Archive of Our Own ^beta

He still remembers the first social worker. Her name was Ms. Milton. Short brown hair, cropped bangs, bright lipstick. She wore a heavy scented perfume that smelled like roses. His mother never wore perfume. They were too busy, out in the field or on a dig, to bother with those things. Ms. Milton had shown up somewhere in those chaotic hours at the hospital, where, for the most part, people had forgotten about him.  She’d found him in the waiting room and handed him a glass of water and took him gently by the shoulders. 

“You’ll stay with me tonight, alright Danny?”

He’d put the glass down and kicked his feet against the floor. He wanted to go home to his bedroom and turn on the lamp that made stars float around on the ceiling and have his father read from the big book of ancient myths. Right now they were reading about Anubis.

“Would you like to come with me? Does that sound okay, Danny?” she asked.

The name sounded strange coming from her mouth. He looked up at her. “My name is Daniel.”

“OK,” she said, with an understanding smile. “Daniel it is.”

There were others after her. Too many for him to really keep track of, especially in those first few weeks. They carted him from New York back to Chicago and then to his grandparents house, where he only stayed a few days. The house was big and cold and he knew he wasn’t supposed to touch anything. People kept coming in and out of the house and they looked at him with sad eyes before turning away and whispering. What to do with Daniel? That was the real question.

“Daniel,” his grandfather took him by the shoulders and cleared his throat. “There’s a young woman coming to get you today. She’ll take you to a home that’s better suited for a child. Now, you won’t make a fuss, will you? Remember, Daniel, you’ve got to be strong.”

He doesn’t remember her name but she drove a blue Ford with a big back seat that he slid across when she turned.

His first foster family was waiting in the doorway when they pulled up the drive. The mother knelt and hugged him, but she smelled like dish soap and her sweater itched against his cheek. “You must be Danny. We’re so happy to meet you.”

His mouth wobbled. He wanted his own mother and how she smelled like their backyard and the clay and resin she was always washing off her hands. “My name’s Daniel. Not Danny.”

There was another understanding smile, and she ruffled his hair. “Well, welcome home, Daniel.”

There were other foster families. Some nice, some not so nice. Most of his childhood felt like a long series of rooms with bunk beds and well meaning adults who tried to teach him how to play catch and throw a football, when all he wanted to do was sit quietly and read.

“Danny, run out to left field and I’ll hit you the ball. Remember, keep your glove up.”

He shuffled his feet against the dirt. This was his third or fourth foster family. The game he liked most was chess but he’d stopped asking to play that a long time ago.

“I don’t like to be called Danny,” he said. The glove was too big for his hand. It belonged to their older son who liked to sit on Daniel’s head while he was trying to do homework.

His foster father, a man who reeked of cigarettes, just sighed and shrugged like he was giving up. “Fine. Daniel , will you please run out to left field and for god’s sake, keep your glove up this time.”

By high school it was easier. People didn’t force him to play catch or sit through family game night and he got to come and go as he pleased. By eighteen he was in college and had his first real girlfriend, Claire. She had long brown hair and was two years older but just now taking Intro to Ancient Cultures. She came back to his dorm room and straddled his hips, grinding down in a rocking motion. He arched up to meet her and she gripped his hair.

“Fuck, Danny, that feels incredible.”

His rhythm stuttered but the way she rolled her hips overrode any objection he had until she called him Danny a second time. This time her hand was down his pants.

“Wait. Sorry, just wait. I just, I don’t like to be called Danny.”

She pulled back and moved her hand back up to his waist. “What’s wrong with Danny?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just…a matter of preference.”

“So if we’re making out and I call you Danny, you’re going to get all bent out of shape?” She sat back on her heels.

“It’s just, no one calls me Danny,” he said. Not anymore, he wanted to add.

She slid her hands up his chest, and began to unbutton his shirt. “What’s the big deal, anyway? Daniel, Danny, same thing. It could be a cute nickname, Danny. You like it when I say it, right?”

His pause of hesitation was brief, but telling. She frowned and her mouth screwed up in that twist that was so familiar to him. It was the look of someone realizing that yeah, that Daniel Jackson kid was a little weird, just like everyone said. 

“It’s not—” he wasn’t even sure what he intended to say. It’s not a big deal. It’s not something I want you to call me. She just shrugged and got up on her knees and stripped off her t-shirt. “Whatever. Daniel it is.”

The next day, he dropped Intro to Ancient Cultures and signed up for Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics.  

He had his first PhD by the time he was 23, and after that it wasn’t Danny or Daniel but Dr. Jackson and that felt like a protective plate of armor. A shield against anything he didn’t want to share. Out at a dig in the Yucatan or at excavation sites across Cairo, he heard a steady stream of Dr. Jackson, Dr. Jackson, Dr. Jackson.  It was a pleasure then, to shake someone’s hand and say, “Please, call me Daniel.”

Danny was practically banished from his life. He rarely, if ever, heard that soft y sound attached to his name. He didn’t think he missed it, or not that much anyway. He’d hear an errant mention of the name at the grocery store or in a cafe and would tamp down an urge to turn around. He wasn’t Danny to anyone anymore; hadn’t been for a long time.

Even Sha're insisted on Daniel, a word she pronounced with such care and love that it thrilled him to hear it. She erased the hard D and softened the center of his name till it ran together in an affectionate, amused mush. They got a year together and it dawned on him that no one would say his name that same way, ever again. Despite his grief, he threw himself into the work, running headlong through the Stargate with Jack and Sam and Teal’c.

Jack barked his name out. Daniel, let’s go! Daniel, dial us home! He said it through his teeth, with the full brunt of his military rank, like Daniel was another grunt he had to train. He expected Jack to be like the boys who sat on his head or the men who told him to keep his glove up but Jack let him bring as many books as he could carry on missions, bought a travel chess set and let him sit quietly and read. Jack just let Daniel be Daniel.

They disagreed all the time. They shouted at each other, stormed away in anger. He could be brusque and had a temper and a smart mouth, but after Hathor’s visit, Jack took him by the arm and whispered, “Come on, Danny.”

It barely penetrated through the drugged fog he was in and he let Jack drag him away, out of the room and through the doors, away from the fire. He only half remembered Jack saying it, thought maybe he’d imagined it, until he escaped from the alternate dimension and landed back in their reality with a Gate address clutched in his hand.

He was dazed, passed out on the floor, when Jack found him.

“Danny!”

That one was real, unmistakable. Jack cradled his head and he looked simultaneously disappointed and heartbroken that Daniel was, once again, hurt. They brought him home and saved the world and in that chaos he neglected to tell Jack he preferred Daniel. It wasn’t worth mentioning. Twice was not a pattern. Twice was an accident, a forgettable slip of the tongue.

And Daniel mostly forgot, till they were trapped on the prison planet and he had the living daylights choked out of him. When he woke up, feeling nauseous and headachy, Jack bound over to him and slapped him on the arm.

“Well, you actually won a fight Danny boy,” he crowed. 

It was a transparent show of bravado. Jack was bad at showing he cared, especially in front of an audience. He covered his anguish with his temper, buried any real emotion with a wisecrack or an ill timed joke. The use of the nickname gave him away though, and Daniel, a student of languages and human behavior, didn’t correct him. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to.

He knew better than most how language imprinted on memory, how the utterance of a single word could feel like time travel. When they’re trapped inside the artificial reality created by The Keeper, Daniel almost breaks the first time his father calls him Danny.  He’s stunned, the word almost crushes him.

“He called me Danny, like, like I’m still a little kid,” he told Sam.

Days after they escaped, the voices of his parents stayed with him, running like a hum in his head.

Danny, go back outside

Danny, what are you doing

Danny Jackson, you stop this right now!

His father, stern and impatient. His mother, soft and understanding. He tried to forget it, banish it forever, but he lingerd over the tenor of their voices—casually, fatefully—talking to their son for the last time. He was always Danny to them. Never Daniel.

“Hey.”

Jack finds him in his office, staring at the walls. It’s been three days and Daniel is still losing time to memories. Jack leans against his desk, so close that their shoulders brush.

He assumes Jack is there to tell him to pull it together, to stop being so flaky.

“You look like your mother,” he says finally. “Same nose. Same eyes.” Jack leans in and taps his frames. “Same glasses too.”

“That’s a coincidence.”

“Is it?” Jack paces his small office. He picks up objects at random and puts them back down. “Charlie looked exactly like Sara. Right down to the little smirk she had for a smile. Used to drive me nuts.” He picks up a glass orb and tosses it in one hand like a baseball. “He had my eyes though. Those came from me.”

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

Jack shakes his head. “Don’t be.” He puts down the orb and rubs at the dust along a shelf. “I’m not gonna tell you none of that was real, Daniel. I was there, I know what it felt like.” He looks across the room at him, that deep wrinkle in his brow furrowed in concern. “It hurts to remember, but sometimes we have to. After all, what else do we have left?”

He’s about to leave, but Daniel grabs his arm.

“I liked seeing them,” he blurts out. “For those few seconds before, before everything turned awful, I had my parents back. I liked seeing them, Jack. Even though I knew what was about to happen. They were real again. Even, even if it was just for a moment. I had them back. I wanted them back.”

Jack doesn’t say anything. What can he say?

“If it had been real, I would have spent an eternity trying to save them,” Daniel says.

Jack squeezes his hand. “They loved you, Danny. That’s all you need to remember.”

When Jack says his name this time, it feels like fingers carding softly through his hair.

He tables his grief, or he thinks he does anyway. It’s not till he’s crouched in a storage room with a gun dangling from his hand that he realizes how close to the surface it’s always been. Without the sarcophagus to hide in, every bad feeling he’s had rushes out of him and he collapses into Jack’s arms, sobbing like a child. Jack rocks him back and forth and rubs his back but Daniel can’t breathe. His sobs are harsh, guttural moans, being pulled from somewhere deep, deep inside. He did so many terrible things, hurt so many people. He clutches at Jack’s arm and cries into his shoulder, feeling the rage and helplessness of being drugged and used.

Jack strokes his hair and whispers into his ear. “It’s okay Danny, it’s okay.”

They take him back towards the infirmary but instead of putting him in a hospital bed, Jack stears him towards one of the private guest rooms. He curls onto his side in the dark while Jack undoes the restraints on his arm and pulls a blanket over him. He wants to die. He begs Jack to end it. He should suffer for what he did to his friends, the people who mean more to him than anything in the world. They should throw him back there, back in the mines, and leave him there to starve.

“Don’t talk like that, you hear me? Don’t say things like that.” Jack keeps a protective hand on his shoulder and the bed dips slightly as he sits on the edge. He’s curled tight into himself, still crying, but Jack just stays with him, stroking his hair. “It’s gonna get bad before it gets better. But I promise you, it will get better. You’ll be alright, Danny.” 

He doesn’t want Jack to leave and gives into a childish need to hold onto him. Jack doesn’t pull away. He shifts closer till his hip is pressed against Daniel’s side, and he leans down, whispering in his ear. “I’m not going anywhere, Danny. I won’t leave.”

Jack has every right to kick him off the team, kick him out of the SG program all together, but he doesn’t. Daniel even tries to quit, and to that both Sam and Teal’c jump down his throat in protest. His equilibrium returns in waves, and in the in-between spaces when it falters, he finds himself at Jack’s house, where he ends up reading in the den or sleeping on the couch.

“There’s a guest room, you know,” Jack says as he tosses a blanket over him, but Daniel’s too comfortable to move. Jack’s house is lived in, with shoes kicked off by the door and sweatshirts tossed over the back of a chair. He doesn’t just like sleeping here, he likes waking up here, to Jack in the kitchen making breakfast or coming back from an early morning run. Everytime he does though, he slides deeper into something dangerous and permanent.

They get separated for some missions. Distance is protection, until he’s stranded on P3X-808 for two weeks while a black hole almost engulfs the Earth and Jack almost dies. He’s less eager to volunteer for outside missions after that and so when SG-1 stands down, so does Daniel.

“It’s actually a good thing you aren’t going with SG-8 on their dig, Dr. Jackson. I’d have to pull you back if you were.” Hammond grabs him at the end of their daily briefing and hands him a large, ivory envelope. His name is embossed in gold velum across the front. “This came for you yesterday.”

Daniel reads it, and can’t help but flinch at the contents. “General, I don’t think I can make it.”

“It’s not optional, Dr. Jackson. Senator Kinsey is throwing a fundraising gala and as our leading expert on ancient cultures, you’re presence has been requested.” Daniel is about to protest, make some excuse, but Hammond only shakes his head. “Consider it kind of a team outing. Colonel O’Neill will go as your plus one.”

Jack takes the envelope from his hands and reads the invitation. Black tie. Dinner and cocktails. And he gets to the date, time and venue. “General Hammond, sir.  I don’t think—”

Hammond waves him off. “That’s an order, Colonel. Need I remind you we need to keep the lights on around here, and he’s the man who helps pay the bills.”

Two weeks later they take a commercial plane to New York and check in to one of the nicer hotels on the Upper West Side, overlooking the Park. “I can’t remember the last time I was in New York,” he mumbles, staring out the window. It’s fall and the leaves are a bright palette of red and yellow. He’d be charmed by the view and the site of Jack in a tuxedo, if a pit of anxiety wasn’t already forming in his stomach.

“It’ll be fine,” Jack says. He adjusts Daniel’s bow tie, which always seems to be a little askew. The venue is only a few blocks away and they walk, the brisk wind kicking up leaves around them. He’s head down, hands stuffed in his pockets, but he doesn’t miss the appreciative way Jack looks him up and down.

They stop outside the big, bronze doors. He takes a deep breathe and Jack puts a hand at his back. They step inside the New York Museum of Art. Unlike the usual hush of a museum, the place is alive with the tinkling of glasses mixed with conversation. Huge banners unfurl from the ceiling, announcing a new exhibit on ancient Egyptian culture.

Jack lets out a low, approving whistle. “Well, I guess now I know where all the stuff you send through the Gate ends up.”

Kinsey finds them immediately, and Jack grudgingly shakes his hand.

“I know a museum fundraiser isn’t as exciting as what you normally do, but heck, most of these items are from your uh, travels.” Kinsey says. “Dr. Jackson, why don’t we go shake some hands. A lot of people paid a lot of money to be here.”

Jack scowls at him and is about to tell Kinsey where he can stick it, but Daniel calms him down with a light touch on his arm.

The two of them walk through rooms that, even decades later, Daniel remembers all too well. He politely explains the historical significance of relics to people who are decidedly more interested in getting their picture taken with the powerful Senator and the famous archaeologist. Kinsey takes him from group to group till they land near a cluster of ancient Egyptian stelae and busts. Daniel stares at the plaque. Courtesy of Melburn and Claire Jackson.   Daniel excuses himself. On pure muscle memory, his feet take him through the hallways to an older, less visited part of the museum.

He enters the ancient Egyptian hall, which is still crammed with objects he could recite by heart. The room hasn’t changed much at all. In the far corner, on permanent exhibit, is the reconstructed temple from the Early Dynastic Period, the one he watched crumble over and over again. Daniel sits on a tufted black bench, head in his hands, and hears the echo of his parents’ voices.

“Danny.”

Jack finds him. Jack always finds him.

He looks up. “Only my parents called me Danny.”

Jack walks over and stands close enough that his legs brush against Daniel’s knees. “Do you want me to stop?”

Before, he never wanted to be Danny to anyone. Now, he only wants to be Danny to Jack.

“No.” He swallows past the tightness in his throat and looks around the room. “Is this real, Jack?”

Jack brushes the back of his neck. “Yeah, Danny. This is real.”

He buries his face in Jack’s abdomen, exhaling wetly against the soft, tailored fabric of his shirt. Jack sighs and pulls him close. Jack doesn’t smell like clay or rose perfume or cigarettes. He smells like military issue fatigues and gun oil and life on a hundred different planets. He smells safe and warm. Like home.