The sound of the front door closing and keys being dropped in the dish by the door carries through the house. A couple of moments later, Jack’s worried voice echoes down the hall. “Daniel?”
Sinking lower into the hot water, Daniel can’t bring himself to respond right away. He’s not even sure whether he wants company - he’d seriously considered going to his own house, but he couldn’t seem to get warm, and Jack’s large soaking tub had been like a siren song. Anyway, it’s not a big house. It won’t take Jack long to find him.
That thought proves all too correct a moment later when the door eases open, and Jack appears, barely a shadow in the doorway. There’s only faint evening light in the long hallway, but it’s still more than the complete darkness of the bathroom where Daniel is hiding. “Daniel?” he repeats, and Daniel knows without looking up that he’s probably got that slight head tilt going on, and the narrowed eyes.
“Jack,” he replies, without moving.
“What are you doing in the dark?”
Daniel doesn’t have a good answer to that, so he shrugs. Jack seems to consider this for a moment, and then he turns and walks away. That should make him happy, since he had convinced himself he wanted to be alone, but Daniel feels a little abandoned instead. He lets his head fall back until his ears are submerged so he doesn’t have to listen to Jack walk away. His chest feels tight and he keeps his eyes closed, even though it’s too dark to see much.
Instead of allowing himself to think about his most recent mission, he starts translating poetry in his head, cycling through languages on auto pilot.
The warm water in his ears isn’t enough to hide the sound of heavy footsteps coming back into the bathroom or the sound of the door closing. It sounds far away though, watery and muffled, and Daniel’s curiosity doesn’t get the better of him until something clunks down hard on the edge of the tub. He opens his eyes and sees nothing, but only for a second before a small bright light flares, and he has to blink against the brightness of it. Jack lowers the lighter to the candle wick until it catches, and then tosses it casually back up behind him onto the countertop.
Slowly, Daniel sits up, gravitating towards the side of the bath closest to his partner, folding his arms on the edge and resting his head on them. The light from the flickering candle casts Jack in sharp relief as he lowers himself to sit on the floor beside the tub, highlighting the deepening wrinkles on his face. In contrast to the age the wrinkles suggest, he is graceful in his descent, even with both hands still full. He sets one of the heavy glasses at Daniel’s elbow and raises the other to take a sip before he props his elbows on his knees and waits in relaxed silence.
Tentatively, Daniel takes the glass and sips it. The whiskey is strong, and pleasantly warm going down. Daniel takes another sip and sighs. “I can’t get warm,” he admits. “I know it’s my imagination, but…,” he sets the glass down and puts his chin back down on his arms.
“I would have thought that you would have had enough of water,” Jack observes, but it’s not judgmental. Daniel shrugs again; the warm and quiet of Jack’s bathtub is worlds away from the chaos of P3L-997 as the floodwaters threatened to wash all of them away.
“Have you ever been caught in a flood like that?” He murmurs into the quiet when the memories of lashing rain and freezing water threaten to overwhelm him again. Something dark flits across his colonel’s face, indicating it was probably something from his special ops days that he’s not going to be super keen to share, but he nods slowly in acknowledgment. Daniel searches his partner’s eyes, trying to ascertain if he is digging into something better left buried, but Jack gives him a little wave of encouragement with one hand.
“Everything happened so quickly,” he finally continues softly. We knew that they all needed to be evacuated, you know that’s why we were there, but our plan was a slow evacuation over days. Maybe weeks.” Jack knows all of this - he’d griped about Danny going out with another team, citing all of the times that it had gone terribly wrong, but Daniel was one of the only people who’d managed to learn the language well enough to get by, and with the tight timeframe there really were no other options. He’d come along to drop his archaeologist and the team coordinating the evacuation off, but then he’d had to go be Teal’c’s backup at a meeting with rebel Jaffa. It should have been a wet, unpleasant, but fairly straightforward mission on Daniel’s side of things. “Right as the Gate went down, it was like the whole decay process suddenly was moving ten times as fast as the calculations said it was supposed to, and we had no way to move anyone.”
Every time Daniel closes his eyes, he can see the water roaring around him, undercurrents threatening to sweep people off of their feet and under the dark surface, rain lashing at their hands and faces, enough lightening to have set the whole world on fire if it wasn’t so damn wet. He shudders against the memories, glancing down into the glass, the whiskey turned a glowing amber-orange in the candlelight. “They didn’t want to abandon their homes. We didn’t have enough time to convince them all. And even the ones who believed us, we couldn’t save them all.”
He hadn’t asked how many people hadn’t made it through the Stargate, but he has a fairly good idea anyway. The worst is the few they’d lost at the Gate. When the DHD had finally come back online, the stargate had already been more than half submerged. One of the marines with free-diving experience had been able to get down to the DHD and dial, but then they’d had to ferry people from the high ground outside the city down to the Gate in a hodgepodge armada of the inflatable rafts the Tau’ri brought and a few watercraft salvaged before the storms and rising floodwaters swept them all away, but because the evacuation site was on land, they’d had to have the people get out of their boats and swim through the Gate, and a couple of them hadn’t made it and hadn’t been caught by the Marines in the boats surrounding them. It was horrifying.
Jack reaches out and brushes some errant wet locks of hair out of his face, and his touch and his expression are both impossibly gentle. Daniel leans into the touch and Jack lets his hand linger, warm on the side of his face. “Danny, you did everything you could. Above and beyond. You’re human. There are going to be days we lose to mother nature.” Even this, just this, soothes some of the yawning chasm of hurt inside of Daniel. This gentle side of Jack that he gets almost entirely to himself is better than any drink, drug, or medicine.
“I just keep seeing them,” he confides, and there’s no response for Jack to make to that. The only sound between them is the barely audible crackle of the burning candle. Jack doesn’t need words to convey his feelings, rubbing his thumb gentle back and forth where it’s resting along his jaw, his expression sympathetic. Jack lets him drift in his own thoughts until he finishes the last of the whiskey and regretfully sets the glass down and then he asks, “Did you eat?”
Daniel shakes his head. “Not hungry,” he mutters, and watches Jack’s eyes narrow a little. His partner knows him too well - he doesn’t eat when he’s feeling overwhelmed, whether he’s hungry or not. Before he can say something to appease Jack, his body betrays him and he shivers, an involuntary reaction to the cooling water. The man sitting in front of him frowns and dips his fingers in the water and quickly pulls them back out.
“Jesus, Daniel,” he gripes, reaching across to open the drain himself. “No wonder you can’t get warm.” He takes his own glass and Daniel’s and puts them on the counter by the lighter and then yanks a towel off of the rack and holds it open. “C’mon, Spacemonkey.”
Daniel was considering balking on principle, but the endearment melts his resolve before it gains any traction, and he stands up and lets Jack wrap the towel around him. Taking the second towel off of the hook, Jack passes it briefly across his hair and then down his legs, briskly drying off enough of Daniel that he isn’t soaking wet. When he encounters no resistance, Jack blows out the candle, wraps an arm around his shoulders, and guides him down the hall to the bedroom. As he yanks back the covers and gently starts to push Daniel down onto the bed, Daniel surfaces from his daze enough to realize first that he’s naked, and then that it’s barely eight o’clock. He can’t go to bed - there’s too much to do. He has several translations sitting in the hallway in his bag.
“Jack!” he protests, trying to rise against the firm pressure of Jack’s hand on his shoulder.
“No, you’re not suppressing this and going back to work,” Jack growls, pushing a little harder. “Your method of warming up didn’t work, let’s try mine.”
“Jack…”
“There’s nothing on your plate that can’t wait. I checked before I came home.” He doesn’t have the energy to fight against that tone of voice. Daniel gives in, and sits heavily down on the edge of the bed.
“Thataboy, Danny,” his lover murmurs, and plants a hand on either side of Daniel’s butt, leaning in very close and fitting his mouth to Daniel’s in a searing, searching, hungry kiss. “Let yourself think about something else.”
Oh. Yeah. Daniel won’t ever say it out loud because his colonel doesn’t need his ego stroked, but he was definitely distracting and they for sure got plenty warm.
