Chapter Text
“Do not interfere. Hold your position.” Jack ordered over the radio. Teal’c stood beside him, his expression impervious to the danger Carter and Daniel had somehow managed to stumble upon.
The radio crackled. “Jack, they’re going to die if we don’t do anything.”
“You don’t know that. We have no idea what’s going on there. Hold your position.”
Jack waited for the next string of arguments, and when none came, he knew something was wrong. “Carter, please tell me-”
“He’s gone, sir,” she confirmed, and Jack swore.
“Okay, go after him. We’ll be there ASAP.” He turned to Teal’c. “I’m going to kill him. I’m really going to kill him this time.”
“Daniel Jackson does not appear to view potential death as a deterrent.”
“Okay, let’s go save him so I can kill him.”
They were alive. They were all alive. The people they’d wanted to save were alive. And Jack was pissed. Daniel’s few attempts to convince him that he shouldn’t be pissed had backfired, and it had taken all of Jack’s self control not to drag him back to the gate by his shirt collar. He’d managed to keep his temper in check as General Hammond greeted them, and even as Dr. Frasier began the medical checks. Jack had pushed Daniel to the front of the line with an off hand comment about checking for anything that could have made him lose his mind, and Janet had only lifted an eyebrow before starting the exam.
Daniel passed, of course, no mitigating factors to explain away the disregard for his own safety, just his standard bleeding-heart recklessness, bolstered with a strong dose of disrespect for the chain of command. Jack caught his arm on his way out of the infirmary.
“Daniel.” Daniel turned back, eyebrows raised, and not nearly wary enough for the amount of trouble he’d dug for himself. “Go home.”
“I was just going to go back to my-”
“Nope. Go home.”
Daniel furrowed his brow as if he didn’t know exactly what Jack was saying to him. “Are you ordering me off the base?”
“Nope. I’m ordering you to go home.”
Daniel’s eyes darted between Jack and Dr. Frasier. Neither man wanted to get into a pissing contest in front of the doctor, but Jack was willing to go through with it if it got his wayward archaeologist back to his apartment, where Jack could have the conversation that they needed to have. He could see the struggle as Daniel didn’t mention that Jack actually couldn’t order him back home, or to do anything outside his role as a civilian consultant, and even that was a tenuous reach when they weren’t on a mission. He was smart enough, though, to realize that he didn’t want an audience for the next stage of the conversation, which would be Jack explaining to him exactly what consequences he could enforce.
Jack sweetened the pot with the vague threat of just that. “Do you want to hear your other choices?”
“Jack, this is ridiculous. I’m fine.” The transparent attempt to save face fell flat, and Daniel visibly weighed his options before gritting out, “Fine, I’m going home.”
Dr. Frasier watched him leave, then turned her scrutinizing gaze onto Jack, who shot her a charming grin in return. Her eyes narrowed, and she held a warning finger to his face. “Don’t do it again.”
Before he could respond, she’d turned her attention to the chart the nurse had begun filling out on him. Jack decided to play dumb, a role he’d perfected over the years. “I don’t know what-”
She cut him off with the same finger, an inch from his nose. “I don’t care what he said. I don’t care what he says. Don’t do it again.”
“Don’t I outrank you?” Jack asked, flinching as she pointed a bright light directly into his eyes.
“Open your mouth,” she ordered him, penlight held high.
He obeyed.
Jack stood in front of Daniel’s apartment door, his hands light with the absence of his customary food-based peace offering, but that was not the type of conversation he was planning to have. The noise from inside made it clear that Daniel was home, just taking his sweet time answering Jack’s knock.
“Okay, I’m here.” Daniel said as he finally opened the door, holding out his hands as if his presence were enough to satisfy Jack and send him on his way.
Jack ignored the passive-aggressive dismissal. “Can I come in?”
Daniel backed away from the door, giving Jack barely enough room to slide past him. He continued into the apartment, feeling Daniel’s sullen glare on the back of his head. Jack was glad they were having the conversation here, because if Daniel’s attitude was any indication, the smart money was on it going south pretty quick.
“Why are you here?”
The question oozed out with all of the long-suffering condescension that Daniel knew pushed Jack’s buttons. It was the icing on the cake. Daniel ignored orders, put himself in danger, coerced the whole team to back him up, then got pissy when Jack called him on it.
“Why don’t you take a guess, Daniel?”
Daniel didn’t guess. He went to the kitchen and poured hot water into a mug. Jack was prepared to wait for a while, but he wasn’t prepared for Daniel to walk down to his living room, sit on the couch, and start reading a book.
Jack followed and pulled the book from his hands. “Oh, no. We’re not done. We’re going to talk about what happened today.”
“I saved a bunch of people’s lives, and you got angry,” Daniel recalled, feigning distraction as he poked through the other books on the coffee table.
“Or…you wanted to do something dangerous. I told you ‘no’, and you ran off and did it anyway, forcing the rest of the team to risk their own skin backing you up. You wanna tell me what’s wrong with that picture?”
“Why?” Daniel selected something old, heavy, and incomprehensible, then began to read, a clear challenge to Jack, who still held the confiscated book between them. “You’ve already decided, which is why you followed me to my house to yell at me.”
“Oh, I’m not yelling.” He wanted to be yelling, but he wasn’t yelling. “Would you like me to yell at you? I can yell at you.”
Daniel slowly graced him with a wearied stare. “Why are you here?”
When Jack had been young, he’d had an older babysitter who’d once told him she’d ‘smack that smug look’ off his face. At the time, it had only increased his self-satisfaction: he’d always been an expert at provoking authority. On the other side of it, he could almost feel his palm itching to follow through. Instead, he put the book back on the coffee table and stepped back toward the kitchen, out of arm’s reach.
“Okay, if you don’t wanna talk, you don’t wanna talk. You’re suspended from duty.”
“No.”
As the answer rang in his head, Jack tried to work out what it could possibly mean in context of their conversation. “I’m sorry?”
“No. Sorry, Jack, but I’m not getting suspended for saving people’s lives.” He was so matter of fact about it, that Jack started to wonder whether he might be in an alternate universe where he wasn’t actually second in command of the entire base. Of course, the simpler explanation was that Daniel was just a stubborn brat. Occam's razor.
“Great. Let me know how that argument goes down with the SF’s who arrest you tomorrow morning when you try to enter the base without clearance.”
Jack waited as Daniel chewed on the inside of his lip, fiddled with the book in his hands, stared out the window, took a breath, then glowered at the nothing in front of him. “How long?”
“Four days.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows, and Jack could see the resentment bordering on fury as he stared straight ahead. “That’s the same as the time they started shooting at us.”
“Yep, same as last time you disobeyed my orders and went running off to put yourself in danger. That’s precedent.”
“But nothing happened this time. It worked. I was right,” he hollowly explained to an invisible point in the middle of the room.
“You were lucky.”
“It wasn’t luck, Jack,” he protested, finally acknowledging that he was speaking to another human being. “I knew that it would probably work.”
Jack didn’t bother pointing out the inconsistency between ‘knew’ and ‘probably’. If Daniel wanted to talk probability, they would talk probability. Jack was glad they were having a conversation at all. “Okay, what was the chance that you were going to get blown up?”
“I wasn't,” Daniel answered, as if it were an answer at all.
“No, I want a number. You said you knew it would probably work, so what did you calculate your chances of getting blown up were?”
Daniel looked around as if a percentage would be found in the midst of the artifacts he’d squirrelled all over the living room. “I don’t know. Um, twenty percent?”
“Twenty percent?” Jack gaped. There was no way that it was that high, but the fact that Daniel would throw it out as possible odds floored him. “Daniel, you do something like that four times, and you’re probably dead.”
“Five times.”
“What?”
“Twenty percent is a one out of five chance, not one out of four.”
The worst part of it was, Daniel probably didn’t even know what a snotty little know-it-all he was being. It was just reflex.
“Thank you for the math lesson, Dr. Jackson. Now let me return the favor. Twenty percent chance of dying is eighty percent chance of surviving. Surviving four times is eighty over a hundred to the fourth, or about forty percent, which is a sixty percent chance of dying. Otherwise known as: probably dead.”
Daniel squinted at him. “You did eighty over a hundred to the fourth in your head?”
“Not the point!” He took a moment to remind himself what the point actually was, since it wasn’t Daniel’s inability to wrap his mind around the fact that Jack could do basic math. “A twenty percent fatality rate is unacceptably high. Imagine if one out of five teams we sent through the gate didn’t come back.”
“Okay, then not twenty percent. Five percent. Or one percent.” Jack shook his head, astounded at Daniel’s ability to throw intellectual rigor out the window when it suited his fancy, and Daniel had the gall to look indignant at Jack’s reaction. “It doesn’t matter the percent because people were going to die if I didn’t take the chance.”
“That’s the problem, Daniel. It does matter the risks that you take.”
“I had to. You weren’t going to do anything.”
“Oh, thanks, Daniel. Now I get it. You didn’t agree with me, so you ‘had to’ disobey orders.”
Daniel threw him one of his patented looks, the one that communicated that Daniel was way too mature to engage with Jack’s childish sarcasm. Jack didn’t buy it for a second.
And bonus, he didn’t have to, because he was in command of the mission.
“Okay, four days suspension, and you spend that time here, in this apartment. You can come back to work next Wednesday.”
“That’s six days.”
“Again, great math lesson, Daniel. I’m not including the weekend, which you’ll also be spending at your apartment.”
Daniel managed to look affronted at the idea of having to spend a few days in his apartment, for an offense that could have landed him years in jail had he been military. “That’s worse than last time, even though I was right.”
“Last time didn’t roll over a weekend.”
Something in Daniel’s face turned inward, in a way Jack didn’t like. “You can’t actually make me stay in on the weekend.”
If Daniel wanted to play ‘What can Jack make Daniel do?’, Jack was on board.
“Great point. Six days suspension.”
Daniel didn’t even look offended, just stunned. “Are you serious?”
“You can come back to work next Friday.”
“You can’t do that Jack! You already said four.”
“I did say four, and you argued with me, and I made it six. Now you’re arguing again, and I’m making it eight.”
“What the-? I didn’t even do anything!”
“Are you shooting for ten? Because it sounds like you’re shooting for ten.”
“Why are you even here?!” Daniel snapped, jumping up from the couch and stomping to his room, where he disappeared behind a slammed door.
Jack bit down on the urge to tell Daniel that he’d worked himself up to ten days. In fact, as the minutes ticked by with Daniel out of the room, Jack started to feel like the complete ass that he was. He’d let Daniel get to him, then he’d made it worse by deliberately pressing Daniel’s buttons, too.
Everything with Daniel had always been messy, and Jack was usually okay with that, because the benefits outweighed the costs. He tried to disentangle the boundaries that he needed to set for mission safety from the anger he’d felt toward a friend whom he’d allowed to get under his skin in a way that he never would have with most people under his command.
When it came down to it, Daniel had made an impulsive choice to act against orders and put the entire team at risk. Not okay, even if he did it for the best of reasons. Everything beyond that was them poking at each other, with Jack using the authority of his command to poke harder.
They’d come to an uneasy balance, with Jack really only claiming command authority while they were on missions, and even then not demanding all the trappings that usually came with it. Disrupting that balance was also a big load of not okay, even if Daniel was the most frustrating weirdo he’d ever had to keep from getting himself killed.
Colonel Jack O’Neill was going to have to suck it up.
He knocked on the bedroom door. When Daniel didn’t respond, he opened it a crack. “Hey, Danny, I’m coming in.”
The nickname had slipped out easily, and Daniel didn’t seem to mind, lying supine in the middle of the bed, ignoring Jack’s presence. Jack leaned against the door frame.
“I guess I deserve the silent treatment.”
“Every time I say something you suspend me for longer.”
Jack looked at his boots. Touché. And Daniel didn’t even seem angry, just subdued and maybe a little hurt.
“Yeah, about that: we’re just doing the four day suspension. That was some Principal Vernon level-” At Daniel’s blank stare, Jack backed up. “Principal Vernon? The Breakfast Club? They’re all in detention and-”
“Could you please stop framing everything like I’m a kid?”
“Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “Although, you did stomp off to your room, slam the door, and sulk on your bed for half an hour.”
He smiled softly at Daniel, who was still giving him the stink-eye.
“I’m not sulking. I needed some time to cool off.”
“Fair enough. Are you cooled off enough for us to talk about this?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Jack stuck his hands in his pockets. So he was going to have to work for it. “How about I make us some grilled cheese and we talk about it at the table?”
“No, I don’t want you to make me a grilled cheese because I’m not ten years old.”
“Right.” Jack had been previously unaware that there was an age limit on who could enjoy a grilled cheese sandwich. “Is there a specific grown up dinner that you would like to have? Some sort of big boy sandwich?”
“Could you please talk to me like I’m an adult?!” Daniel punctuated the demand with a pillow flung at Jack’s face.
“Okay!” He caught the pillow and tossed it back on the bed. “We’re just two grown ups having a mature conversation. And a pillow fight.”
At the tiny twitch of Daniel’s lips, Jack knew that he had won. He put on his most serious face.
“So, Dr. Jackson, did you see C-SPAN last night? And what do you think about that AOL Time Warner merger? I mean, the stock market-”
“Okay, fine! I’ll have a grilled cheese.”