Chapter Text
Daniel told himself he wasn’t moping. He stared at the statuette in front of him and tried to let it distract him from the last five or six conversations he’d had with Jack. Jack, who had suddenly become a stickler for procedures and regulations that Daniel couldn’t remember him even giving a damn about before. He let out a sharp breath, then ground his teeth when he felt Jack’s presence in his office doorway.
“Hey, you wanna get a bite to eat?” Jack asked, and Daniel’s stomach twisted, unready to accept the peace offering. He tried to focus on his work, and was mildly successful until Jack waved his hand right between Daniel’s face and the artifact he’d been studying. “Earth to Daniel.”
“Careful, Jack, this is fragile.” It wasn’t actually fragile, but it could have been, and Daniel was careful with all of his artifacts.
Jack didn’t mind, of course. He treated the fragility of ancient artifacts with the same cavalier disregard he did anything that didn’t directly affect him. Except, of course, his newfound respect for regulations and procedure when scheduling off-world travel. “You wanna get a bite to eat?”
“No.”
“Come on, Danny, you have to eat.”
“Did you talk to General Hammond again?”
“Daniel…” Jack started, and Daniel had his answer. Jack wasn’t even trying to do anything.
“This is important!”
“I know, Daniel, but right now we’ve got months and months of interplanetary politics to catch up on, and dozens of allies who are kind of curious why we’ve gone radio silent.”
The time loop had thrown everything out of whack, and Daniel’s personal visits had been deemed ‘nonessential travel’ while they sorted out exactly what they had missed. Even dialing out for radio communication was apparently too much of a burden on the gate schedule. “I need to go back.”
“And you can, just not right now. We can’t change the whole mission schedule last minute.” Daniel seethed at the obvious lie. They changed schedules at the last minute all the time. They just didn’t want to do it for Daniel. Fed up with Jack and SGC, and the military in general, Daniel began to pack away his work for the day. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Because I’m not letting you go to Abydos on Sunday?”
Daniel smiled coldly into his bag as he checked that he had everything. “No, because I want to go home.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll just stay here and work on these translations.” Jack settled into a chair and picked up a stray paper, softening the sarcasm with a conspiratorial smile, as if Daniel were in on the joke, and Daniel just picked up his things and walked toward the door.
“Do what you want. You always do.”
“Excuse me?” Jack shot up from his chair. “Daniel, get back here.”
“You’re not my CO when I’m off the clock,” Daniel said, walking out the door in complete disregard of Jack’s rising temper behind him.
“When you’re lobbying to go off world, you bet your ass I’m your CO! Now, march yourself right back here, and tell me what’s going on.”
“Bye, Jack.”
Daniel wasn’t sure what to expect from Jack at the briefing the next morning. Had he answered his phone or listened to the two messages Jack had left for him, he’d probably had gotten a clue, but he hadn’t been in the mood to deal with it.
From the surreptitious glances he was getting, Jack wasn’t sure what to expect from him either. Daniel kept his eyes on the papers in front of him, pretending to read the reports again, and only chiming into the meeting when necessary, careful to avoid catching Jack’s eye any time he needed to look up.
As the meeting was wrapping up, Daniel took the opportunity to plead his case with the general. He got half a sentence into it when he was cut off.
“Colonel O’Neill has already informed me about your request, and it’s been denied,” Hammond informed him, with a finality that Daniel was not ready to accept.
“I know, sir, but if you’d let me-”
Jack ran a hand over his face. “Daniel! We are not having this conversation again.”
“If you’d let me-”
“Daniel!” Jack snapped, and his palm fell down on the table with a loud crack. “Zip it!”
The room froze, the sound of Daniel’s pulse absurdly loud in his ears. He didn’t bother to wait to see what would happen. He grabbed the mission briefing and stormed back to his lab, military protocol at being ‘dismissed’ be damned.
They stepped out of the stargate into a vast darkness that the malp recordings barely hinted at. Nostalgia struck him, and he froze until it passed. The room felt familiar, not in structure, but in the timbre of its silence. He wondered at the character of a people who would expend so much effort to construct emptiness.
Jack’s voice broke the formidable stillness of the chamber.
“All right, kids, stay close. Don’t break anything, don’t touch anything, and remember, you’re not just representing yourselves, you’re representing the stargate program, all of humanity, and the entire second grade class.” At Teal’c’s raised eyebrow, he added, “Or, you know, Jaffa-ity.”
The casual condescension, which Daniel usually wrote off as one of Jack’s idiosyncrasies, grated on him, and he avoided the meaningful glance that he often shared with Sam at the antics.
The chamber reminded him of the cartouche where he’d spent so much of his time in Abydos. It had been a sanctuary of sorts, and while no one had understood Daniel’s need to be alone, they’d allowed him the indulgence. It had been balanced with nights crammed with others around a fire, or fussed over by gaggles of women whose aims he often couldn’t quite identify. In the cartouche, he’d only belonged to himself, and he’d thought that’s what he wanted, but maybe it had just been the balance.
Jack was keeping up a string of irreverent commentary and advancing through the chamber with the breezy assurance that everyone else would be right behind.
Daniel was not right behind.
He slipped into an alcove that turned out to be a corridor. It was lined with inscriptions, similar to the dazhuan script. The ossified history of a people brought from their world to another. Unsurprising, but a novel take on the same story they’d heard so many times. He traced out the carvings with his fingers, cold, smooth, and permanent.
Jack’s voice erupted from the radio, shattering the reverie. “Daniel, do you copy?”
Impelled by habit, Daniel’s hand was halfway to the radio before his mind could question the action. Did he want to answer? The question led to another, more disconcerting one: Was he hiding? Hiding was about intentionality. He wondered how much of an accident his current location was.
“Daniel, respond!” Jack sounded anxious, as if he suddenly didn’t want Daniel to ‘zip it’ anymore.
At that thought, Daniel realized that he was, in fact, hiding. He switched the channel on his radio.
It didn’t take too long for someone to find him, but then he hadn’t gone far. He had enough time to puzzle out a good portion of one of the walls, and he’d taken pictures of all of it.
Luckily for him, Teal’c hadn’t bothered to ask how he’d ended up so far off course, or why he hadn’t answered, just ensured that neither of them were in immediate danger before grabbing his radio.
“I have located Daniel Jackson. He is unharmed.”
“Okay, meet us back here.”
“We should return to the stargate,” Teal’c explained, as if Daniel hadn’t just heard the order come through the radio himself.
Daniel scratched the side of his face, considering his options. He wondered how much of what he’d done could be explained away. Jack had walked off first. His radio was currently on the wrong channel. “Yeah, I’m going to stay here a little longer.”
“Colonel O’Neill has asked us all to meet at the stargate.”
“Yeah, I’m going to stay here a little longer.”
The tone and repetition skated easily across cultural boundaries, and Teal tilted his head in concern. “This course of action is not wise, Daniel Jackson.”
Under the pressure of Teal’c’s placid disapproval, Daniel almost faltered, but he gathered his resolve and instead began to annotate his sketches. Teal’c barely lifted an eyebrow before going back to the radio.
“Daniel Jackson is refusing to return to the stargate. He appears to be incapacitated in some way.”
“Get him back here, Teal’c.”
“I do not believe that he will come willingly.”
“Drag him. Shoot him. I don’t care. Get him back here.”
His pen skipped slightly at ‘shoot him’, but Daniel otherwise feigned disinterest in the conversation. If Teal’c cared either way, he didn’t let on.
“We must return to the stargate now. If you do not come willingly, I will use force.”
When Daniel still didn’t respond, Teal’c reached for him, and Daniel jumped back, colliding softly with the stone behind him. Anger flared up at Jack for outsourcing his dirty work to a proxy, and Daniel slapped his journal closed. “I’m coming.”
Teal’c obviously didn’t trust him, staying a bit too close and keeping a curious eye trained on Daniel the entire time. Daniel couldn’t blame him. He hardly trusted himself. Before long, they reached the gate, where Jack and Sam waited. Daniel resisted Jack’s expectant bent and waited for the interrogation and associated rant.
“Well?” Jack asked, and Daniel affected confusion. Jack gave him a few seconds, then prompted, “What happened, Daniel?”
“Nothing. I was translating the inscriptions on the walls. Apparently the culture-”
“I don’t care what the walls said. Why did you wander off?!”
Jack was livid, which Daniel found soothingly familiar and perversely satisfying. Sam quickly found something else to do, not nearly as comfortable with Jack’s sarcastic attempts at dressing Daniel down. Teal’c on the other hand, was making no effort to hide his curiosity, apparently still under the impression that Daniel might be ‘incapacitated’ by whatever mysterious force compelled people to take notes on ancient inscriptions. Daniel didn’t mind an audience, not when he casually rebuffed Jack’s reprimand.
“I went to go translate the inscriptions.”
“Right after I said to stay close?”
Sam called Teal’c over, a ruse to give Daniel some privacy, he could only assume. It gave Daniel something to track rather than Jack’s question, a way for his answer to come out distracted and distant, a pet peeve of Jack’s in situations like this. “Sorry, I thought you were joking around.”
The delivery was perfect, a reference to Hammond’s own criticism of Jack’s cavalier attitude toward command, but Jack saw right through the excuse. It wasn’t quite too far though, and Daniel could still live on the border of two realities, one in which he had gotten lost in his work, wandered off and overlooked mission protocol in his curiosity, and the other in which he flagrantly thumbed his nose at Jack’s command.
“Okay, and when I called you on the radio, was that a ‘joke’, too?”
Daniel considered saying that he didn’t hear it. He was teetering on the edge of blatant rebellion, but he could still walk back. But as the silence stretched on, he began to come to terms with the fact that he might be just as angry as Jack looked, that he might want to rub his defiance in Jack’s face. With a soft breath, he let out a subtle, “I was zipping it.”
The audacity did not go unnoticed. In fact it was noticed, and noticed, and noticed, as Jack’s face wrung out a range of ominous emotions, before finally settling on seething fulmination aimed right at Daniel.
“Right.” His grim expression didn’t stray from its target, even as he waved to get Teal’c and Sam’s attention. “Carter, dial us out.”
Sam started on the DHD, but Teal’c approached the two of them with a furrowed brow.
“O’Neill, I believe that Daniel Jackson may have been compromised. His behavior has been abnormal, and in the time that he was unaccounted for, he may have come under alien influence.”
Jack grabbed Daniel by the arm, and Daniel knew better than to try to shake it off. “Don’t worry, Teal’c. I’m not going to take my eyes off him until his behavior returns to normal Daniel Jackson levels of abnormal.”
Strangely, Jack let him go after the medical checks. There was nothing wrong with him, of course, other than the sword of Damocles hanging above him. Daniel returned to his lab, feeling strangely adrift without the spectre of Jack’s imminent retaliation. He had expected Jack to be angry, some salty mix of censure and sarcasm, but instead he’d been met with stony professionalism. It was unnerving.
Forcing himself to concentrate on the array of photographs he’d dug out of a neglected bin, he ignored the wave of anxiety every time footsteps approached the lab, along with the ambiguous undertow of disappointed relief when Jack didn’t appear to bring whatever reckoning Daniel had brought on. He tried not to reflect on what his feelings implied. Doubly tried not to reflect on the implications of his actions earlier in the day.
Just when he stopped marking the passage of every airman in the corridor, Jack stepped into the lab. Daniel actively failed to notice him, and Jack waited, uncharacteristically silent.
The tension grew until Daniel was compelled to acknowledge Jack’s presence, and Jack held out his hands in question. “So, what’s your endgame?”
“I’m busy,” Daniel said, rifling through the pictures that were barely holding his attention. He didn’t want to play Jack’s games, and he didn’t want to suffer through a forced introspection. In fact, he didn’t want to do anything that aligned with Jack’s objectives at the moment.
“You’re about to get a lot of time freed up, if you don’t give me some answers.”
Daniel chose two of the photos to lay out on the desk, a welcome reprieve from Jack’s thinly-veiled threats. The symbols were similar to those he’d seen in the chamber, with several shared divergences from Earth-based characters. “Do you have any specific questions, ones that aren’t vague clichés?”
“Yes, specifically, what did you hope to get out of running off today and ignoring me on the radio?”
“I already told you. I was reading the inscriptions in the other chamber.” Within the confines of his own mind, Daniel ran off again, evading Jack’s demands in order to review the sketches he’d made of the walls in light of the photos in front of him. Both sets of characters were strangely squared, unexpected in such ancient samples. He wondered whether they could have diverged sometime before the Zhou Dynasty, and pointed his mind to that puzzle rather than the grim set of Jack’s jaw.
“And sabotaging your radio.”
Daniel didn’t deny it, and he didn’t nitpick Jack’s definition of ‘sabotage’. Jack could think what he wanted. He laid another photo on top of the two he’d chosen and compared it to the sketches in his journal.
“All right, Danny-boy, time to clock out.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“Not anymore. We’re going back to my place.”
“Jack, this is-”
“Not a request.”
The urge to fight was fading under the weight of his exhaustion. Staying angry at Jack was awkward, especially when he was being so accommodating. He wanted to be back on the planet, nestled in the darkness, trying to read ancient inscriptions by the dull flicker of torchlight. Or maybe that was Abydos.
“You can stay the night if you want,” Jack added.
“Why would I want to stay the night?”
“Daniel, just…” Jack faltered, the stress of the day highlighted by the pallor of his face. He pressed a thumb between his eyebrows and closed his eyes. “Just go pack a bag.”
Daniel wasn’t sure whose victory it was.
Summertime in Colorado Springs was the antithesis of the cartouche. Warm, bright, full of life, and open in a way that made you feel like you might fall off the surface of the earth if you weren’t careful about it. The mountains formed a strange inversion to the domed ceilings of the chambers Daniel had left behind. As they pulled onto the road, Daniel realized that it was Friday, and that the streets would be full of people heading out to spend the weekend outdoors, people who wanted to play at leaving thousands of years of civilization behind.
His duffel shifted at the turn, and Daniel kicked it further into the footwell. He’d brought enough clothes for a couple of days, even as he protested he wasn’t going to stay. He wasn’t even mad anymore, really, just entrenched. The window of opportunity for Jack to leverage what little actual authority he had was already closed, the initial report submitted without any mention of Daniel’s transgressions. Daniel was ready to go toe to toe with Jack, and Jack seemed ready, too, a determined slant to his lips before he opened them to speak.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you in the briefing.” The literal meaning of Jack’s words was tainted by the undertone of angry accusation. Daniel didn’t know what to do with it. “It was uncalled for, and it didn’t reflect how much I value your contributions to the team.”
The apology came out in a harsh staccato, more reprimand than anything else, and Daniel ignored the thin veneer of remorse laid over it. Whatever Jack was laying the groundwork for, Daniel didn’t feel the need to wait before making his own preemptive strike. “Wow, that’s a really good apology, Jack. Did you come up with it yourself, or…”
“No, I did not have a PR team craft an apology for you.” At least he looked over at Daniel for that, his eyebrows pulled down to mirror the irritation in his voice. “If you don’t want to accept it, that’s your prerogative. You have every right to feel angry.”
Daniel stretched his mouth out in the harsh semblance of a smile. He was beyond excited that he had a right to feel emotions.
“You want to make faces at me? That’s fine. If you’d yelled at me or called me names today, you could have done that, too. What’s not fine, and what you did, was violate safety protocol and willfully disobey orders on an off-world mission.” The content had fallen in line with Jack’s tone, a clear rebuke. Exactly what Daniel had been waiting for. “That is what we call a disproportionate response.”
Now that he knew where the conversation was heading, Daniel withdrew from it and took in the wilderness as it passed by. He’d heard they were going to turn the area into a park.
“I want you back out in the field ASAP, so we’re going to take care of this tonight.”
The woods had given way to a view of Fort Carson, and Daniel watched it disappear and reappear as they followed the winding curves of the road.
“Okay?” Jack prompted him, and Daniel shrugged toward the window.
“I don’t know. It’s kind of a vague statement to agree to, Jack.”
Daniel’s stomach lurched as Jack swerved the car to the shoulder and jerked to a stop, flicking on the emergency lights with a harsh swipe of his hand before twisting in his seat to face Daniel.
“Let me be explicit. You crossed a line, and you’re getting punished for it. And when we go back to that planet, you’re going to respect the chain of command. And you’re also going to cut it out with all this passive-aggressive crap you’ve been giving me all day. Does that clear things up for you?”
When Daniel just sat there, waiting for the tirade to pass, Jack groaned and rested his head on the steering wheel. “I don’t know how to talk to you when you’re like this.”
“Have you tried not being a condescending ass?”
“Yeah, I have. Just a few minutes ago when I tried apologizing to you.”
“It didn’t sound sincere.”
“Daniel, I am sincerely sorry!” Jack’s fingers were splayed out in frustration, and Daniel basically believed him.
“Then why are you talking about punishing me? Maybe I should be punishing you.”
“You kinda have been! Or is that not what’s been going on today?”
Jack waited for an answer that Daniel didn’t have.
“You know, every time you’ve pulled some reckless stunt that almost got you killed, it’s always been for an idealistic, do-gooder reason. I never thought I’d see the day that you’d risk yourself for some stupid, high-stakes temper tantrum.”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t insult me by pretending that’s not what happened. You decided to wander off and go radio silent. To what? Give me a heart attack? Piss me off? Well, A-plus work, Daniel. I was scared, and then I was furious. This is what success looks like.”
Every cell in Daniel’s body was aching to apologize, but he held firm. Tugging on the seatbelt, he adjusted himself in the seat and set his jaw against Jack’s judgement.
“So, yes, I’m sorry for what I said. I was rude, and I shouldn’t have talked to you like that. But you were reckless, you were insubordinate, you were childish, and you were spiteful. And you’re only getting punished for the first two.”
“So next time follow your lead and stick to childish and spiteful,” Daniel shot back, locking eyes with him.
Jack met the challenge, holding Daniel’s gaze for almost a minute, until Daniel had to fight the urge to look away. As he wavered, Jack gave him the answer he hadn’t been looking for. “Exactly.”
Jack pulled back onto the road and they resumed their journey to his house. With the destination now firmly entwined with its context, Daniel wondered what his endgame actually was.