Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Eight

They never asked him if he wanted a party. If they'd asked, he could have told them no one would want to come. But parents are incredibly stupid sometimes, which is how he ended up in the roller rink with three kids from his school who weren't away at summer camp, eating a cake that's too sweet because it's mostly made of red clown face icing.

There's Jimmy, who has a severe stutter. The other kids call him retard whenever the teachers aren't listening. Then there's Mark and Dave, who were clearly forced to come by their parents. They haven't lowered themselves to actually talk to him the whole time.

Daniel hasn't worked out how to make the skates work properly. Even Jimmy is sailing around happily with the crowd of kids attending more popular parties, but Daniel can't seem to make them move without falling.

His shoes are being held hostage by a man behind a counter and his mother took away the book he brought. However, she turns her back from the party, such as it is, to chat with Jimmy's mother for a little while and Daniel decides he doesn't really need shoes. Kids back in Egypt went without them in the city. He'll be fine too.

With some effort, he manages to unlace the skates and sneaks out down the steps. The roller rink is on the third floor, above a gym in a massive building. He's not close to their temporary apartment or his school. He's not really sure where he is, but it feels good to be back outside, away from the disco music and stale cigarette smell inside. He walks carefully to avoid any glass on the sidewalks, but it's not too hard.

He wonders if he could navigate home and looks up at the buildings around him. Unfortunately, he doesn't see anything really familiar, like the Empire State Building. He hasn't paid that much attention to the buildings anyway.

There's a newsstand on the corner so he goes and reads the covers of the comics as he tries to decide what to do.

“Kid, you gonna buy something?” the man behind the counter asks. “Looking costs a nickel.”

Daniel doesn't have any money, but he realizes, looking at the man, that he's pretty sure he's from the Middle East so he replies happily in Arabic. “I don't have any money.”

The man raises an eyebrow. Daniel likes that expression. He wiggles his own eyebrows, trying to copy the one eyebrow gesture.

“Where are you from?” the man asks in Arabic. “You don't look Egyptian.”

“How did you know I grew up in Egypt?” Daniel asks, interested.

“You have an accent,” the man says. “Do you hear my accent? The way I say words is a little different from you, right? In English too.”

“Where are you from?” Daniel asks.

“I grew up in Lebanon,” the man says. “Do you know where it is?”

“I'm not stupid,” Daniel replies. “Lebanon, capital Beirut, bordered by Syria and Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea, of course.”

The man looks him up and down. Daniel is pretty sure he notices the lack of shoes. “What's your name?”

“Daniel Jackson.”

“Are you lost, Daniel?”

Daniel isn't sure how to answer this. It's true that his mother doesn't know where he is and he isn't sure where he is, but he did leave the party on purpose.

“It's my birthday,” he says, instead. “My father would say that's a non-sequitur,” he adds in English. “That's Latin. I know that one too. Do you know Latin?”

“I'm afraid I do not,” the man replies.

That's when Daniel hears his mother's voice, half frantic. “Danny!”

She's still over by the entrance to the gym, so Daniel is pretty sure he can get a head start. “Bye!” he tells the newsstand man in Arabic, then he takes off at a dash. Anything to avoid going back to that party and having to spend another hour stuck on wheels designed to make him fall down in front of his classmates.

He gets about a quarter of the way down the block before he trips and falls. He stepped on something nasty, he can tell right away. And his knee is skinned up as well.

“Danny!” his mother says again, catching up with him. “What are you doing out here? You scared me. And it's rude to leave your own party.” She looks down at him. “And now you're bleeding? Oh, Danny.” She sounds annoyed.

“I hate the party!” Daniel yells, gripping his knee. He is angry and was just speaking Arabic so he sticks with it. He's loud enough that the man at the newsstand leans out and watches. He'd get up and run again, but his foot hurts too much. It might be really hurt, like beyond just peroxide and a band-aid hurt. “No one asked me if I wanted a party!”

“Speak English, Danny,” his mother says, exasperated. Ever since they came back here to spend the year in New York, his parents have been pestering him to speak English. He speaks English perfectly fine, he thinks. Why does he have to prove it all the time?

“I hate you!” he screams, sticking with Arabic. “You said we'd go back during the dig season!”

“We have been over this a million times now,” she says. “Your father got asked to do a very prestigious summer lecture series and we were both asked to oversee the installation at the Met.”

“I hate it!” he screams again. He knows he's throwing a tantrum, but he doesn't especially care.

His mother hauls him up to his feet, but it hurts, so he screams. She looks down and sees the glass shard sticking out of his foot and swears, this time joining him in Arabic. At least that makes Daniel laugh a little.

She picks him up and yanks the glass out. Daniel can't tell if it's bad, but he knows there's blood all over the place now.

“Excuse me, madam.” It's the newsstand owner. “That is my sister's deli right there,” he gestures across the street. “Come with me and we can help him clean up.”

For a moment, Daniel thinks his mother is going to take him back up to the roller rink, but she sighs and follows the newsstand man to the deli.

Fifteen minutes later, Daniel has a thick improvised bandage on his foot and is eating a huge piece of baklava and talking to a little girl in a pink dress with curly dark hair in Arabic, telling her the story of how Geb made the earth and Nut made the sky.

When his mother returns bearing his shoes and three unopened presents, she looks overwhelmed and says they have to leave.

“How about we bring you to the museum next week when we install the exhibit,” she offers as they hobble back to the subway. “You can see all the artifacts. Your father and I are going to have to bring some things from the collection in the crates. Some vases and a few other things.”

“The shabti figures? Like at the British Museum?”

“None of those. We just have a few now. If we find an apartment, we'll take them out and give them a special place on a high shelf. I know you're a big boy and can handle yourself at the museum and not have any more tantrums. Isn't that right?”

“Yes!” he says. “Do you think any of the presents are books?” he asks, peering into the grocery bag with the bright boxes.

“Jimmy's mom said he got you Matchbox cars,” she admits. “Oh, Danny. I wish...” Then she breaks off. “I'm glad you got the baklava you wanted. That cake really was pretty bad.”

Chapter Text

Fourteen

He's only been there a week when his birthday comes. It's still the honeymoon phase, if you can call it that. Five other kids. Most of them younger, though he's learned to watch out for the little kids. Sometimes they're the worst liars and the most vicious.

Once you've washed out at three different placements, they get the right to get creative. That's the phrase his caseworker, Miss Rodriguez used. Apparently the middle of nowhere and farm chores is “getting creative.”

He actually doesn't mind it so much. He had freaked out when he first heard about it. Every foray into the New York wilderness has resulted in sneezing fits so bad that he was initially worried about farm life, but the Johnsons are supposed to take him in for allergy shots twice a week and they seem to be helping. He'll know how bad it is when fall comes.

Sometimes over the last few years, he's felt like his parents' death inadvertently trapped him in a city he didn't care for that much. When he was little, they had spent a lot of time out in the desert in the proverbial middle of nowhere. There's something sort of nice about it. He doesn't mind having to feed the horses every morning and shovel out stalls in the afternoon. It's interesting in a way.

On the other hand, the library in town is smaller than a McDonald's. When he asked the librarian about inter-library loan, she basically told him to get lost.

His caseworker promised that when school started, he can accelerate like he'd planned back in the city. He could still probably graduate early. That's why he takes the trigonometry textbook the math teacher at his last school gave him up to the barn. Math isn't his strong suit, but it's the thing with the most requirements. And he can already ace anything they throw at him in languages or history and his writing is solid. So it's math he has to be sure he can prove himself with.

He settles in with the textbook. No one mentioned it was his birthday this morning, which is just as well. The Johnsons seem a little overwhelmed sometimes by the younger kids, especially 8 year-old Maggie, who seems to always be at the center of trouble yet never the cause, Daniel has noticed. He's not sure what her deal is.

But as he sits in the barn, Frankie, the fifteen year-old he's stuck sharing a bedroom with, appears and he apparently knows it's Daniel's birthday. Frankie's not bad. He's usually actually borderline nice to Daniel so far, at least when he manages to string two words together. He doesn't seem that bright.

“Got you something,” Frankie says, smirking. He pulls out two joints and a matchbook. “Missus said it was your birthday and be nice.”

“It's probably not what she meant,” Daniel says, turning the joint over in his fingers.

“Huh. Yeah.” Frankie laughs a little. “They got better weed up here, you know. Woodstock was, like, super close to here.”

Daniel starts to say it wasn't that close, but he stops himself. He doesn't really want the joint, but it's such a nice present that he isn't sure how to turn it down. “I should probably study,” he says dubiously.

“Yeah,” Frankie says. “We can smoke tonight. After dinner. I think missus is going to make you a cake.”

“That's nice,” Daniel says. He sticks the joint in the pocket of his shirt and sits down in the loft with his notebook. After Frankie leaves, he stays there for a few hours, mostly studying, but also just enjoying the silence of the farm. He had freaked out when his caseworker had told him, but now he's thinking maybe it'll be okay. Maybe he can last the whole two years here until he thinks he can finish school and get emancipated. He likes that he might have a plan now.

He does his afternoon chores early and heads inside before dinner. There is a cake, he thinks. He can smell something baking.

Maggie is in his room sitting on his bed holding something.

“Get lost,” he says. None of them are allowed in each others' rooms.

“Okay,” she says cheerfully. “What is this thing anyway?”

He looks and sees she's got his shabti figure, which had been carefully placed in a small wooden box lined with plastic and fitting with foam. He had carved it out himself when he took this one item from his parents' collection to keep. The box had been hidden in his drawer. Maggie must have really searched to find it.

“Put it down!” Daniel cries. “That's… it's almost three thousand years old!”

“It's probably fragile,” Maggie says. She drops it on the wooden floor with a little thud. Daniel can see the cracks in the ceramic immediately and he gasps.

“You! You! Oh my god! Do you even… That was…” he's so flustered that he's pretty sure he's not even speaking English. He swears fluidly at her and she's got the hugest smile on her face, a smile he simply cannot take. He shoves her hard and she falls backward on the bed. But she actually giggles and that makes him come all the way undone. He climbs on the bed and smacks her across the face.

She grins, but he can see fat tears beginning to slide down her cheeks.

“Mrs. Johnson!” she screams, not moving from the bed. “Mrs. Johnson!” She really has lungs on her. Daniel is still furious. He climbs off the bed looking at the shabti on the ground. He had taken three from their collection when they buried his parents. One he placed in each of their coffins so they would have servants in the afterlife and this one he kept, to remember and take with him if he ever died and could see them again. He didn't really believe that anymore, but it was still the token he'd carried with him the longest.

As he's standing there, trying to figure out what to do, wishing that Maggie would just leave so he doesn't lose it again and smack her even harder, Mrs. Johnson bursts in, followed by most of the household, come to see what's happening.

Maggie curls up on the bed. “Oh, Mrs. Johnson, help. Danny made me come in his room even though I knew it was against the rules. And he made me lay down on the bed and tried to touch me somewhere private and then he hit me hard when I said I'd tell.”

“What?” Daniel sputters. She couldn't have picked a better accusation, he knows from experience now how all the adults jump when anyone says that. “No! That's not… She broke my ushabti figure!”

Maggie looks down at the floor. “I never touched it! He told me it was some devil worship thing. I think he's a heathen. Mrs. Johnson!” She's still got the tears sliding all over her face.

He is a heathen, but he knows the Johnsons expect them all to go to church every week and say grace before meals. He hasn't said anything about it, but he always feels like he's a fraud when he's surrounded by Christians, like they can see through how he's faking it. And he's called upon to fake it pretty often. If he explains that the shabti is to serve him in the afterlife the way the others are serving his parents, he's pretty sure that won't go over very well. He stands there unsure what to do.

“And he's got drugs!” Maggie yelps.

That startles him so much, he glances at Frankie in alarm, and Frankie, who is at the back of the crowd of kids in the door, looks surprised and backs away. He didn't know and has probably gone off to hide his own joint, but it's way too late for Daniel. The look on his face has almost certainly given him away.

Five hours later, Daniel is sitting on the porch in the final minutes of his birthday when the caseworker pulls up in her beat up station wagon. She has probably chain smoked all the way from the city. She looks about as pissed as anyone's ever looked. His stuff is packed up in his battered blue trunk. He has the trig textbook and the wooden case with all six pieces of the shabti carefully placed inside both sitting on his lap.

“You tried to touch that girl?” Miss Rodriguez says as they load up his trunk. “After what happened at your last placement? I never… I just… I never, Danny. One week, Danny. One week!”

“I would never do that,” Daniel says, incensed. “You know that's not true! She's a psycho. She broke my shabti… and I smacked her. But I would never have… not after… not ever, not even before I saw… I would always have known that was wrong…” He tears up. For five hours he's been sitting on the porch waiting, managing to be stoic and calm. Now, with Miss Rodriguez looking at him with her arms crossed, furious, he completely breaks down.

She relents slightly. “Okay, but the pot?”

“I wasn't going to smoke it. Someone gave it to me. I didn't want to say no. He… the someone… was trying to be nice.” Daniel hopes he didn't just rat out Frankie. Frankie had passed by him several times, giving him worried looks.

Miss Rodriguez sighs. “Get in the car,” she says, switching to Spanish.

Daniel chokes and nods slightly. If she's going to speak Spanish, it means maybe it'll be okay. English is for when she's really mad. Spanish is for when she's being nice and open.

“Well, for what's left of it, happy birthday,” she says, sliding into the front seat.

“Back to the group home?” Daniel asks, dreading it.

“For tonight, definitely. I'll see what I can do before the end of the week. There's a boarding school I looked at before. It's maybe an option. But it would have been easier without… something like this.”

Daniel nods and looks at his watch. He wants this birthday over.

Chapter Text

Seventeen

He isn't planning to really do anything for his birthday. He works that morning, tutoring one annoyed Latin student and one assistant professor who is about to spend a year on a fellowship in Egypt and wants to pick up a little Arabic. Working with the professor is a little bit bittersweet. He enjoys it, but he's also jealous. He'd like to go back to Egypt, though his adviser has said that maybe he can join a dig next season, he knows it takes money that he probably can't scrounge up. The professor is also hopeless with Arabic, which baffles Daniel since it's like a first language for him.

By the evening, he's ready to turn in. He's taking a full summer load himself, in addition to his tutoring jobs and his hours sitting at the library front desk. He hadn't made many friends during his freshman year and then it had been summer. It was just awkward being sixteen. At this coming year he'll be as old as some of the incoming freshman class. He already has permission to live on a freshman hall again and get a freshman roommate. He's hoping it'll work out better than the previous year. It hadn't been bad exactly, just a little lonely.

Summer sucks because he has to feed himself. There's no friendly cafeteria meals. He has a one room apartment above a restaurant not far from campus. He's been trying to live off large pots of lentils cooked to death on his single burner and stowed away in the mini-fridge. However, he feels like his birthday means he can treat himself to a pizza and a salad from the place downstairs.

He slowly chats with Nikos behind the counter while he waits for his food. He can read a little ancient Greek and he knows a little modern Greek. He's getting better talking to Nikos. And Nikos is a good teacher. He corrects Daniel but doesn't stop the flow of conversation.

A voice behind him speaks up. “Whoa. How many languages do you speak, man?”

He turns around. It's Matthew, a sophomore he tutored in Latin in the spring. He's standing with a group of a few friends, all young guys, all in stylish jeans.

“Oh,” Daniel says. “Hi. Um… ten or twelve. It depends on how you count.”

“This guy got me through Latin last semester,” Matthew says to his friends. “We were about to get a couple of pizzas before we head over to hear a friend's band. Wanna hang?”

Daniel hopes he doesn't look as startled as he feels. He glances at Nikos, who chuckles and says, in Greek, “Go be with young men your own age!” Then he adds to Matthew. “It is Daniel's birthday.”

Daniel nearly sinks into the ground with shame.

“You probably have plans then,” Matthew says.

“Uh, no. I'm… summer's pretty… most of my friends went home and I'm stuck here working. It's… kind of lame,” he says, stumbling.

To his surprise, Matthew looks sympathetic instead of disgusted by Daniel's lonely status. “Then you definitely should hang with us,” he says.

Matthew and his friends turn out to be okay. He can tell they're all rich. And all local. And all confident and rolling in social status. And everything else Daniel lacks. But for some reason they're nice to him. Matthew buys him some of the cannoli Nikos keeps in the refrigerated case for his birthday, saying that he definitely owed him one for the B he'd managed to pull in Latin. It's absurd to Daniel. Matthew had paid him. He'd been an employee. But Matthew is being so nice, he's not going to question it.

Then they're off to a club, where one of Matthew's friends pays off the bouncer with a huge bill palmed into his hand not to check any of their ID's. The band is mostly just loud. Matthew says they grew up with the bassist, a skinny guy with shaggy hair. He was someone's older brother, he explains. In the middle of the set, the whole club turns into a mosh pit and the lead singer jumps in, held up by the crowd for a moment before returning to the stage. Daniel has never seen anything like it.

He stands mostly on the periphery of the action. Luckily Matthew seems content to hang out on the edges too. The club is filled with kids in punk gear. One guy has his hair spiked up. When Matthew sees Daniel staring, he leans over and says over the music into Daniel's ear, “They use glue to make it stand up. Can you believe that?”

Daniel shakes his head and Matthew runs his fingers through Daniel's hair, which has gotten shaggy. Now that he's not in care anymore, there's no one to cut it. Back at boarding school, the house mother saw to stuff like that for him and the couple of other wards of the state. Now no one is making him and it's around his ears.

It feels incredible to have someone touch him like that. Matthew does it so casually, laughing, pulling Daniel's hair up as if he's going to spike it with glue.

Daniel risks a smile and looks at Matthew more closely than he's allowed himself to so far. He's slightly taller than Daniel himself, with shorter hair, dark and wavy. He has gray eyes and a sort of crooked smile that never leaves his face.

He hasn't managed to experience anything even vaguely romantic in his seventeen years, but he finds himself melting a little as Matthew moves his hands away and begins bobbing his head in time with the heavy beats from the music.

Slowly, Matthew starts to dance and Daniel ends up joining him. He has no idea what he's doing, but there doesn't seem to be much to it. All they have to do is sort of bounce up and down or lean back and forth. By the time the band stops, Daniel is buzzed high off having just been there. He has adrenaline pumping through him in a way he's never had before.

“Hey,” Matthew says in his ear. Matthew's friends are all by the stage, talking to their old friend the bassist. The real act is setting up on stage now, getting ready to come on after that opening.

“Hey,” Daniel replies in kind, feeling stupid.

“Want to get out of here?” Matthew asks.

“Um...” Daniel isn't sure. The loud music was pretty stupid, but he loved the endorphins and the atmosphere and the dancing. He won't have an actual ID for three whole years and he's not sure when he'll be back in a club like this again.

“No one's home at my apartment,” Matthew adds.

It's neutral information in a way, but Daniel gulps and reads it for what he thinks it is. His heart pounds and he nods. Matthew grabs his hand and they get out of the club, not even going back to talk to Matthew's friends.

It's not a long walk to Matthew's place, which turns out to be large and well furnished. Daniel can barely imagine having a place like this as a student, even with roommates.

In case there's any doubt about what's happening, the moment they get into Matthew's room, he locks the door and then presses Daniel into a long, languid kiss.

Daniel has never kissed anyone. In the last several years of foster care, he tried to make it a point to never be alone with any of the other kids and to never touch them or let himself be touched. It's just easier that way. The casualness of how everyone in his freshman dorm touched all the time was one of the hardest things about starting college. People literally piled together in the lounges or spooned up in long rows or backrub chains. The first time one of the guys on his floor had patted him on the back, Daniel had literally jumped. He knew he had a reputation for being touchy and not liking to be touched. At one point, his roommate had observed, “Dude, you're that way with the girls too. Were you like, molested in foster care or some shit?” Daniel hadn't figured out how to talk to him for a good week afterward.

He doesn't feel like anything he saw or experienced in foster care scarred him indelibly. It's not like he was raped. But he knows he's different somehow and that maybe things he saw and fears he had turned him off thinking about sex in a certain way. You protected yourself, especially in a group home. And if you thought you might like guys, even a little bit, you definitely never let on.

Now, with Matthew's tongue in his mouth, he is thinking about sex quite a lot. He hopes he doesn't seem as inexperienced as he knows he is. Kissing is so wild and wet. He had no idea. But it also seems so natural the way their mouths fit together.

“I wondered about you all spring,” Matthew says as he breaks away. “You were so reserved.”

Daniel doesn't know if he can form coherent words in any language so he doesn't try.

“Are you more of a top or a bottom?” Matthew asks.

Daniel isn't sure how to process this question. He wants to just go back to kissing, but Matthew has broken away and is shuffling through things at his bedside table. He pulled out a bottle of something and Daniel has no idea what he's looking at.

Matthew drops the bottle on the bed and returns to Daniel. He hooks his fingers into the belt loops on Daniel's jeans and uses them to tug him over to the bed. They kiss again, but it doesn't last long. Matthew pulls off his shirt, revealing his chest so Daniel does the same, losing the ratty school T-shirt he was wearing.

Matthew kisses his neck and runs his hands up Daniel's chest, giving him goose pimples despite the heat, flicking at his nipples and making Daniel gasp. All that skin is so much to process. Daniel can barely take it. It's pure intensity.

Daniel leans in to take advantage of more kissing, but it's becoming clear that Matthew is ready for more.

Part of Daniel is too. His body feels impatient as they fall to the bed, grinding against each other, even while his head freezes up and his brain tries to think too fast.

He spies the bottle as Matthew kisses his neck and squeezes his ass and suddenly it clicks what he's expected to do here and he knows he can't. He's not ready. He's scared witless.

He scrambles up off the bed. “I… um… I don't know if...”

“What's wrong?” Matthew asks.

Daniel doesn't know how to talk about this. Doesn't know how to say any of the complex things he's trying to make work through his brain, especially as they compete with his body, which is still pretty eager for something he can't quite envision.

He grabs his shirt and says, simply, “I'm sorry,” and flees, leaving Matthew looking bewildered.

By the time he's made it all the way back to his summer apartment, he feels sick with himself. He should have stayed. He's seventeen for goodness sakes. He's a college student. He shouldn't be trying to live like a monk. There are no eight year-old girls to accuse him of molesting them. Making out doesn't get you kicked out of school anymore. The college won't send him to another college if he has sex. But it's been so long since he's had anyone who actually cared for him in any way. He's made some friends, but he's probably closest to his school assigned adviser. Or maybe to Mrs. Eldrigde, who's in charge of the library desk where he works. He has a sudden fear that he'll never have anyone, that he'll always be alone.

It's well past midnight when he lays down in bed, fighting tears. It would just be stupid to cry, he tells himself. There's no point. He does something he rarely does and pulls out the little wooden box from his underwear draw and very carefully withdraws the shabti figure from his parents' collection. It's been lovingly glued together with special glues. He had taken it to the Met to get help with it from one of his parents' friends years ago when it was broken.

He curls the figure in his hand and tells himself that he won't be alone. He won't let himself.

Chapter Text

Twenty-Five

It becomes clear, as the clock ticks over to his birthday, that it's not just an allergic reaction, but that he's probably getting sick. Sometimes it's really hard to tell. He hadn't thought twice about having a runny nose when he and Sarah headed to the airport, but by the time they're mid-air, he was worried he might be really coming down with something.

He manages not to throw up until they make it to the chic London hotel Sarah chose. So as the clock ticks over to his birthday, he's on the floor in a foreign country puking his guts out into a much fancier toilet than he's ever had. Then he crashes on the sofa when Sarah looks dubious about sharing a bed with him.

Early in the morning, Sarah is up and getting things packed and together.

“Do we have to be in such a hurry?” Daniel complains. Originally, they were supposed to check into the hotel, crash and try to reset their clocks, and then enjoy London for a couple of hours before picking up the rental car and heading out to spend a few days with Sarah's family. Now he just wants to try and sleep this nasty bug off for a few more hours.

“Darling, you obviously are in no shape to go anywhere,” she says. “I simply can't bring you to meet my father looking like that. I don't want to get your germs and I'd hate to give them to Daddy.”

“But… what am I supposed to do?”

“You should stay here and rest,” she says, as if it's obvious.

“But...” Daniel starts, but he's too sick to come up with a proper argument.

“Don't even start on how your birthday is cursed, by the way. Superstition doesn't really become you, you know.”

The fact that he's draped on the couch feeling worse than he can remember in a long time seems like it's probably supporting evidence for his theory rather than hers, but he doesn't say anything.

“Tomorrow or the next day, if you're feeling better, you should take the train up to join us. I'll even get you from the station. I'm going to write it down. And you've been to London before.”

“When I was six,” Daniel says.

“Well, you're quite good with cities. I'm not worried a bit about you. But if I stay here any longer, I may get sympathetically ill and you wouldn't want that. When we leave for Jordan, it'll be roughing it for nearly a month and I'd like to get a bit of luxury in at home. No need for us both to suffer, you know.”

She makes it sound so reasonable. That, or he's so feverish, that it's only after she leaves that he realizes how completely fucked he is. There's no way he can pay for another night of the overpriced hotel. And he can't go to a youth hostel being sick like this either. Even the train ticket isn't really in his budget. Everything in London will be so expensive. He groans and forces himself up to go check out.

He feels like a jerk asking the concierge about a cheap hotel near King's Cross, hoping he can just head to the station in the morning for the train, but the concierge, a young woman with a touch of a lower class accent doesn't look put out at all and directs him to a couple of options. Then she suggests the drug store on the corner if he should need anything. He probably looks even worse than he realizes.

He sleeps most of the morning and a chunk of the afternoon at his new hotel, which is pretty seedy and still cost a fortune by his standards. But by the afternoon, his fever has broken and he's starving so he leaves the hotel, picking up a kebab from a stand. He's sure he still looks wild and unkempt, but he can still mostly claim to be a student, even if he does have one Ph.D. finished.

He wanders around breathing in the air of a different city. He never could manage to love New York. Too many memories. Chicago has grown on him over the last four years. Mostly he misses some idea of city that he can barely define. And he misses the desert. He's been back to Egypt now three whole times, but it's never enough.

Sarah had been looking forward to showing him things. She wanted to take him to some garden she loved and to eat at some expensive restaurant she liked. Now that he's mostly not feverish, he can admit she's basically ditched him and let himself be mad about it.

But not too mad. He knows this is what she's like. You can hardly order a glass of wine and complain it contains alcohol. Being with Sarah always makes him feel like he's worthy to sit at the table with everyone else and if he's not sure if there's much else to them than that, it's not something he likes to think about too deeply.

He's considering what to do when a thought dawns on him and he looks at his watch. There's probably enough time, but to be sure, he hails a cab for the short ride. Half an hour later, he's headed into the British Museum and walking briskly toward the Egyptian wing, prepared to be overwhelmed in the hour before closing.

But there's something in him that clicks in place. Sarah hadn't wanted to come to the museum, saying it was dull to see all the things everyone already knew about. He has the museum map in his pocket, but he remembers being here as a child. If it's as stodgy and unchanging as the Met, then he might just remember where to go. He passes the Rosetta Stone and then rows of New Kingdom vases and artifacts, a whole room of mummies. He turns a corner. He's just moving on gut instinct. There's a sense of organization, but no knowing it, he is just guessing, or maybe remembering.

There's a case filled with rows and rows of ushabtis and he pauses, looking at them. For a moment, it's like doing the I spy puzzle in the Sunday paper. Then, his eyes zero in on a figure he knows extremely well. It's a copy of the one he has back in his tiny apartment in Chicago, glued together after a long ago accident. It's from the same dig as this one. A crateful of the artifacts from that dig went to the British Museum as part of a special exhibit, but a few things just ended up here and there. Probably most of it was back in storage somewhere. But this was still here. He remembered, vaguely, his father pointing it out when they were here when he was little. He's not sure why it's one of his stronger memories. So many of the memories of his parents feel more and more like worn out photographs that, the more he trots them out, the more removed the are from the actual experience of them. It's just been so long ago.

But he's standing there in the place of the memory and that's nice. It doesn't make it more vivid, but he does feel a line all the way back to the past.

For a little while, he stays there, just staring, not really thinking anything in particular. Finally, he tears himself away and makes the most of the little time he has left, actually looking at the old, already found stuff. The stuff they looted back in the old days, when archaeologists weren't really much different from tomb raiders. A lot of the best stuff is back in Egypt now, which is good. More will probably go back, he thinks, eventually, but for the moment, he looks, reading the inscriptions on the sides of sarcophagi and admiring the heads on canopic jars, and the sheer volume of stuff.

He thinks about how he didn't send his parents off with enough stuff. It was an old, irrational worry of his. In his first foster home, he would hoard crazy assortments of things that he wanted to take to their graves and bury with them. Other people left flowers, he left spoons and toothbrushes on their graves. The cemetery people removed them and he'd pitch fits. And the foster family would lose it with him and spank him sometimes. And then he'd refuse to speak English because it was before he learned that stubbornness isn't the only way to get what you want.

A guard comes up and tells him he has to leave as he's looking at a depiction of Amun and Amaunet on a chunk of wall, reading the fragments of the inscriptions running alongside them.

By the time he's back outside, the sun is starting to go down and feels like the fever is back, a pale imitation of before, but still just as annoying.

He picks up a curry at a hole in the wall as he walks. He's heard the Indian food is great in London so he hopes this one lives up to it. He would have liked to chat with the restaurant owners. He knows a tiny smattering of Sanskrit, but he doesn't know any modern Indian languages and thinks it might be interesting to learn but there aren't tons of people speaking them in Chicago.

By the time he's back to the hotel, having forced himself to walk to save money, he's a tired wreck again. He settles in with the curry, the BBC, and a bottle of paracetamol and thinks if his birthday isn't cursed, he doesn't know the meaning of cursed. The whole point of having Sarah was supposed to be having a partnership but instead he's stuck in a foreign city alone. He pushes the thought down and tries to think about the dig. Things are always busy and communal on a dig. It's such a better way to be.

Chapter Text

Thirty-One

He sits in the cartouche room appreciating the silence. He's been thinking recently about digging out the gate. Maybe they should do it, especially now that he understands things better. It's not just Earth and Abydos out there. This is the addresses of hundreds of worlds. The ability to go to each of them boggles his mind a little.

But he really needs paper. He's been experimenting with Ska'ara a little bit, trying to make something like papyrus, but it's labor intensive. And then he'd need to make ink. He knows how to make papyrus. He never learned about ink before.

He has a rude calendar carved on the wall in another room though. He goes there and adds the days and records the things he's been trying to keep track of, like seasonal changes. That's when, counting and translating, he realizes something. It's his birthday. Huh.

Suddenly, he's seized with the desire to share that with Sha're. No one keeps track of their birthday on Abydos. He doesn't even know for sure how old Sha're is, probably a good bit younger than him, though she married late. And she likes to hear about his traditions from his former culture. Maybe he'll share this one with the Abydonians. He's been trying to share mostly useful things. They're making new shovel designs and he's helped them with a different irrigation system. Birthdays are a useless thing. And if he thinks hard about his, he doesn't think he's ever even had a memorably good one, but he pushes it out of his head. Soon maybe he'll have his calendar set and he'll be able to celebrate another birthday.

The walk from the Great Pyramid takes a good half an hour. By the time he's back in the village, he's tired and thirsty and stops at the well to take out the dipper before going through the clay-walled buildings to find his own hearth. It's midday, which means it's siesta time. It's quiet and he expects Sha're might be taking her midday nap.

He swings the tapestry away from the door, saying, “I realized that today is a special day. It's a tradition from Earth and...” He falters because there is an unexpected crowd.

To his surprise, Sha're is laying on the bedding surrounded by her female cousins.

“Where have you been?” Marra demands as he walks in.

“At the pyramid,” he says slowly. “What's going on, good cousins?”

The women are all angry at him. They stare at him with arms crossed and begin filing out of the large room. But they're also, he can see, angry at Sha're.

“You should go to the tent,” Marra says to Sha're.

“No!” Daniel says. He knows what that's code for and he's forbidden it. The tent for women to bleed in is cruder and dirtier than the houses. Sha're turns over and moans slightly. She's crying, he realizes in confusion.

“Get out,” he says to Marra. She's older and widowed and always a busybody as far as Daniel is concerned. “Sha're is my wife and this is my hearth.”

“Your godless ways brought this on her,” Marra says and she spits on the ground as she leaves, the door hanging swinging broadly behind her.

“What's going on?” Daniel asks, completely bewildered. “And why did Marra think you should go… Aren't you… aren't we…?”

They haven't talked about it yet much. For some reason, Daniel feels like it would jinx it. But her time of the month had come and gone twice now if he's been counting right. The tradition is at the third time you can hold a feast and slaughter a bithcout, which was a bit like a goat. For subsequent children, you just slaughter one of the desert turkey like birds. He wasn't exactly looking forward to cutting the bithcout's throat, but he'd keenly watched the last time it was done and Sha're had teased him about it.

It clicks in his head though. She's lost the baby.

“Oh, god,” he says, sinking to his knees on the pile of bedding. “Sha're, habibti.”

“Don't touch me!” she says with surprising force. “We broke the rules and now I suffer for it.”

He pulls back, uncertain about what to do. “Beloved, we talked about this. It's superstition. You saw that Ra could die. The gods aren't real. The superstitions aren't real. This is just a thing that happens sometimes.”

Her face is covered in tears, the kohl on her eyes is smudged. “But why did it happen to me!”

“I don't know. If...” He breaks off. He loves his life here in most ways but sometimes, when he sees people suffering with broken bones or simple fevers or cuts that could become infected, he realizes how precarious life is here. If they were on Earth, he could take her to a hospital. Maybe they could tell her why she lost the baby. But maybe they couldn't. “Sometimes if the baby isn't going to be healthy or strong, it dies before it can grow.” He knows almost nothing about pregnancy and birth.

“It's not fair,” she cries, but she lets him begin stroking her hair. He is crying too, he realizes.

“And there are no gods to blame,” he says quietly.

Soon they're wrapped in an embrace, crying it out together. “We'll try again,” Daniel whispers to her over and over. And, “It's not our fault.” By Abydonian tradition, it wasn't a baby yet. By American law it wasn't either. He realizes this is what he was worried about jinxing earlier. Life is precarious here. And without science, it's hard to fight the superstition. He thinks, when she conceives again, which is inevitable given the lack of any methods of birth control other than the rhythm method, that he may not even be able to bring himself to slaughter the bithcout. Maybe it's best to wait until he sees the child emerge on its birthday.

God, birthdays.

“We'll carve the baby a shabti,” he says. We'll bury it in the garden for her. To take care of her in the next world.”

“How do you know it was going to be a girl?” Sha're asks after a long silence.

“I don't.”

“Yes. I would like that, Danyel. I know it's not how things are supposed to be done. She did not have a soul to look after yet.”

“We can do it however we want. If it helps us.” He pictures the shabti figure he kept for his parents for so long, broken and repaired twice, sitting in its little wooden box. Where would it be back on Earth now? Could he replicate one like it for a child that was no more than a pea? Nothing but an idea and a hope?

She stays inside all day and he takes care of the chores around the hearth and brings her stew and bread from the ovens and goes to help the men tend the mastadges. When she asks him, as they settle in for the night, what he had run back from the pyramid to tell her about today, he finds he can't bear to explain it.

“I can't remember,” he lies. The first lie he can remember ever telling her.

She snuggles into his chest and he strokes her hair until they both fall asleep.

Chapter Text

Forty-Six

It's still a week before his birthday and they're working on flights and when the storage expires and a million other stupid logistics while talking on the phone when he realizes that all this is going to come together on July 8th, which is simply not acceptable.

“Don't start on this birthday curse crap,” Jack says with a groan.

“It's not an auspicious day,” Daniel grouses.

“Auspicious my ass. It's a stupid superstition. Did your parents open King Tut's tomb on your birthday or something?”

“Tut's tomb was opened in 1922. I'm not that old, Jack.”

“I can't believe you, of all people, are going to argue in favor of a superstition. It's so unscientific.”

“The earth was once nearly blown up on my birthday,” Daniel says, citing evidence like a good scientist.

“That was a coincidence.”

“Probably.”

There's a long silence on the phone. Daniel finishes the dishes. He can hear Jack puttering around with something on his end.

“Is this a game of chicken, then?” Jack finally says.

“No.”

“That sounded like a yes. Just get here, Daniel.”

So a week later, he's understandably nervous about disembarking from the red eye at 6:00 in the morning at National. He can see the Pentagon as they land without incident (miraculously as far as Daniel is concerned) as well as the monuments. The minute the plane opens up, he can feel the muggy heat steal into the cabin and he sneezes. Washington is the worst for allergies. He should probably have started more shots last week.

He waits for his bags. They somehow haven't been lost. He gets in the taxi line and only waits a couple of minutes. On its way to the house, somehow the taxi doesn't crash.

He was off in another galaxy when Jack bought the property. Buying a house when you're not on the planet is a bit of an adventure. They have to go back and finish the paperwork so his name will be on the deed. He's seen photos, but not the house itself. It's a townhouse, with a stone front and a hill of a green lawn that Daniel immediately dreams about replacing with a Japanese sand garden, but it's probably pointless because all the other houses, smashed right against it, also have green grass with all its allergens. Why has he agreed to this anyway?

Jack refused to send a key and refused to leave one out in the open. Daniel already knew he'd miss him because he had a couple of important morning meetings so he goes and knocks on the neighbor's house. A woman holding a curly-headed baby answers, looking tired. She's still in pajama bottoms. Behind her, two more kids are fighting over a push toy. For a second she looks at him quizzically, but before he can introduce himself, she says, “Dr. Jackson?”

“Call me Daniel.”

“Nice to finally meet the general's boyfriend,” she says, looking perkier than she had a few moments before. “I'm Jamila. Um...” Her hand went to a table just inside the door then she looked annoyed. “Ethan!” she screams. “Where are the keys I put here last night!”

For a few minutes, Daniel is sure this will be the start of the day's disasters to come, but the keys are located in the backyard in the offending four year-old's tricycle seat. “I neededed them to start my car,” he explains several times over.

Jack had told him there were kids next door and he hadn't objected but for a moment he wonders if they've made a terrible mistake. Jack doesn't talk about Charlie very often and he doesn't talk about the children that might have been if his wife had lived. It seems like a strangely fraught choice of home for a moment.

“So, that wasn't much of a welcome to the neighborhood,” Jamila says, handing him the keys, “but I swear we're not bad. Let me know if my pack of hooligans cause any trouble. The general has been really nice. The yards all connect in the back and along the parkway so we are a neighborhood that's a bit all up in each other's business. You'll see. Come back there tomorrow night and a bunch of us parent types will be herding kids and cooking out. And drinking too much wine. But everyone is welcome. Really.”

And something about the way she describes it feels communal and not fraught at all. He nods, feeling shy, and heads over to actually look inside the house.

He's braced for disaster, but inside it's light and airy with beautiful hardwood floors. He can see Jack's put in the high end air filters. The boxes are everywhere. It's all very half unpacked, but he likes it. He rounds into the back room and sees something that wasn't there before in the photos. Jack has lined all the walls with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. They even go around the windows. There's a single shelf with a few books on it. Daniel goes over and sees a sticky note Jack has attached that says “All the space I need – the rest is yours.” It's just a few old paperback war novels and a couple of photo albums. Daniel chuckles.

He unpacks his clothes, sure that his stuff will somehow be delayed, but the delivery truck comes early. It's things from the house in the Springs, but also from several different storage places he's managed to accumulate over the last couple of decades and several deaths. It's going to be a mess to sort out.

The movers bring it all inside with such efficiency that he's shocked. He directs things to various rooms, barely knowing what he's doing, but it can all be moved later. Amazingly, nothing is broken, nothing goes wrong. The roof of the house doesn't cave in the moment he goes upstairs.

He finds leftovers in the fridge and eats in the library with the shelves, enjoying the natural light and opening crates. There are three big boxes of things from his parents that he hasn't opened in years. There's a box of stuff from his student days. He opens a box and realizes its one from before his first death. It's a box he somehow didn't get to when he first got back from Abydos. It's mostly clothes. He knows the Air Force packed up his stuff and Catherine paid to have it stored, though he never understood how she explained that. Perhaps just by being eccentric. Catherine was an even bigger pack rat than him. There's a box here somewhere of artifacts he saved that came from her enormous collection.

As Daniel digs through the clothes, shoving most of them into a large garbage bag and cursing himself for poor cataloging skills, a small wooden box falls out and he gasps. He has learned to let go of things over the years. He's released all his burdens, even lost and broken artifacts and loneliness.

He slides the box lid off and looks inside. The little shabti is there, just as perfectly preserved as the last time he saw it. He can't even remember when that was. A lifetime ago, before Sarah left him, before Abydos, before Sha're, before the Stargate, before Jack. He runs his fingers over it. Then, very carefully, using the box as a makeshift stand, he places it on the center of one of the empty shelves.

Jack arrives home an hour or so later.

“I know this place was semi-clean when I left,” he observes dryly.

“Sometimes you have to make a mess first,” Daniel says. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Me too,” Jack says. Daniel hears a slight hitch in his voice and sighs. It's their first day here, their first night in a new home, the first one they've shared, after a long time of waiting. He was caught up in excavating his old lives, but he has a new one here with Jack.

Jack, who is almost totally gray now and not trying to hide it a bit. Jack, who is halfway in uniform, the one Daniel knows he hates being stuck wearing every day and would quit if he thought for a minute Homeworld could get along without him. Jack, who looks as sexy as the first time Daniel saw him all those years ago.

Jack strides over, avoiding the boxes and detritus that have accumulated. He draws Daniel in for a kiss. It's not a kiss of great passion. More a sweet, welcome home kiss. Daniel closes his eyes to savor it. First kiss, new home.

But all too soon, Jack is breaking off the kiss and Daniel sees him slide down to the ground on a single knee.

“Oh no!” Daniel says. “No! Not today, Jack. Do you want to curse us?”

“You going to turn me down because it's your birthday?”

“No!” he says again, feeling like an idiot. “And why are you on your knees?”

“The guy doing the asking gets to get on his knees.”

“But… your knees! Would you get up?”

“You are totally sabotaging this, Daniel,” Jack complains, but he doesn't move.

“I just...” Daniel wails. “Jack.”

“Daniel Jackson, will you marry me?”

“You're not even going to be able to walk later if you stay like that too long!”

“Well not if you leave me down here all day!”

“Jack.”

“Daniel.”

They have fallen into this after years of dancing around it, then years of bickering. Daniel feels like he fools everyone sometimes. Like he fakes having things together that he doesn't. And he has a strange impulse to literally ditch Jack, ditch the house whose deed doesn't have his name yet, and run far away. He's done it enough times before to enough people that he's knows both that it would be easy and that he'd regret it.

“Daniel?” Jack says again.

Daniel tugs at him. “I wish you'd picked a different day.”

“Daniel,” Jack says again, exasperated.

“Yes,” he says, surprising himself at how emphatic it comes out. “Yes. Of course it's yes. Would you just get up?”

Jack grabs his hand and lets himself be helped up then. He doesn't move slowly at all and Daniel hopes his knee is actually fine. And then they're kissing again, relieved and happy and quietly passionate. Daniel leans his head into Jack's shoulder, feeling the calm and protection he feels around Jack.

“Happy birthday, Daniel,” Jack says. “Welcome home.”