dig

So AU. More AU than you can shake a stick at. Thanks go to Oreph and Jess for beta, and to Rachael for the read-through.

I do not know which to prefer,
the beauty of inflections
or the beauty of innuendoes,
the blackbird whistling
or just after.
--Wallace Stevens, "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

Whistling Or Just After
by Hetre Z

He thinks he should have buried something when he had the chance. A replica of Daniel's glasses, maybe, or a boot.

"I'm glad you're back," Carter says, smiling.

Daniel says, "You've said that already."

"I still mean it."

He should have done something, just to get it out of his system. Teal'c says, "I am glad as well." They'll have a group hug soon.

Daniel looks at him, eyebrows raised. "You didn't miss me."

Jack says, "I wanted you back, if that counts. I've been taking your messages for a year; now you can answer some of them." He could have held a little funeral. Or bowed his head one day, just for a minute. "Speaking of which, Walt Disney called. He says --" he stops; Daniel's smiling already. It's the first time he's smiled in over a year.

Daniel steps closer. Jack wants to lean away, a little. He missed Daniel, he should say so. Daniel says, quietly, "You, too."

Jack smiles. His jaw feels like it's broken.

There's a stack of gifts on Daniel's old desk, welcome-back cards, balloons, flowers, and Jack spends the afternoon helping to clear them away. Daniel said he wanted to leave some things out, to show he appreciates the gesture, but everything ends up either packed into storage boxes or stuffed in drawers anyway. There's a basket filled with candy, Astro Pops and Lik-A-Stiks and Bubble Tape, and when Jack holds it up Daniel just smiles, like he knows exactly who sent it.

"People have the weirdest sense of humor," Daniel says, and Jack wonders what the joke was.

"I wouldn't say that." He leaves the basket on the desk, and moves on to the ship-in-a-bottle set next to it. "Nobody's sent you Night of the Living Dead yet."

Daniel looks pale in the electric light. He doesn't answer; just keeps smiling and bites off a length of Bubble Tape, chewing through his smile. His breath smells like sugar and plastic. For a moment, between putting down the kite and picking up the bag of apples, he imagines Daniel's breath smelling of flowers and rot, and the decaying throat it would come from. When he looks, Daniel's skin is smooth, and the gum is bright pink between his teeth.

It's been years since Jack's had to chart stars for homework, but he mostly remembers how. He can draw the curves of the Horsehead Nebula, still, when he sharpens his pencil right and leans back in his chair. It's easy to get the big things, he thinks, when you can break them into smaller pieces. He'd be lost without the little squares on the graph paper.

Daniel looks like he's about to laugh. "You want to what?"

"C'mon, it'll be fun. You can dress in a toga and hold a bunch of grapes if you want."

"But why? I'm right here," Daniel makes little flapping motions at his chest, "you can see me, you don't need a picture. It's not like I'm going to --" he stops. "Besides, you can't draw."

"Hey, now." He shouldn't be surprised. Technically he can't draw. All Jack can really do is trace from one end of the graph square to another, over and over. "I'll have you know, I've won . . . um. Well, I haven't won any prizes, but I could have.” He squints. "Are you worried I'll make your nose too big or something?"

"Jack, you want to draw me. Doesn't that seem a little strange to you?"

"Not so much stranger than you coming back from the dead again, no."

They've sent out preliminary scans, and the planet looks fine. The grass is the same color green as water in sewage drains, and the earth is dull purple under it. The stargate is set in an open field; any enemy would be visible from a klick away, and there's been no sign of natives, just ruins. According to scans, it's a cakewalk.

"You do realize," Jack says, "this means we're gonna be attacked and held against our will, or possibly tortured, or maybe infected with some kind of weird alien virus the second we step through the gate. I mean, statistics show --"

Daniel's across from him at the briefing table, his head tilted to the side. He's almost smiling, but it's all in his eyes and forehead, so probably nobody else can see it. "So come out of the gate with your gun drawn."

"You think I wasn't going to anyway?"

"You could toss a poppet ahead of you to draw their fire." Daniel taps his pencil, and Jack can see exactly what color his eyes are behind his glasses and across the table.

"A what? A poppet, are you kidding me?"

Daniel shrugs, and General Hammond says, "Is there a problem, Colonel?"

"No, sir," he says. "SG-1's making rag dolls to fight our enemies. I think it's perfect." Daniel might be smiling again.

Walking to the gate, he ends up beside Daniel. Jack pokes him in the arm. "Seriously, a poppet? Why don't we just stick your hat on a pike and march it around?"

Their feet clack on the stargate ramp. There's a faint pressure at his shoulder and it’s Daniel shoving him lightly, playfully. For a second he imagines being pushed up against the stargate and held there. Daniel's fingers would be cold on his neck or his chest, and the glyphs would press sharply into his back. He'd be breathing hard, but Daniel wouldn't breathe at all.

He stumbles, he must have tripped on the ramp somehow, and then the gate opens and they get ready to step through. Daniel takes a deep breath and says, "I kind of missed this," and Jack thinks it's wrong but he couldn't say why.

When he dreams, it's about cutting Daniel open. Precise cuts with scalpels, and ragged cuts with steak knives, or other serrated edges. In his dreams, Daniel is silent; his eyes are warm but going colder. He doesn't beg or cry. Sometimes he says "please".

Jack stops drawing and looks, and the lines are wrong. It's better than stick figures, it's better than the map sketches Teal'c can do of ground cover, but there's still something wrong. It looks like Daniel.

"I'm impressed," he says, looking over Jack's shoulder. "It actually resembles me."

"It looks wrong." Jack tries turning it upside-down. It doesn't help.

"You could try coloring it in."

"Black and white's better." The eyebrows are crooked. Jack starts erasing in little sweeps. He's never really drawn a face before, but it shouldn't have been any more difficult than, say, blueprints. He doesn't even need a T-square for this. "Cleaner lines, simpler picture."

"Yeah, about that." Jack looks up. Daniel's scratching the side of his nose, looking confused. "You don't draw. I mean, sure, dogs and stuff, with Marin. But you don't draw."

There's a stack of clean graph paper next to him with three sharpened pencils on top, and the eraser is still in his hand. He takes the top sheet, catching the pencils when they roll. "I'm gonna try this again. You want to sit back down?"

Daniel is still behind him. His breath huffs out against the back of Jack's head. He sits down with his book, glasses on, and asks, "Like this?" but Jack's already drawing again.

Daniel calls at three on Sunday. It comes halfway through Jack's second cup of coffee, and a third through his first egg sandwich.

"They've taken my grocery store away." He sounds a little frantic. The phone feels frantic in Jack's hand, and against his ear.

"Who did what?"

"I checked, I went to go shopping and my grocery store is gone. There's a laundromat there instead. Jack," he can tell Daniel's holding the phone with both hands, "I already have a washing machine."

Jack puts his shoes on. "I can take you to mine if you want. They've got tacos in the freezer section."

When you die, the beetles come to get you, and the potato bugs, and gnats. If Daniel were still dead, he'd be swatting at them right now, begging Jack for bug spray. "It's all different, not just the store, you know? It's like I'm still gone, sometimes."

If Daniel were dead, Jack thinks he'd give him bug spray. Or anything. He's nodding yes before he can help it.

They eat together in the mess hall, the five of them. Daniel and Jonas discuss the different worlds they've been to; this one had religious persecution, this one had a sophisticated barter system, this one had clones. They don't look the same or act the same, but Jack thinks it's like a person talking to himself. There's almost no difference between them; it's just that Jonas hasn't died.

Daniel reaches past him for the salt. His wrist slides over Jack's arm, and Jack can feel the pulse there. It hurts his arm; he could check Daniel's blood pressure like this. Daniel is alive, and he and Jonas aren't any different at all.

"I'll get you a pay raise if you use some goddamn table manners." Jack thinks he sounds angry, but that's not it. It's not anger.

Daniel looks at him, arm halfway to his plate and held unmoving in the air. His face is still. "May I please, sir, have the salt, Colonel, sir?"

Jack nods, and Daniel sneers. He's different from Jonas, and same as before he left. Jack should be happy. His arm still hurts where Daniel touched it.

There's a dusty, wood-framed picture tucked into his top desk drawer, the two of them smiling and out of focus at some mountain picnic. He kept it on his desk after Daniel died the second time, and before he came back. Jack opens the drawer and looks at it, resting sideways on top of a stack of papers. He wants to burn it, but he knows that wouldn’t help.

Teal'c went to fetch firewood, and Carter's measuring the cave and checking for naqueda, pockets of poison gas, maybe little green men with guns. The cold air’s coming in through the seams of his fatigues, and his bones ache.

"Tell me again, Daniel, why we couldn't just sleep in the houses provided to us."

Daniel walks over. The tips of his ears are blue. "Jack."

"No, let me hear it. I love this part."

He looks tired. Not just in his face, but also his arms and hands, everywhere. "I made a mistake."

Jack smiles as wide as he can. "That's right."

"Although, if we're being completely honest, you did as well. I distinctly remember the natives saying something about --"

"You cold?" Daniel's hands are shaking a little, and he's clenching his jaw like his teeth would chatter if he didn't. He shakes his head. "C'mere."

His hands are cold. Jack takes one between his and starts rubbing, trying to bring the heat back. His knuckles are smooth, the hands cold and shrunken and still. All Jack can feel are the bones inside his skin.

"You're avoiding the subject."

"Of course I am," Jack says.

His hands aren't getting any warmer, and it feels good, the cold of his skin against Jack's palms and wrists. It's an emergency situation, he tells himself; his team's of no use to anyone with missing fingers. Daniel looks like he wants to leave, and Jack won't say how good it feels but he doesn't stop.

He goes to the mountain gym and Daniel’s there, practicing kicks by the far wall. The movements are clean and precise, and he’s breathing hard. His skin is splotchy red. Jack wants to close his eyes, or leave. He doesn't want to watch Daniel move.

He walks over. "You joined a dance troupe?"

"I'm taking self-defense lessons. Could you maybe," he throws Jack a boxing pad, "hold your arm out?"

"What exactly are you planning to defend yourself against?" Daniel shrugs, and kicks. Jack can feel the shock in his elbow and his wrist. "Cause if you're worried about, you know, dying again," he lifts his arm, and Daniel misses the high kick. "With your track record it's not gonna be an issue."

Daniel says, "I'll keep that in mind," and tries the high kick again. This one connects, and jars his shoulder; it makes his hand sting. Daniel keeps kicking, a little harder than before, and Jack's arm buzzes from the impact.

Offworld, awake in his tent, he listens for Daniel's breathing, and counts it. Five hundred, eight hundred. It's too steady and too constant, and sometimes Jack can't tell which is him and which is Carter, or Teal'c. They breathe in time, and Jack stays up all night waiting for a change.

The narrower the lines are, the better it looks. Daniel's face, in the picture, is smaller and thinner, a little lifeless, cold. It's perfect. Whatever was wrong before is gone, and it's perfect.

"Here," he holds the picture out, "tell me what you think."

Daniel takes the picture. He breathes in once, sharply, and he looks angry. "Jack, what the fuck?"

"What?"

"This is a joke, this is. This is you fucking with me. What." He shakes his head. "Jack?"

Jack takes the picture back, and it looks fine. Not brilliant, he thinks, but good enough. It's just Daniel, strung up between the squares. Jack closes his eyes, and when he opens them again the picture looks like a skull, plotted neatly and with clean, precise lines.

The alarm sounds: there were casualties offworld. SG-4 comes through the gate with three carrying a stretcher. Someone's coat has been draped on the body, and the cloth arms hang limply over the sides.

The funeral will be Thursday, the soonest they could call the SG teams back. She was a captain. She's being held in the mountain morgue. Jack puts it off as long as he can, doing paperwork and reading old issues of Newsweek, but after a few hours he goes to see her.

Jack pulls back the sheet, and she's pretty. He didn’t think she would be. She looks blank, and still, a little vulnerable on the metal table. If it were Daniel, he'd feel -- something. Jack feels nothing.

A doctor walks in and sees him. "Colonel?"

"Just paying my respects." He leaves the mountain as fast as he can. At home, he watches taped baseball games and drinks, and pictures Daniel on the same table, covered with the same sheet.

He once tried to explain decision-making to Daniel, and didn't get very far. There's no such thing as logic, he said, except where it fits in with orders and instinct. You don't need a reason to make a decision, you just need to make it. Daniel kept asking, but what if it's wrong, what if you know it's not right, and Jack didn't have an answer. He thought maybe that was the point.

He finds Daniel in the corridor outside his office, and pulls him inside. "Listen, um. I have to," and then he stops. He was going to say something, I miss you, Danny or I wish you were dead, Danny. He doesn’t know what he was going to say.

But what if you're wrong? Jack leans over and kisses him.

For a second Daniel's mouth is cold and unmoving, and he thinks he could do this forever, just like this. Then Daniel starts kissing him back, and his hands come up to hold Jack's head in place, trapping him. His tongue wriggles into Jack's mouth.

When he pulls back, Daniel looks flushed, and vivid and happy. He looks ugly.

"I," he smiles and tips his head down. "Okay. Yeah, okay."

He walks away, still smiling. Jack's neck is burning. He drinks a glass of water, and then another one, but he can still taste Daniel's tongue in his mouth.

General Hammond nods. "So you're both in agreement, then."

Jack looks around, but there's no one else in the room. "Both, sir?"

"Dr Jackson came in this morning and also asked that he be transferred out."

Jack says, "I think it's best for all concerned."

"Too bad. You're breaking up our best team."

Jack looks straight ahead. On the far wall is the picture of him and Daniel at the picnic. This one isn't cropped like the one in his office, so Sam and Teal'c and the General are there as well. He and Daniel look happy.

"Yes, sir."

Daniel comes over, and they fuck in the kitchen. Leaning against the counter, with the brightly colored walls behind him and the sun on his face, he looks washed-out and almost lifeless. He doesn't make a sound, but just closes his eyes, and Jack watches him.

Jack pushes a hand under his shirt and says, "You asked to be transferred."

"Conflict of interest."

There's a second, in the middle somewhere, when Daniel opens his eyes and holds his body still. He stops breathing and stops moving, and his mouth works like he's trying to speak but nothing comes out. There's a second in the middle of it when he looks so, so beautiful.