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WIP Amnesty, Day 11
This was going to be step one in the development of a Sam/Jack/Daniel OT3--a Sam/Daniel story, then a Jack/Daniel story, then an OT3 story, all with titles from "Little Gidding," by T. S. Eliot, also the source of the line on my very first SG-1 icon.
Of course, I got exactly as far into this story as you will see below, realized that Sam Carter is female which makes Sam/Daniel het which means, and I really just could not get past this at the time, Sam never gets to fuck Daniel back, and then I ran screaming home to due South for a while. *g*
But I'm still rather fond of what I did manage to write, so here it is:
Sam/Daniel. Set during "A Hundred Days." Decidedly not explicit.
After the first mission to Abydos, when Daniel had been dead to his own world, Jack had gone down to the holding cell Daniel had been sleeping in, on those rare occasions when he slept, and gathered up his belongings. He’d packed it all into boxes with the fastidiousness of a man who’d spent his entire adult life in uniform, neatly rinsing and bagging the toothbrush and paste, folding the non-regulation blankets tangled on the bunk, carefully rolling the few dress clothes so they wouldn’t wrinkle too badly. Daniel’s will, made out on a photocopied form they’d handed him, had named Jack as executor and beneficiary both, mainly because Jack had been the one responsible for making sure he got his paperwork in order, and so had been standing over him in a uniform with a nametag on it. O’Neill, with two L’s. Jack had taken the boxes home, after, and put them in his garage, and if he had any reason for saving all that stuff, he never told anyone.
Daniel knew all this because when he finally did have to come back to his home world (the world where, when he had to go there, they had to take him in) Jack had taken Daniel back to his place, given him a beer and a bed and in the morning gave him the few pathetic remnants of his former life, all neat in labeled boxes.
Now it was Jack who was gone, and it was Daniel’s turn to make that visit to an empty space. No boxes, because Jack wasn’t dead and no one was even meant to believe he was, but Daniel moved silently through the silent house, unplugging appliances, throwing out the sparse contents of the fridge. There was a single lonely bottle of beer on the top shelf, and he took it up to the rooftop deck. It was a cloudy night, no stars to look at and wonder which one was shining down on Jack, so Daniel just perched on the railing and drank the beer, quickly, before it got warm enough to really taste.
The Tollan had told him, maybe in a year. He’d tried to talk to Jake, but only gotten some other Tok’ra. She had given him one of those looks that reminded him just how closely they were related to the Goa’uld, and started listing off how many of their operatives were lost, unaccounted for, trapped in dangerous places without hope of relief. Daniel knew how to hear *no* in dozens of languages, so he’d nodded and thanked them for their time and left before he gagged on his own polite words. So there were just the Tollan, their ship, their maybe-in-a-year.
That would leave Jack on another planet, a planet struggling to rebuild after disastrous losses, for a whole year. Daniel knew, first hand, how that could go; he knew how far you could fall in love, with a woman, with a planet and a people, in a year. They could fall in love with you, too, and Daniel knew Edora would love Jack as much as Abydos had loved him. Jack was a leader, and they would need that, although he’d be a bastard about it and they’d start off hating him. It wouldn’t matter. They’d follow him sooner or later, and then they’d love him. Daniel had followed Jack all over the galaxy in the last few years. He knew how it worked.
A year would be too long, if they were really going to get him back at the end of it, and the Tollan hadn’t even been able to promise that with any certainty. So Sam was Jack’s best bet, their best bet for getting him back. Sam and her particle accelerator that would be powered by naquadah and fit in the gate room and break through a fused gate. Daniel had done a little homework on particle accelerators, in between his diplomatic efforts, and while two and a half years’ acquaintance with Samantha Carter had caused him to nearly lose his grasp of every word he knew that meant “impossible” through lack of use, he still knew this was going to take a while. It was going to take longer, for instance, than Sam could stay awake continuously.
Daniel knocked back the last of the bottle and jumped down from the railing, wobbling a little as he did, lightheaded. He tried to remember the last time he’d eaten, or slept. He’d crashed for a couple of hours between his visits with the Tollan and the Tok’ra, he knew that, and there had been coffee while he was relating the news to Hammond, but he’d only picked at the donut. He set the empty bottle down carefully in one corner, so that he’d have both hands free to get him down the stairs in the dark, and when he got to Jack’s kitchen he raided the cupboards, searching for starch products. He wound up with beef jerky and a handful of stale crackers, but it tasted better than a lot of things, and when he’d eaten he felt okay to drive.
***
Sam was perched on a lab stool, scribbling furiously. He walked up behind her and peered over her shoulder, and stared for a while at the strings of numbers and symbols. When he was young, mathematics had seemed like yet another foreign language, and Daniel had been briefly intent on learning its mysteries. But he’d soon concluded that you couldn’t say anything interesting with numbers–-just shapes and lines, numbers and more numbers, no stories, no histories, no people–-so he’d given up. He wondered, now, not for the first time, what it would be like to be able to hope and dream and rail against fate in numbers, the way Sam did.
Her right hand was clamped tight around her pencil, her left arm braced against the table as though it was holding her up, the fingers of her left hand spread wide and pressed rigidly against the top of the page. She still hadn’t acknowledged his presence, kept on scribbling, legibility decaying as an inverse function of velocity. She’d never forgive him if she had a breakthrough and couldn’t read her own notes afterward.
Daniel reached over her shoulder to hover one fingertip just above the page, where he wouldn’t smudge the graphite scrawls. “Sam. Math error.”
“What?” Surprised by his audacity but not startled, so she had at least known he was standing there. “What math error? Where?” She batted his hand away and bent closer over the page.
When she was still searching after two full minutes had elapsed, Daniel said gently, “Look, Sam, I don’t know whether you made a mistake or not, but if you don’t know either then you’re obviously done for the night.”
Her left hand closed into a fist. “Daniel, I don’t have time.”
“Yes, you do. You have to. How long has it been since you slept?”
She glanced over at the clock, and he could see the question forming in her eyes, though he knew she was too cagey to ask. *AM or PM? What day?*. “Sixty-two hours,” she said, after a moment. “Give or take.”
“Okay, well, come on. Get off base, get some sleep, you can be back here in six or eight,” *or twelve or twenty-four*, “hours, and you’ll be able to work better with a clear head.”
Sam straightened up quickly, too quickly, and swayed a bit, leaning back against Daniel. He set his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, and then she nodded and swung sideways and hopped down off her stool. “Okay. Thanks for the intervention, I’ll see you–-”
“No,” Daniel said, firmly, taking her by the elbow and towing her toward the door. “I’m a little insulted that you even tried that. I’m driving you home, you’re not remotely road-safe.”
Sam glared at him, and he knew there would have been playfulness in the look, another time, but it was blunted into near-sincerity by her exhaustion and her desperation. He took it in the spirit she would have intended it, normally; he smiled and marched her to the elevator. On the ride up she stepped slightly away from him, leaned against the wall, tipped her head back and closed her eyes. She didn’t smile, didn’t visibly relax, but the fluorescent light shining full on her face showed the bruises under her eyes, the grey creeping into her skin, and he knew she needed this whether she thanked him for it or not.
***
Sam dozed in the car, and Daniel walked her up to the front door, let them in with his own key, and ushered her inside. She didn’t lean on him, but let him guide her with a hand at the small of her back, moving when he did and otherwise standing in what looked like a stupor, though he had a sneaking suspicion that she was doing calculations in her head as she stared dully into the middle distance. When he walked her into her bedroom, some kind of autopilot took over; she grabbed pajamas and headed to the bathroom, and Daniel sat down on the foot of the bed, with some vague thought of staying to tuck her in and make sure she actually went to sleep.
He stared into the middle distance himself, then, for a little while, listened to various plumbing sounds and thought vague disconnected thoughts about ritual washing and modern conveniences, and then Sam was standing in front of him in her cute striped jammies. “Daniel,” she said, sounding suspiciously wide awake but at least not even jokingly angry with him anymore. “How long has it been since *you* slept?”
He blinked, and raised his eyes from Sam’s tank top, which was conveniently at eye level, to her face, which bore a little smile, and a line between her eyebrows just like Jack always had. “Within the last twenty-four hours,” he said, too weary to try to sound defensive about it. “Sometime.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “You’re not much more road-safe than I am.”
Daniel shrugged. “My terror of your couch compels me.”
Sam glanced over his shoulder, at whatever was behind him, and then reached out and carefully took his glasses off his face. “Sack out here, then. We can share.”
She didn’t bother saying *just like that time we had to zip our bedrolls together to keep warm*, made no reference to tents or all the times they’d slept close to one another, just gave him a gentle push back that rocked him but didn’t lay him out. Daniel thought of the bag that he kept in the back of his car, with a toothbrush and change of clothes and sleep pants, but Sam was crawling up from the foot of the bed to claim the right side. She flipped the covers back, and Daniel had slept in his fatigues as often as not, the last few years. He leaned down and unlaced his boots, kicked them off without sparing a thought to someone tripping over them later, and turned and crawled up the bed himself.
Sam’s hand on his ankle guided his legs under the covers, and as she pulled them up he muttered, “Wasn’t I supposed to be tucking you in?”
His eyelids had gone heavy as his head sank into the pillow, which was soft and smelled like Sam and fabric softener, but he heard a smile in her ladylike snort. “Sleep, Daniel.”
He said, “Yes ma’am,” more or less, already drifting away.
***
Daniel woke up pressed snugly against Sam, his face in her hair, his arms wrapped around her middle. One of her arms lay across his waist, her hand resting on his side beneath his t-shirt. He felt sweaty from sleeping in his clothes, which had never bothered him offworld but felt distinctly inappropriate in Sam’s fresh-smelling bed, and his morning hard on was reminding him why waking up in zippered pants wasn’t such a great idea, to say nothing of Sam’s hip pressed against his groin. He opened his eyes to find her watching him. “Daniel,” she said quietly, half a question.
Maybe he’d made the decision sometime before, without knowing it: maybe he’d chosen this while he slept, moving into her arms, or last night when he crawled into her bed, or maybe this had been the inevitable result of prying her out of her lab and bringing her home. On the other hand, maybe it was such an easy question to answer that he just didn’t have to hesitate before saying, “Yeah, Sam, we’re good.”
Sam nodded, meeting his eyes steadily for a breath or two before she rolled onto her side, slinging one leg over his and wriggling up to bring them so perfectly into alignment that he shuddered, his hips pressing against hers without conscious thought. She made a little encouraging noise, and Daniel forced his eyes open to see hers were closed, her forehead pressed to his, and he could feel her breath on his face.
Dig site romances, to say nothing of his year of marriage on Abydos, had taught Daniel to regard minty freshness as more a curiosity than anything else, and he suspected Sam wasn’t so much squeamish as polite. Still, he kept his lips together as he brushed them across hers, cautious until she moved against him again and he forgot to be. Her mouth tasted only faintly sleep-sour; mostly she just tasted like Sam, the same scent that had surrounded him all night.
Of course, I got exactly as far into this story as you will see below, realized that Sam Carter is female which makes Sam/Daniel het which means, and I really just could not get past this at the time, Sam never gets to fuck Daniel back, and then I ran screaming home to due South for a while. *g*
But I'm still rather fond of what I did manage to write, so here it is:
Sam/Daniel. Set during "A Hundred Days." Decidedly not explicit.
After the first mission to Abydos, when Daniel had been dead to his own world, Jack had gone down to the holding cell Daniel had been sleeping in, on those rare occasions when he slept, and gathered up his belongings. He’d packed it all into boxes with the fastidiousness of a man who’d spent his entire adult life in uniform, neatly rinsing and bagging the toothbrush and paste, folding the non-regulation blankets tangled on the bunk, carefully rolling the few dress clothes so they wouldn’t wrinkle too badly. Daniel’s will, made out on a photocopied form they’d handed him, had named Jack as executor and beneficiary both, mainly because Jack had been the one responsible for making sure he got his paperwork in order, and so had been standing over him in a uniform with a nametag on it. O’Neill, with two L’s. Jack had taken the boxes home, after, and put them in his garage, and if he had any reason for saving all that stuff, he never told anyone.
Daniel knew all this because when he finally did have to come back to his home world (the world where, when he had to go there, they had to take him in) Jack had taken Daniel back to his place, given him a beer and a bed and in the morning gave him the few pathetic remnants of his former life, all neat in labeled boxes.
Now it was Jack who was gone, and it was Daniel’s turn to make that visit to an empty space. No boxes, because Jack wasn’t dead and no one was even meant to believe he was, but Daniel moved silently through the silent house, unplugging appliances, throwing out the sparse contents of the fridge. There was a single lonely bottle of beer on the top shelf, and he took it up to the rooftop deck. It was a cloudy night, no stars to look at and wonder which one was shining down on Jack, so Daniel just perched on the railing and drank the beer, quickly, before it got warm enough to really taste.
The Tollan had told him, maybe in a year. He’d tried to talk to Jake, but only gotten some other Tok’ra. She had given him one of those looks that reminded him just how closely they were related to the Goa’uld, and started listing off how many of their operatives were lost, unaccounted for, trapped in dangerous places without hope of relief. Daniel knew how to hear *no* in dozens of languages, so he’d nodded and thanked them for their time and left before he gagged on his own polite words. So there were just the Tollan, their ship, their maybe-in-a-year.
That would leave Jack on another planet, a planet struggling to rebuild after disastrous losses, for a whole year. Daniel knew, first hand, how that could go; he knew how far you could fall in love, with a woman, with a planet and a people, in a year. They could fall in love with you, too, and Daniel knew Edora would love Jack as much as Abydos had loved him. Jack was a leader, and they would need that, although he’d be a bastard about it and they’d start off hating him. It wouldn’t matter. They’d follow him sooner or later, and then they’d love him. Daniel had followed Jack all over the galaxy in the last few years. He knew how it worked.
A year would be too long, if they were really going to get him back at the end of it, and the Tollan hadn’t even been able to promise that with any certainty. So Sam was Jack’s best bet, their best bet for getting him back. Sam and her particle accelerator that would be powered by naquadah and fit in the gate room and break through a fused gate. Daniel had done a little homework on particle accelerators, in between his diplomatic efforts, and while two and a half years’ acquaintance with Samantha Carter had caused him to nearly lose his grasp of every word he knew that meant “impossible” through lack of use, he still knew this was going to take a while. It was going to take longer, for instance, than Sam could stay awake continuously.
Daniel knocked back the last of the bottle and jumped down from the railing, wobbling a little as he did, lightheaded. He tried to remember the last time he’d eaten, or slept. He’d crashed for a couple of hours between his visits with the Tollan and the Tok’ra, he knew that, and there had been coffee while he was relating the news to Hammond, but he’d only picked at the donut. He set the empty bottle down carefully in one corner, so that he’d have both hands free to get him down the stairs in the dark, and when he got to Jack’s kitchen he raided the cupboards, searching for starch products. He wound up with beef jerky and a handful of stale crackers, but it tasted better than a lot of things, and when he’d eaten he felt okay to drive.
***
Sam was perched on a lab stool, scribbling furiously. He walked up behind her and peered over her shoulder, and stared for a while at the strings of numbers and symbols. When he was young, mathematics had seemed like yet another foreign language, and Daniel had been briefly intent on learning its mysteries. But he’d soon concluded that you couldn’t say anything interesting with numbers–-just shapes and lines, numbers and more numbers, no stories, no histories, no people–-so he’d given up. He wondered, now, not for the first time, what it would be like to be able to hope and dream and rail against fate in numbers, the way Sam did.
Her right hand was clamped tight around her pencil, her left arm braced against the table as though it was holding her up, the fingers of her left hand spread wide and pressed rigidly against the top of the page. She still hadn’t acknowledged his presence, kept on scribbling, legibility decaying as an inverse function of velocity. She’d never forgive him if she had a breakthrough and couldn’t read her own notes afterward.
Daniel reached over her shoulder to hover one fingertip just above the page, where he wouldn’t smudge the graphite scrawls. “Sam. Math error.”
“What?” Surprised by his audacity but not startled, so she had at least known he was standing there. “What math error? Where?” She batted his hand away and bent closer over the page.
When she was still searching after two full minutes had elapsed, Daniel said gently, “Look, Sam, I don’t know whether you made a mistake or not, but if you don’t know either then you’re obviously done for the night.”
Her left hand closed into a fist. “Daniel, I don’t have time.”
“Yes, you do. You have to. How long has it been since you slept?”
She glanced over at the clock, and he could see the question forming in her eyes, though he knew she was too cagey to ask. *AM or PM? What day?*. “Sixty-two hours,” she said, after a moment. “Give or take.”
“Okay, well, come on. Get off base, get some sleep, you can be back here in six or eight,” *or twelve or twenty-four*, “hours, and you’ll be able to work better with a clear head.”
Sam straightened up quickly, too quickly, and swayed a bit, leaning back against Daniel. He set his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, and then she nodded and swung sideways and hopped down off her stool. “Okay. Thanks for the intervention, I’ll see you–-”
“No,” Daniel said, firmly, taking her by the elbow and towing her toward the door. “I’m a little insulted that you even tried that. I’m driving you home, you’re not remotely road-safe.”
Sam glared at him, and he knew there would have been playfulness in the look, another time, but it was blunted into near-sincerity by her exhaustion and her desperation. He took it in the spirit she would have intended it, normally; he smiled and marched her to the elevator. On the ride up she stepped slightly away from him, leaned against the wall, tipped her head back and closed her eyes. She didn’t smile, didn’t visibly relax, but the fluorescent light shining full on her face showed the bruises under her eyes, the grey creeping into her skin, and he knew she needed this whether she thanked him for it or not.
***
Sam dozed in the car, and Daniel walked her up to the front door, let them in with his own key, and ushered her inside. She didn’t lean on him, but let him guide her with a hand at the small of her back, moving when he did and otherwise standing in what looked like a stupor, though he had a sneaking suspicion that she was doing calculations in her head as she stared dully into the middle distance. When he walked her into her bedroom, some kind of autopilot took over; she grabbed pajamas and headed to the bathroom, and Daniel sat down on the foot of the bed, with some vague thought of staying to tuck her in and make sure she actually went to sleep.
He stared into the middle distance himself, then, for a little while, listened to various plumbing sounds and thought vague disconnected thoughts about ritual washing and modern conveniences, and then Sam was standing in front of him in her cute striped jammies. “Daniel,” she said, sounding suspiciously wide awake but at least not even jokingly angry with him anymore. “How long has it been since *you* slept?”
He blinked, and raised his eyes from Sam’s tank top, which was conveniently at eye level, to her face, which bore a little smile, and a line between her eyebrows just like Jack always had. “Within the last twenty-four hours,” he said, too weary to try to sound defensive about it. “Sometime.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “You’re not much more road-safe than I am.”
Daniel shrugged. “My terror of your couch compels me.”
Sam glanced over his shoulder, at whatever was behind him, and then reached out and carefully took his glasses off his face. “Sack out here, then. We can share.”
She didn’t bother saying *just like that time we had to zip our bedrolls together to keep warm*, made no reference to tents or all the times they’d slept close to one another, just gave him a gentle push back that rocked him but didn’t lay him out. Daniel thought of the bag that he kept in the back of his car, with a toothbrush and change of clothes and sleep pants, but Sam was crawling up from the foot of the bed to claim the right side. She flipped the covers back, and Daniel had slept in his fatigues as often as not, the last few years. He leaned down and unlaced his boots, kicked them off without sparing a thought to someone tripping over them later, and turned and crawled up the bed himself.
Sam’s hand on his ankle guided his legs under the covers, and as she pulled them up he muttered, “Wasn’t I supposed to be tucking you in?”
His eyelids had gone heavy as his head sank into the pillow, which was soft and smelled like Sam and fabric softener, but he heard a smile in her ladylike snort. “Sleep, Daniel.”
He said, “Yes ma’am,” more or less, already drifting away.
***
Daniel woke up pressed snugly against Sam, his face in her hair, his arms wrapped around her middle. One of her arms lay across his waist, her hand resting on his side beneath his t-shirt. He felt sweaty from sleeping in his clothes, which had never bothered him offworld but felt distinctly inappropriate in Sam’s fresh-smelling bed, and his morning hard on was reminding him why waking up in zippered pants wasn’t such a great idea, to say nothing of Sam’s hip pressed against his groin. He opened his eyes to find her watching him. “Daniel,” she said quietly, half a question.
Maybe he’d made the decision sometime before, without knowing it: maybe he’d chosen this while he slept, moving into her arms, or last night when he crawled into her bed, or maybe this had been the inevitable result of prying her out of her lab and bringing her home. On the other hand, maybe it was such an easy question to answer that he just didn’t have to hesitate before saying, “Yeah, Sam, we’re good.”
Sam nodded, meeting his eyes steadily for a breath or two before she rolled onto her side, slinging one leg over his and wriggling up to bring them so perfectly into alignment that he shuddered, his hips pressing against hers without conscious thought. She made a little encouraging noise, and Daniel forced his eyes open to see hers were closed, her forehead pressed to his, and he could feel her breath on his face.
Dig site romances, to say nothing of his year of marriage on Abydos, had taught Daniel to regard minty freshness as more a curiosity than anything else, and he suspected Sam wasn’t so much squeamish as polite. Still, he kept his lips together as he brushed them across hers, cautious until she moved against him again and he forgot to be. Her mouth tasted only faintly sleep-sour; mostly she just tasted like Sam, the same scent that had surrounded him all night.