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Daniel leaned in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. For one moment, the image was overlaid with a younger Daniel, wearing that ridiculous cream sweater and those tan slacks and looking too damn good to be deserved by a man who'd been murdered a dozen times and reanimated for a parasitic alien megalomaniac's pleasure. Jack shook the image away.
"Are you ever going to give it up?"
Jack was attacking his service dress blues with a lint roller. Hayes hadn't been president in about a decade, but he still commanded respect, and Jack wasn't about to show up to one of his dinners in anything less than his best.
"Can you, knowing what's out there?"
"I can," Daniel said.
Jack snorted. "You haven't."
"Sure I have."
"Says the guy who falls asleep in his office at the SGC at least three times a week and still does the majority of the translation work for the gate teams."
"Translation and history are my passion, Jack. My hobby. I've loved them since I was a child." Daniel straightened up, stepped into the room. "But you – you like fishing, and stargazing, and watching hockey. Those are your hobbies. Being a soldier isn't a hobby, Jack. And I don't think it's your passion."
Jack was a simple man. He didn't passion. He needed a mission.
"We both gave up frontline defense years ago. You went to Washington. And I retired from SG-1."
"But I –"
"Trained the next generation of SGC soldiers. They're good men and women. They've been protecting Earth and two galaxies without us for a while now, and things have gone fine."
Daniel was right, but retirement meant being out of the game, meant being out of the know, and Jack couldn't go back to he man he'd been before he'd known about the Stargate. Couldn't back to a life of ignorance where all he had was his own guilt and a shattered family and was haunted by the ghost of his dead son.
He had a family now, though. Sam and Teal'c and Daniel, to a lesser extent Mitchell and Vala, sometimes that punk kid Sheppard. No matter how far apart they were, how many light years and planets and galaxies, they were a family.
If Jack retired from the Air Force, who would he be? What would he do? What would his purpose be?
"Homeworld Security has gotten more than it deserves from you," Daniel said.
"And if I give up my blues and my stars, what'll I do? I can't fish forever."
"Now that your pond has fish, you might be able to." Daniel smiled wryly.
"I'd get bored and you know it."
"You'd find something to do."
"Like what? Turn my cabin into a B&B for SGC soldiers going through culture shock after spending too long posted in Pegasus?" Daniel's apartment had been like that for a while, an endless rotation of soldiers crashing on his couch and in his spare room when they needed a way station between Pegasus and their leave destination and didn't want to sleep on base because it was too much like being cooped up on the Daedalus for weeks on end. Jack would let himself in with his key and stumble over a puppy pile of Sheppard and Lorne and Stackhouse and Kleinman and a host of others whose names he'd never learned.
"Why not?" Daniel said. "You're a great cook. You keep a pretty good house." He glanced around Jack's bedroom. Jack was military. Of course he kept a good house.
"I'm pretty sure I'm too old to be doing that kind of thing on my own."
"What if I helped?" Daniel asked.
Jack stared at him. "You'd do that?"
"I've done it before." Daniel shrugged.
Jack contemplated for a long moment. "You're insane," he said finally.
Daniel didn't look offended. "It was just a thought. I guess I'll leave you to it. We have to leave in twenty minutes if we want to get to Hayes's on time."
Jack glanced at his watch. "Right." He resumed his attack with the lint roller.
Daniel turned to go, and Jack said, "Would you ever give it up? For good? Leave the SGC?"
"If the right offer came along." Daniel cast him an enigmatic smile and walked away.
After another dinner with delicious food and awkward conversation that was half interrogation from Homeworld Security detractors and half adoration from starry-eyed young scientists and soldiers who hoped to become the next SG-1 and AR-1, Jack was ready to call it a night and almost ready to throw in the towel - turn in his wings and stars - altogether. Daniel was driving them home, because he needed to drink less to get through awkward conversation (people had learned to stay on the right side of his sharp tongue at these shindigs).
"What would the right kind of offer be?" Jack asked, picking up the thread of former conversation, knowing Daniel would follow easily. "Hiding in a cabin in the woods and writing and publishing and decades of I told you so? Overseeing digs in Egypt again? Wife and kids?" As far as Jack knew, Sarah Gardner was still single. Between her passion for history and her firsthand experience with the Stargate program, she and Daniel had a lot in common.
"No wife, no kids," Daniel said.
Thinking of recent changes in UCMJ regs, Jack ventured, "Husband?"
"Is that an offer?"
Jack blinked.
"Because it would be the right offer."
Jack blinked again. Then he said, "Pull over."
"Why?" But Daniel obeyed anyway.
"So you don't crash when I do this." Jack reached across the seats and hauled Daniel in for a kiss. It had been a long time since either of them had kissed anyone, and it was wet and clumsy, with bumped noses and scraping teeth, and it was perfect. It was coming home.
When they ran out of breath, Jack pulled back. "How long?"
Daniel smiled and said, "I took a staff blast for you."
"But...Shau'ri."
"You can love more than one person, Jack."
Jack searched Daniel's familiar blue-eyed gaze. "So, about that cabin in the woods."
"You can fish. I can write. We can invite people over sometimes. Sam, Teal'c, Cam, and Vala. Maybe some of the young bucks, too. They'll tell us all the latest gossip."
Jack lowered his gaze, considered.
"We can never forget what's out there," Daniel said. "But it's time we appreciate what we have here."
Jack nodded. "All right. Take us home."
They fell asleep in the same bed. Daniel didn't stir when Jack slid out of the bed in the middle of the night and fired up his laptop, typed his resignation letter. When he went to lay it on his boss's desk the next day, Daniel's was already there.