solitude
by greensilver
--
It seemed fitting that SG-1's last mission should be a first contact.
It also seemed fitting that the Aschen wouldn't be Earth's final first contact, but that particular sentiment was probably Jack's alone.
When SG-1 stepped through the Stargate, the aliens had already formed a welcoming party around the MALP. At first, Jack wasn't sure they were aliens; they looked more like seaweed, with long tube-shaped torsos and slowly waving tentacles on all sides. If they hadn't talked, they could've passed for unusually colored plant life.
"Seaweed with legs," Jack said later, when the aliens had departed for their own mysterious seaweed reasons. "It's just kinda creepy."
Daniel just kept working, letting his recording of seaweed dialogue play over Jack's commentary. Seaweed language sounded a bit like the distant, scratchy voice of a telephone operator on a line filled with static; if Jack listened long enough, patterns started to emerge in the clicks and clacks.
The tape ended with a loud burst of white noise. Daniel held down the rewind button on his voice recorder, and Jack's gaze was drawn to the way Daniel's skin went white beneath his fingernails - like Daniel was pressing too hard, working too hard at ignoring Jack and their one-sided conversation.
"Why is it we can't understand these guys, anyway?" Jack said, watching Daniel's teeth worry at his lower lip. "We don't usually have these problems."
Daniel scribbled something on his notepad in the fluid, illegible handwriting that was reserved for his field notes alone. Jack had never thought to ask why Daniel made his personal journals more readable - more accessible - than his notes, but he wondered now. Questions like that only ever occurred to him after the time to ask had come and gone.
"I don't know why," Daniel said, releasing the rewind button. The tape started to play again, and he raised his voice just enough to carry over the incomprehensible patterns and indecipherable sounds. "Maybe the Aschen could explain it."
A dozen possible responses occurred to Jack at once, but they were all harsher things than he was prepared to say to Daniel. Instead, Jack tugged his hat down and left, which was undoubtedly the effect Daniel had been hoping for.
Jack had thought that, someday, he'd miss the standard mission fare: fighting solely to get a rise out of Daniel, providing an occasional insight just to make Carter's head spin, playing hours of Twenty Questions in an endless quest to stump Teal'c, just once. Time stolen and shared between the four of them, everyday moments that amounted to a larger whole. Even with the Aschen and everything that had happened, he'd thought he'd miss it eventually.
He missed it already. None of them would quite look at him; Carter talked in circles, anxious and fumbling and so caught up in not saying what she shouldn't that she forgot to say what she should. Her periodic reports were as garbled as the seaweed language itself, and whenever she lost her train of thought, she picked up with the word "exoskeletons" and felt her way back into the conversation from there.
"Exoskeletons" was beginning to pass for "hello" in Carterspeak. Jack gave up on actually listening to her reports after the first few attempts, and when she realized he wasn't listening, she stopped giving reports entirely.
Teal'c, at least, just looked contemplative. If experience hadn't taught Jack to be wary of Teal'c's passive exterior, he might've tried to start up a conversation, or at least a friendly game of tic-tac-toe. As it was, Jack left his team to their own pursuits and wandered as far as he could go without letting them drop from his line of sight.
This kind of isolation had become exceedingly rare over the past four years; he'd grown complacent, and the Aschen had arrived with their technology and their medicines to show him just how blind he'd been.
--
He followed a path up the side of a hill, and when the hill turned into a small mountain, he decided to find the top for a better look at their surroundings.
Planet Kelp, as he'd decided to call it, reminded him of nothing so much as the Badlands: an endless stretch of exposed rock that cropped up here and there to form leveled cliffs and valleys. The only vegetation in sight was a yellowish sort of grass that perfumed the air with a flowery smell as he crushed it underfoot; jasmine or orchid, one of those exotic scents that Sara had liked to stink up the house with. The hard, cracked soil of the area around the Gate platform hadn't yielded this kind of sweet-smelling grass, but it covered every flat surface on the higher levels.
He wished Carter could talk to him in full, coherent sentences; she would've liked this. Daniel would've liked it, the way Daniel liked everything about discoveries made when exploring alien terrain for the first time. Teal'c ... well, Teal'c probably wouldn't have been too impressed by grass that smelled like flowers, but he still would've been better company than bare rock and open sky.
Viewed from a cliff-top high above, the aliens looked all the more like clusters of seaweed on the ocean floor. At this height, Jack felt less like an explorer on an alien planet than like a deep sea diver. If he stepped off of the cliff's edge he wouldn't fall, just sink; every movement of arm and leg would buoy him up higher, higher, until he broke the ocean's surface somewhere above the clouds. He looked up, half-expecting to see schools of fish overhead; instead, a lone bird of prey rode a different kind of current.
Solitude here had a surreal quality that turned falcons into sharks and made him long for the stifling masses of humanity in shopping malls, at hockey games. The novelty of being alone with his own thoughts had worn off days ago, and the idea of a lifetime of silent, isolated moments like these was almost enough to make Jack give in.
--
When loneliness and boredom finally chased him back to the others, the seaweed aliens were having a tentacle-waving freak-out on the steps of the Gate platform as Daniel tried to light a Powerbar on fire.
The Powerbar wouldn't quite catch; Daniel kept clicking the lighter on and off beneath it just to get it to burn, and the smoke he produced was so acrid that Jack could smell it from ten paces away. Powerbar smoke, it turned out, smelled a bit like new asphalt at the end of a hot summer day.
"Daniel," Jack said, "what the hell are you doing?"
"Just being friendly, Jack," Daniel said, and clicked the lighter again.
Carter intervened. "The aliens were burning things on the platform, sir - they got a little upset when we didn't follow suit."
"Burning things," Jack repeated, glad that Carter could be so specific. "Really." He tried to picture just how a seaweed alien would go about lighting something on fire, but all of the scenarios he came up with were too mind-boggling to contemplate.
"I think it's some sort of greeting ritual." Daniel's voice was a little warmer than before; either Jack's absence had improved Daniel's mood, or quality time with an alien culture was mellowing him out. "I didn't want to insult them."
Just when there weren't supposed to be any surprises left, Daniel went and set fire to the rations. Jack shook his head, fighting the masochistic urge to try and follow Daniel's logic. "So you decided to burn food?"
Daniel grinned at Jack through a haze of foul-smelling smoke, holding the Powerbar as far from his body as he could. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."
The tension in Jack's shoulders started to ease for the first time in weeks; he almost smiled back. This was better. This was, in fact, damned near promising. If Daniel kept looking at him like that and Carter kept forming complete sentences, Jack was going to turn into an optimist.
"If you're done making nice with the locals, I've got something to show you," Jack said, abruptly all too pleased with his discovery. "Perfect spot to pitch our tents."
Daniel set the Powerbar down on the platform steps and hastened away, covering his mouth with his sleeve to hide a sneeze. "No time like the present," he said, wrinkling his nose - to express disgust or fight off another sneeze, Jack couldn't tell. "That really doesn't smell so good."
"You should've thought of that before you set it on fire, Daniel," Jack said, turning away from the ongoing seaweed festivities and heading for the path up the hillside. All three of them followed him, sticking as close as the path allowed.
"Do you have something you'd rather burn, Jack?" Daniel said, not-quite-sneezing again.
They hit the grassline, and orchids bloomed underfoot.
"Actually, yes," Jack said, and smiled.
--
Jack lay awake for longer than he should have, his thoughts spinning in endless circles that resisted the gradual onset of sleep. One more day and night and that was it, they'd be done; for the moment, that outweighed any further consideration of the Earth's future. The idea that there would be no more missions like this one should have been a pinpoint of light next to a sun, when compared to the Aschen situation - but the dissolution of SG-1 was more pressing, more immediate. With his team so close at hand, it was near-impossible for Jack to focus on anything else.
Teal'c was talking to Carter on her watch and their voices carried, forming an indistinct babble of white noise that itched at the edges of Jack's awareness, making him restless. Jack didn't think any of them had quite grasped that they'd never be together like this again, once they stepped back through the Stargate; for all the isolated hours he'd had to turn the idea over and over in his mind, even he didn't fully comprehend it yet.
"Daniel," Jack whispered, "are you awake?"
Daniel made a low, not-quite-awake sound that was somewhere between his normal can't you see I'm working? noise and the indelicate snort of a disagreeable horse. "Jack?"
"Yes." Jack pushed himself up onto his elbows, squinting through the darkness to see if Daniel was waking up at all. "Daniel, you're the only one sleeping."
There was a hint of movement on Daniel's side of the tent, a smear of shadow against the moon-lit canvas walls. "I'm the only one sleeping?"
"That's right," Jack said, glad Daniel had grasped the severity of the situation.
Daniel's voice was sluggish and tired, but not entirely unamused. "Jack, is this a mission or a sleepover?"
"Teal'c and Carter are still up," Jack pointed out, hoping Daniel would capitulate; wanting Daniel to talk to him, to distract him, to fill the waning hours of their time together with anything other than the broken wheel of Jack's endless rumination.
Daniel sat up a little, just enough for Jack to distinguish his silhouette from the mass of his sleeping bag. "Sam," he called, "you're keeping Jack awake." The other conversation halted, and after a moment, there came the entirely distinct sound of Carter trying to lower her voice to a whisper.
Oh, god, it was a sleepover.
"There," Daniel said, flopping back down onto his sleeping bag. "Goodnight, Jack."
Jack thought about poking Daniel to keep him awake, but he valued his own well-being too much to attempt it.
Eventually, even Carter's half-whispered conversation faded into the absolute stillness of night. The only lingering sounds were those of wind on canvas, a puff-rattle noise echoed in the slightly congested give and take of Daniel's breathing.
--
Jack awoke with a jolting suddenness that spoke of danger, of a need for action; there was gunfire nearby, he was sure of it. He located his gun with one hand and shoved Daniel with the other, shaking Daniel awake. "Daniel," he hissed, "Daniel, wake up-"
A bright flash illuminated the landscape outside of their tent, and there it was again: the loud crack-pop of shots being fired. When the sound eased into a low, distant growl, logic finally caught up with the nearly overwhelming force of Jack's fight-or-flight; unless the upper atmosphere had it out for them, no one was attacking.
Daniel stirred, rolling over and away from the spot where Jack still gripped Daniel's sleeping bag. "If you wake me up one more time, I'll kill you," he said, and settled back in to sleep.
Jack let go of Daniel's sleeping bag and lay back, waiting. No more than twenty seconds later, Daniel froze, belatedly catching on to the urgency with which Jack had awakened him.
"Forget it," Jack said, tugging at the ineffective liner of his own bag. The temperature had dropped, was dropping as he spoke; the mingled odors of rainwater and mud overpowered the usual tent-smells of treated canvas and tired bodies in close quarters. Even as Jack opened his mouth to explain to Daniel about the lightning, the storm front reached their little camp and rain hit the tent with a sound like rice pouring into an empty pot. The rain clouds obscured the moon, dimming the faint glow that had allowed Jack to see Daniel's outline.
Lightning crackled overhead, eliminating any further need for an explanation. In that brief bit of light, Jack saw Daniel sitting up with the sleeping bag pushed down to his waist, one arm fumbling in the space around him - for his glasses, most likely.
"Go back to sleep," Jack said, unzipping his bag from the inside. "You've got two more hours, at least."
Daniel's voice was closer than before; he was still sitting up, maybe even kneeling. "What are you going to do, stand watch in the rain?"
"That's what ponchos are for," Jack said.
"Our ponchos are on the FRED," Daniel pointed out.
Jack paused, assessing. "That's got to be your fault," he said, freeing himself from his sleeping bag and crouching at the tent opening. "I'm not sure how, yet, but give me time."
Daniel elbowed into the space at the opening, reaching past Jack to unzip the tent flap. "Teal'c? You out there?"
A moment later, Teal'c ducked partway into their tent, nearly slamming his forehead into Daniel's in the process. Rainwater dripped from Teal'c's poncho onto the floor of the tent, forming little puddles near the foot of Daniel's sleeping bag.
"Your watch is not for another fifteen minutes, O'Neill," Teal'c said, in a too-neutral tone that could've meant anything from I'm still miffed about that whole Aschen thing to there's rainwater in my ear. "I would have awoken you at the correct time."
The storm intensified, turning the raindrops into a solid sheet of water that framed Teal'c's silhouette in the tent opening. "Tell you what," Jack said, giving Teal'c a little push to get him and his rain-carrying attire out of the relatively dry tent. "If you can grab our ponchos from the FRED, I'll relieve you early."
Teal'c retreated into the waterfall of weather, and the tent flap fell mostly shut behind him.
"You realize our ponchos are going to be soaked when they get here," Daniel said, flicking a finger through the puddles near Jack's feet.
Jack twisted around, shoving their sleeping bags out of the danger zone. "Why don't you get a few more hours? I'll wake you up when it's your turn."
Daniel shook his head a little. "No point in wasting any more time on sleep," he said, almost apologetically.
Jack had no idea how to reply to that, and opted not to say anything at all; the pause should have been awkward, but even the quality of the silence had changed. Back on Earth Daniel's silence had been cold and distant; less than a day later, it was the easy silence of friends with no need to talk, as though Daniel had forgotten Earth entirely. Daniel seemed to have turned off their conflict at the flip of a switch, and the extent to which things were falling into old patterns was making Jack uneasy. The Aschen situation hadn't gone anywhere, and even when Jack consciously pushed it out of his mind, part of him still remembered; part of him still held back. Daniel, though ... Jack wanted to be prepared for the moment when reality kicked in and Daniel remembered that he was supposed to be angry with Jack. Jack didn't want that moment to take him by surprise.
But right then, Daniel was happy. The degree to which their mission could've been any mission was disarming; this mission was fundamentally different just by the nature of being the last one, but Daniel's attitude was lulling Jack's mind into a sort of complacency in which the current mission blurred together with every other one they'd ever been on. An endless stream of planets and moons with terrains of infinite variety, all blending into one another so that this one was no different - because they were explorers together, and the mood was light, easy, teeming with the quiet anticipation of incipient discovery.
If Jack wanted to, he could forget all too easily that the mission was anything other than a final stepping-stone on the road to an unwelcome future.
Teal'c returned with their ponchos, bringing rain and mud in with him. All of Jack's thoughts on the false nature of their contentment retreated, staying just close enough to the surface to nag at him when Daniel smiled.
--
Their separate watches merged, more intentionally than not. Despite Daniel's insistence that the seaweed aliens weren't going to attack while SG-1 was sleeping, he kept pace with Jack; when his watch was over, Jack returned the favor. The rain made it difficult to speak without raising their voices high enough to wake up Teal'c and Carter, so what snatches of conversation they managed amounted to inconsequential chatter about seaweed language and whether or not anyone would notice if they snuck samples of the orchid-grass home in their packs.
The storm dissipated near the end of Daniel's watch. The clouds rolled back to reveal a deep blue sky just beginning to lighten along the horizon; for a few minutes between the end of the storm and the onset of sunrise, the temperature remained just a bit too cool for comfort.
When the sun rose, the temperature climbed with it; when Carter and Teal'c emerged from their tent, the morning was already hotter than the late-spring weather of the day before. By the time they reached the Stargate, Jack's shirt was plastered to his back. Most of the mud around the Gate platform had already dried, locking faint traces of seaweed tracks into the ground.
The aliens had congregated around the platform. Daniel and Carter slipped right back into geek mode without so much as a nod in Jack's direction, leaving him alone with Teal'c.
Jack stretched out on the platform steps, low enough to avoid any unexpected wormholes. "Twenty Questions?"
Teal'c sat next to Jack, his staff weapon casting a thin line of shadow across them both. "Is it bigger than a breadbox, O'Neill?"
"Don't you want to start with 'animal, vegetable, or mineral'?" Jack said, closing his eyes against the sun.
"I feel confident that I can guess your object without that information," Teal'c said, giving his smug superiority full rein.
Jack scowled at the sky, spontaneously changing his object to something Teal'c would never, ever guess; the guy was smart, but he still didn't know half as much about pop culture as Jack did. Jack had been taking it easy on Teal'c. Classic movies alone were going to provide an entire day of Teal'c-stumping objects.
By late afternoon, Jack was reluctantly impressed by the depth of Teal'c's cable television-imparted wisdom.
Daniel tore himself away from the oh-so-fascinating process of making spools of recordings of seaweed language, just long enough to wander over to the platform steps and announce, "Jack, I burned my Powerbar."
Jack glanced at Teal'c, who just shrugged with his eyebrows. "I know, Daniel. I was there. I almost sat on it this morning," Jack said, trying to figure out what Daniel was after.
"It's nearly evening," Daniel said, as though Jack was unaware.
"Yes," Jack agreed, flipping off his hat to ruffle his sweat-dampened hair. "Evening. When the sun is low in the sky and linguists want ... what, exactly?"
"He wants your Powerbar," Teal'c said, looking as smug as though he'd just beaten Jack at Twenty Questions yet again.
"That doesn't count," Jack grumbled, pulling his hat back down over his eyes.
"I believe it does," Teal'c said.
"Can we focus on the issue, here?" Daniel snapped, nudging Jack with a foot.
The Stargate chose that moment to interrupt, beginning the slow whirr-clank of an incoming wormhole. Jack jumped off of the platform steps, grabbing his gun with both hands.
The radio at his shoulder crackled to life in tandem with the wormhole. "SG-1, do you copy?"
Jack released his P90, letting it fall back against his chest as he reached for his radio. "Yeah, General, we're here."
"Has Dr. Jackson made any progress with the alien language?"
"Not much," Daniel said. "To be honest, I don't think I'm going to get anywhere here."
Hammond was unexpectedly pleased with that news. "I've got something that might help you out," he said, and as he spoke, a narrow crate emerged through the wormhole. "When the Aschen heard what you were doing, they offered us a device."
Daniel looked up at Jack, and then away. That was the moment, Jack thought; that was the reality-sets-in moment, and it landed like a blow to the diaphragm.
"A device," Jack repeated, staring at the event horizon.
"A translation device," Hammond said. "The scientists here have inspected it, and we'd like you to give it a field test."
For a moment, no one spoke.
"Sounds good, sir," Carter said, somewhere behind him and to the left. "We've received the crate. We'll have a full report on the device when we 'gate home tomorrow."
"Thank you, Major," Hammond said. A brief hiss of white noise accompanied the soft whoosh of the wormhole shutting down; when both sounds faded, only the distant pops and clacks of seaweed language filled the silence.
"Jack," Daniel finally said, "if we act like the sky is falling every time the Aschen give us some piece of new technology..."
"You heard the General. He wants a field test." Jack turned away from the Stargate, the crate, and Daniel; he didn't want to have to watch them open it, and a much-needed rationalization suggested he couldn't really be of much use with linguistic technology, anyway. "I'm going to do a sweep of the perimeter."
Daniel tried again. "Jack..."
Jack could already hear the low scuffle of Carter's boots on the platform steps. The crate wasn't the end of the world, not really; there was no literal Pandora's Box to be opened, unless one counted the Stargate itself. The crate was just one more blow to any chance Jack had ever had of making them see reason, and all he could think about was the wasted time he'd spent summoning camaraderie like the ghost of missions past when he could have been reasoning with them, persuading them, convincing them.
"Check in on the half-hour," Jack said, retreating to the more welcoming silence of the cliffs above.
--
He watched anyway, from a height that obscured whatever device Daniel and Carter had plucked from the crate. Daniel, it appeared, actually stopped to read the manual; Carter sat down on the steps and fidgeted with the device until Daniel took it from her, approaching the seaweed aliens.
A moment later, chaos erupted. The cluster of seaweed aliens around Daniel and Carter became so dense that Jack couldn't pick them out in the crowd.
Daniel's voice came over the radio. "Jack, you'd better get down here."
"Already on my way," he said, and ran.
--
When Jack got back to the Stargate, the aliens had calmed, and one of them appeared to have emerged as the leader.
"...Absolutely amazing," Daniel was saying as Jack walked up. "Jack! Listen, you've got to hear this."
The device in Daniel's hand was slightly thicker than a remote control. When Daniel pressed a button near the top, a distinctively Aschen voice began to overlay the steady babble of seaweed language. "We did not understand that you did not understand about the offering," it said. "We apologize for any confusion."
Daniel released the button, and made an emphatic gesture with the device. "See? I knew I did the right thing when I burned it."
"That wasn't the seaweed mons- the aliens," Jack objected. "That sounded like the Aschen."
"The voice on the translator is Aschen," Carter said, taking the device from Daniel. "We could probably change that."
Jack turned to Daniel, grasping the first argument that came to mind. "All of your tapes," he said, stabbing a finger at Daniel's little pile of recordings. "All the work you've done - wouldn't you rather know for yourself?"
Daniel looked gratifyingly abashed. "I will, of course, when I get back to my office..."
"Then do it," Jack interrupted, "and put the toy away."
Carter intervened with a vehemence that surprised him. "It's not a toy, sir. An hour ago we had no idea what they were saying, and now we could negotiate a treaty with them if we wanted to."
"Not that we need to, now that we've got the Aschen." Jack's temper was rising, and the glint of sunlight on the small metal box in her hand only sped his anger along. He'd done a lot of pointless arguing back on Earth, over the past few weeks, but this was different; this was just the four of them, alone, too close for thoughts and emotions to be entirely contained. "The translator isn't the problem here, and you know it."
"The translator is aiding us," Teal'c said, "as is everything the Aschen has given."
Daniel's low, over-confident voice was the last straw. "This is just a control issue for you, isn't it, Jack?"
"Why can't any of you see what I see?" Jack shouted, loud enough to nearly make himself hoarse with just that one all-encompassing sentence. Daniel looked utterly taken aback; Jack just stared at him, at a complete loss for words.
Jack could see their walls rebuilding brick by brick, could hear it in the silence that followed his outburst. They'd forgotten what the reality outside of this mission was, allowed themselves to forget because that was easier, safer. Even when Hammond had disrupted it all with his latest Aschen gizmo, they hadn't completely relinquished the fantasy that everything, even Jack, had gone back to the way it was. Now they were looking at him exactly as they had been for days prior to the mission; confused, betrayed, assessing. Disbelieving.
He had to say something to sway them, while he still had the chance. The three of them were the smartest people he knew; they couldn't remain willfully blind forever. Daniel only stared, and Carter was clutching the Aschen device like a lifeline; half-desperate to persuade at least one of them, Jack turned to Teal'c. "Teal'c, don't you realize what's going on here? Of all people, you - dammit, it's just like the Goa'uld!"
Teal'c met Jack's eyes; that was unexpected, and Jack felt a swift flicker of hope. "The Goa'uld are precisely the point, O'Neill," Teal'c said, everything about his voice and bearing resolved, determined, unshakeable. "The Aschen will help us defeat the Goa'uld, and we will be free."
Jack realized that there was no quarter to found, none, and every last bit of reserve dried up and blew away. If they were really so willing to let themselves be fooled, they weren't the people he'd thought they were. "Earth isn't a part of that we, is it? Are you really prepared to sell out Earth to gain freedom for the Jaffa?"
"We are not 'selling out' Earth," Teal'c said.
"But even if you thought we were..." Jack said, and stopped.
He stopped because it was still Teal'c, still Carter and Daniel; only his perception of them had changed. Part of him wanted to lash out, if persuasion fell short - but even that small part knew there were things he couldn't say, even now, even with all of them staring at him like he had a snake in his head.
"On P4C-970 you were happy - you were excited, I know you were. You wanted this as badly as we all did." Carter's voice was firm, almost cold, and this wasn't how he'd thought it would go, not at all. "I don't understand what changed."
"I stopped to smell the roses, that's what," Jack said, fighting off a steadily encroaching sense of failure.
The look she wore was guarded, almost sad; Teal'c had retreated so far beneath his mask of neutrality that his normal expression seemed downright animated by comparison. Only Daniel looked like he was still listening, but Jack didn't want to hope, not again, not yet.
"We can talk about this when we get back to Earth," Jack said - and that was a too-obvious lie, because when they got back to Earth they'd be separated, and there wouldn't be time or inclination for any of them to talk to him. "I'm going to go set up camp, before it starts getting dark."
Jack half-expected Daniel to stay behind, but he didn't; Daniel followed Jack back to their tent, walking close enough behind for Jack to hear the soft whisper of Daniel's footsteps across the grass.
--
Daniel rolled out his sleeping back in silence, only stopping to look up at Jack when they were kneeling on their bags, half-turned away from one another. "Why?"
Jack paused in the act of taking off his vest, fingers sliding to a stop. "Why, what?"
"You're so... angry." Daniel looked confused, almost lost; his hands moved restlessly across the surface of his sleeping bag, smoothing out invisible wrinkles. "What happened? Why?"
"Why the hell do you think I'm angry, Daniel?" Jack wanted to shout again, to really let Daniel have it, but his voice wouldn't lift above a tired, weary tone that sounded strange to his own ears. "We're giving them the entire planet on a platter, and you won't see it."
"But what convinced you?" Daniel said, a little less hesitant than before.
Jack looked away. He didn't have any tangible proof, not yet - just the stomach-turning certainty that this was all wrong, that handing over absolutely everything like this could never be right, that it was already too late. Daniel had been right, in a way; it was a control issue, on a level that none of them seemed capable of understanding.
"I'm here, Jack," Daniel said, as open and earnest as the day Jack had met him. "I'm listening. I'm just not hearing anything that says to me that you know something I don't."
"I..." Jack was still hoarse from his earlier tirade - or maybe his throat was just catching on the words he didn't have, the words that would have made all the difference. "Daniel, it's wrong."
Daniel shifted closer, every hint of confusion gone. "I get why you're unhappy. I wasn't thrilled at first, either. But the Aschen - Jack, it's incredible, and they're giving it all to us, they want to help."
"For free," Jack said, shaking his head. "They're giving it to us for nothing, Daniel."
Daniel's posture finally turned to full certainty bordering on annoyance, and at last, Jack looked up. The look on Daniel's face caught Jack completely by surprise: Daniel burned with a hope that bordered on fanaticism. On Daniel, of all people, that looked scary as hell.
Jack was, he thought, meeting Daniel for the first time all over again. Daniel had always been a man balancing on a razor's edge of doubt and need, and now that the Aschen had arrived with their false hope and empty promises, Daniel was just like the others. Jack had counted on Daniel to be the guy who asked questions, but it seemed that had been an incredibly foolish expectation. Maybe, Jack thought, Daniel just wanted to believe the facade of peace too badly to question what was going on beneath it.
"No more hunger," Daniel whispered, and the words were seductive; Jack wanted to be wrong, he truly did. "No more war, Jack. We'll be heroes, and no one will care if -" Daniel's hands lifted into the space between their bodies, stopping just short of Jack's half-opened vest. "No one will care."
Jack didn't have to ask what Daniel meant; he knew.
Daniel's hands turned palms-up; the invitation was unmistakable. Daniel's gesture should've changed everything, meant everything - but Earth was no longer free, and Jack was no longer free to give in, not the way Daniel wanted.
If Jack didn't meet Daniel halfway, Daniel's hands would fall, and Jack could pretend for awhile that he'd won the battle. But the simple fact that Daniel had reached out at all meant that Jack had already lost - lost the war, lost Daniel, lost every shred of hope that the thin veneer of normalcy had afforded him since they'd first met the Aschen. War and hope and Daniel were all wrapped up together, finally, and this was it for all of them, this was as far as Jack could go; as long as he could hold out for.
Those uplifted hands and the offer they implied were opening salvo and victory march all in one. Jack lost because Daniel was right, it didn't matter - and Daniel lost for the same reason, he just didn't realize it yet.
"Daniel," Jack said, "I'll never believe."
"But you will." Daniel looked utterly convinced of the truth of his words, and that same unshakeable convinction had been right so many times that if they'd been talking about anything else, anything else at all, Jack would've had second thoughts. "Jack, this is what we fought for. Earth will be safe, and not just Earth - every planet, every species that's ever been threatened by the Goa'uld. We've won."
Daniel shifted forward; not quite pressing against Jack, but invading his space nonetheless in a way that was wholly unfamiliar. Slowly, hesitantly, Jack flattened his palms over Daniel's - meeting Daniel's invitation with a gesture of supplication, fingers closing over Daniel's just to have something to latch onto.
Daniel pulled Jack toward him, and smiled against Jack's mouth.
Jack wasn't bitter, not yet; when all that hope and belief cooled off into something everyday, something taken for granted - then Jack would be bitter, then he'd be furious, and he could already see it happening. It was happening between them, in the slow conversion of the unknown to the known, in the lines they were crossing that meant nothing in the too-perfect future Daniel envisioned.
For all that Jack felt like he was undressing Daniel completely, they never quite got out of their clothes. The situation didn't allow for it, and the look on Daniel's face suggested they'd have plenty of time for that later on, back home, when they were completely alone.
Jack knew better, but he nearly forgot; when he touched Daniel, Jack nearly forgot about the Aschen altogether.
Nearly.
Afterward, Daniel looked at Jack with eyes alight with discovery, with promise. If Jack stayed, if Jack gave in, if Jack believed; this was what the future could be, every night just like this one. And maybe there was hope there for Jack, after all: if Daniel could unknowingly help him forget what they'd done, if Daniel's body could be Jack's respite from what they'd become ....
Daniel reached for Jack again; not with hope, this time, but with expectation.
Jack looked away, and dressed in silence. The space between them grew, multiplying exponentially with each clumsy jerk of Jack's fingers over the wrinkled fabric of his uniform. When Jack paused at the tent opening and turned back, Daniel's earlier look of promise was gone, replaced by one of dawning realization.
Jack wanted to say something to make the moment less painful, but he couldn't even find the words to say goodbye.
Daniel smiled a little. "'But Lot's wife looked back, and became a pillar of salt.'"
Finally, Jack knew what to say. "Get some sleep. We've got an early start tomorrow."
And he left, somehow managing not to turn back again.
--
SG-1's last return through the Stargate should've been greeted with fanfare, with anything at all to make note of the occasion; but to those on the winning side, there was no occasion. The old order was simply fading into the new one, with no visible transfer of power.
That was how it would be, when the rest of the world was told. Once they found out they were getting world peace and a cure for old age, there would be no revolution.
Jack studied the Stargate, not quite meeting Daniel's eyes. "If you'd never translated the cover stone, if we'd never gone through..."
Only silence followed. When Jack turned to look for Daniel, he realized SG-1 had already departed without him; the room was empty. Jack was alone.
--
Author's Note: Written for Ev Vy in the Jack/Daniel ficathon. Many thanks to Tafkar for the beta.
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