-don’t think I could do that again.”
It doesn’t matter that he was expecting the question. He’d thought he’d prepared for it, all of those sleepless nights of ‘what ifs’ while Daniel was ascended, and then the promises he’d made to himself since Vis Uban, especially while they all waited and worried about their newly recovered and once again missing teammate on Anubis’ ship. But for all of his mental rehearsal, the question posed in Daniel’s quiet and resigned voice has an impact a little like being shot.
To hell with being hands-off.
He reaches out, putting a hand on each of Daniel’s shoulders and holding them there while he turns Daniel to face him. “I’m just a man, Daniel. You’re just a mortal too. I’m going to get frustrated. I’m going to get mad. Knowing me, I’m probably going to be an asshole. We’re going to argue, and you’re going to have to explain things to me in dumb colonel terms occasionally.” He has his partner’s complete attention, those bright eyes peering up at him from under eyebrows that are deeply wrinkled in a frown of concentration. “But, look, whatever happens, we’re going to work it out.”
There’s no light of belief and understanding in Daniel’s face, and so Jack knows he has to dig deep. He has to give voice to the feelings that he always thought Daniel trusted, even if he didn’t speak them very often. He knows that was stupid - it was fatalistically stupid to think his linguist’s love language wasn’t words, that he didn’t need to hear Jack say them, it was stupid to the point where he let this man believe he didn’t have the feelings that Daniel did. Jack knows better now - it won’t be any easier, but he will do whatever it takes.
“I had to live without you for a year, Danny. I know I can’t do that again. So I know we’ll work it out because I simply won’t allow anything else, do you understand me? You’re mine, and I’m yours, and that’s just how it’s always going to be.” His fingers have tightened on Daniel’s shoulders, and he forces them to relax. Slowly, still more than aware that Daniel is nearly vibrating with tension under his hands and the thoughts are visibly going a mile a minute behind his wide eyes, he slides his hands up from the other man’s shoulders to cradle the back of his head, thumb brushing across the archaeologist’s jaw. “Daniel Jackson, I love you. I trust you. And I’ll prove it to you, and keep proving it to you until you tell me to stop.”
Danny’s mouth opens in a silent little ‘oh’ of surprise, and Jack watches his expression change. His face relaxes, years of wrinkles disappearing as the skin smooths out. His eyes go unfocused for a moment as he’s remembering something, and then when as they refocus on Jack, they soften. He leans his head into Jack’s hands and his arms peel away from his middle, one hand coming up to lightly wrap around Jack’s wrist. There’s true, solid recognition in his expression for the first time since he has been back, and something around Jack’s heart loosens, the rush of relief leaving him feeling unmoored and at sea. This, more than the shell of a man they had brought home, is his partner.
“Hi,” he murmurs. There isn’t even room to feel self-conscious about the soft affection he can hear in his own voice. Some other day, in some other circumstances, he can be worried about maintaining his taciturn reputation. “There you are.”
“Hi,” Daniel responds, just as softly. “Jack…” The words he doesn’t say, but are clouds in his eyes, have an almost physical presence between them.
“What, Danny?” Jack brushes his thumb across Daniel’s cheek again, hoping his firm, warm grip is reassuring. The other man takes a deep breath and lets it out a little unevenly before he speaks again, gaze steady on Jack’s.
“I never stopped loving you, Jack. I just….thought you’d stopped loving me.” Wordless, Jack shakes his head. Never. He’d been a total jerk, and more than a little obtuse, but never that. But he doesn’t interrupt, because he can sense that Danny’s not done. “I’m sorry about ascending. It was running away. I just couldn’t...I couldn’t bear the idea that we weren’t even friends anymore.” At that, Jack opens his mouth to protest, but Daniel shakes his head. “Hear me out? I just need you to know that I need you to tell me more often, okay? In case I forget.”
“I can do that,” Jack promises, “I can do that. I’m so damn sorry too, Danny. I pushed you away because I’m a coward, but I know better now. I know that not having you is worse than my fear of losing you.” They stare at each other a moment, and then Jack squeezes the back of Daniel’s neck gently. “Right. No more apologies. We go forward from here.”
“Okay, Jack.”
“Okay,” he nods, feeling a deep sense of satisfaction.
“Jack?”
The query brings his eyes back down to his partner, and he raises his eyebrows. There’s something in his boy’s expression, something he hasn’t seen in a long time. A laugh, maybe; a hint of mischief. “Da-niel?” he drawls the question, curious.
“Will you kiss me now?”
Oh. Yes. Jack leans in without hesitation to do just that.
