He really can’t believe he let Sam back him into this stupid challenge. Jack works on his crosswords for fun - trying so hard to solve this one, specifically, is quite a bit less fun. But Sam’s accusation that he’s never actually solved a whole one by himself rankles; getting caught getting help from Walter on the last one hadn’t helped.
Absently, he reaches out and clears a spot on the mirror so he can see his reflection, taking another swipe with his razor. “Ummm... damn.” He’s stuck. Admitting he is stuck, though, would mean losing, so Jack alternates between shaving and re-reading the clues. When the phone rings the first time, he ignores it. Due to his divided attention, he nicks himself with the razor. Growling under his breath, he snatches the phone up and presses it to his face. “What?!”
“Jack, I've been translating the ancient writing on the colonnade SG-2 discovered on P3X-439. I think-”
“Daniel,” he interrupts the flow of words coming out of the handset, a little bit irritated. That answers the question of where Daniel had disappeared to before Jack even woke up. Did the man ever sleep? Dryly, he adds, “I'll be there in half an hour.”
The archaeologist is not deterred. “It talks about a library of knowledge, Jack. I think the monument contains a repository of the ancients.”
“Repository, you say,” Jack peers at his crossword again; that’s a crossword puzzle-worthy word if he’s ever heard one. He compares his mental definition to the clues left unsolved and experiences a vague sense of disappointment when it doesn’t match. It was a long shot anyway.
“Yeah, you know, that-that thing that grabbed your head, made you talk crazy, nearly killed you…” Daniel trails off, expectantly. Which, yes, of course Jack remembers. Not that he wouldn’t like to forget.
“Well, sounds like we should stay away then.”
“Well, I mean considering what we know now, we should be able to find another way to access the information. I mean, Sam's been able to use Tok'ra crystals to, to find a way to t-transfer all kinds of different energies, I mean…” he’s doing that thing where his thoughts travel faster than his mouth can form words, and he starts stuttering and tripping over some of them. Jack takes the phone away from his face, to check and see if Daniel’s calling him from home or under the Mountain. In doing so, he absently realizes he got shaving cream all over it and dunks it under the pool of water in the sink to clean it off, momentarily reducing his lover’s voice to indecipherable bubbles. When he pulls it back out, he faintly hears, “We should go there as soon as possible.”
Lifting it back to his ear, he pretends he knows what Daniel has been saying. “Yeah?”
“So?” the kid asks and pauses, waiting for some sort of answer.
Jack can’t really give him a good answer, since he missed most of the explanation, but he doesn’t want to admit that he wasn’t listening. Falling back on old habits, he stalls the need to answer by repeating his earlier statement; “I'll be there in half an hour.” Surely Daniel can wait thirty minutes.
“Okay, bye.”
“No, no, no, wait,” Daniel’s already on the phone - Jack should have charmed some answers out of him last night, but he was a little bit distracted and he had been holding on to his pride that he’d solve it by himself. “Don't hang up. I need a seven-letter word.”
“I told Sam I wouldn't help you,” Daniel reminds him, but he sounds reluctant.
“Well, then this will be the one thing she doesn't know,” Jack wheedles. If Daniel wasn’t calling from the Mountain - a line most certainly tapped by multiple sources - he’d have much better leverage over his partner, but for now, he’s just going to have to hope for pity. “Up, down, charmed, blank.”
“Strange,” Daniel says with a sigh, and Jack decides Daniel doesn’t plan on helping him.
“Yeah. Well, thanks anyway,” he lowers the phone; just barely he can hear that Daniel says something else on the end of the line. Assuming Daniel is protesting the cheating, he hangs up the phone and goes to finish getting ready.
It’s well over half an hour. He might have thought of a possible word for his crossword, gotten it out in the parking lot, and lost track of time. As he fills in the last word - he’s 100% sure it isn’t the right word, but it fits - he can feel the judgmental gaze of the airman he’s sharing the elevator with. Jack looks up, and the man meets his gaze for just a second, shaking his head. He’s saved from having to come up with some sort of scathing dressing-down when the door opens, and he exits quickly, having to side-step three people standing in the middle of the hallway.
Jack’s people. He draws up short; Carter has her hands on her hips, Teal’c looks as unbothered as ever, and Daniel is tapping at the face of his watch.
“How long have you been waiting there?” It could be staged, they probably had someone at the desk up in NORAD call down when Jack got on the elevator. It would be the sort of thing they would do if annoyed at being kept waiting. The sort of thing Daniel would organize. But, then again, he wouldn’t put it past them to have been standing there for quite a while.
“You said half an hour an hour ago,” Daniel points out, sounding a little put-out.
“General Hammond's waiting,” Sam interjects, before Jack can offer some sort of snarky reply to their linguist. He settles for a hard look, just for a minute, and then remembers the ‘finished’ crossword in his hand. Strolling towards the center of their line, he doesn’t slow, forcing them to break apart. “Excuse me,” he adds as an afterthought, handing the folded paper over to his second and pushing through the line, smiling a little at the look of surprise on her face.
Paper rustles beside him as she falls into step at his right shoulder, Daniel and Teal’c behind them. “The fate of the world is hanging in the balance, and you've been sitting in your truck, finishing this?” Sam sounds incredulous; he pretends to be unbothered, but there’s that little trickle of unease. The ‘fate of the world’ has been in balance more often than not around here, but she does sound seriously annoyed.
“I believe it was double or nothing.”
“Okay…” Sam huffs, “23 across, the atomic weight of boron. The answer is ten.”
“Yes?” Should he have known that? It was probably easy to look up, but he doesn’t remember looking it up.
“You wrote the word fat.” She folds the paper back up, holding it up for him to take.
“Your point?” Jack snatches the paper back, and she doesn’t respond. He’d argue the point (if it fits, maybe Boron IS fat?), but he’s pretty sure it isn’t the only wrong answer. He should have left it on the mirror and made Daniel help him another night when he was satiated and too sleepy to protest the ethics of cheating.
They turn the corner into the briefing room, where he is a little surprised to find two of his men standing by the railing. “Harper, Reynolds,” he greets them as he walks around the table, and that little suspicious feeling grows. Probably he should have paid just a little more attention to Daniel earlier.
Harper’s ‘Sir’ and Reynold’s ‘Jack’ follow him around the table, and Sam must have caught the edge in his voice, because she hurries to add, ”SG-3 spotted a Goa'uld reconnaissance drone while on the planet where they found the colonnade. Since that obviously means the Goa'uld were aware of its existence, SGs 3 and 5 will be providing back-up. If General Hammond approves the mission.”
“What mission?” He finally sharpens his attention, looking first at Sam and then harder at Daniel. What mission? What colonnade? He hasn’t heard any of this and certainly hadn’t approved a mission request. Folding the crossword puzzle back along well-creased lines, he watches Daniel, who seems to be making a point to look anywhere else.
The General walks in before Jack can start a line of questioning with Sam, who is probably a weaker link than his partner. “Good morning, SG-1,” he says pleasantly, but then slightly less so as he stops and faces Jack, “Nice of you to join us.”
“Good morning, Sir,” seems the only appropriate response. Jack surreptitiously checks his watch as he sinks into his seat a beat behind his commander - he’s not that late, the rest of his team was just here obscenely early.
“I've read Doctor Jackson's report on his translation,” Hammond starts and then looks at Jack again. “Given what happened the last time you encountered something like this, I'm surprised you're so willing to take on this mission.”
“So am I, Sir.” Damn it, he thinks, what mission?
“Jack,” Daniel sounds frustrated. Mentally, Jack pivots. Possibly this wasn’t intended to be sneaky - possibly Daniel thought Jack was paying attention to him on the phone earlier and approved some sort of mission. He’d give that about a fifty-fifty chance alongside his lover taking advantage of his late arrival and distractedness to get them rolling on a mission he thought Jack would balk at.
“Daniel?” Either way, that is a clear request in Jack-Daniel code for more information.
“Why wouldn't we want to gain access to the greatest repository of knowledge in the known universe, once and for all find the lost city of the Ancients, and use their advanced technology to save the entire galaxy from the evil oppression of the Goa'uld?”
“Well, there's that,” he agrees. Daniel looks genuinely confused, so he adds a point to the ‘Daniel thought I was paying attention this morning’ side of the scoreboard.
“From the mission file I've read, this is one of those things that whips out from the wall, grabs your head, and rearranges your brain, right?” Reynolds asks, fingers tapping the papers in front of him.
“Sort of,” Daniel hedges.
“Sort of?” Reynolds is no stranger to Dr. Daniel Jackson, so his tone is politely inquiring instead of incredulous.
“It basically downloads the entire library of Ancient knowledge into a person's mind,” Sam comes to the rescue. “That massive amount of data then slowly unspools into your brain, eventually taking over your consciousness completely.”
“Except it wasn't meant for a physiology as primitive as ours,” Daniel sounds a little salty about that; Jack is sure he would like absolutely nothing more than to have one of these things in his head.
“Easy, fella,” he can’t help but interject, because after all, the Asgard say he’s more advanced than many other humans on Earth. Jack’s not sure he buys that, but it’s fun information to have tossed around the base. Daniel doesn’t roll his eyes, but his raised hand and sarcastically mouthed ‘sorry’ are pretty darn close.
“I thought the report said you almost died last time, Sir,” Harper sounds a little concerned, and Jack doesn’t really have much to say to the contrary - it had, in fact, been one of their closer calls, but Jack doesn’t remember much of it.
“The Asgard removed the information from O'Neill's before he was lost to us,” Teal’c explains.
“So, why don't we just shoot Thor a call, get him standing by as back up?” Jack suggests, looking around the table.
“We tried, Sir,” Carter sounds regretful, “he's not responding.” So far, Jack isn’t sure exactly where T and Carter stand on ‘go’ or ‘not go’; neither one seems overwhelmingly enthused, but they backed Daniel up in the request to go and don’t seem overly concerned.
“None of our alien allies have been particularly reliable of late.” The General sounds the most reserved - as it should be; he’ll be the one making the final call about sending SG-1 into a potentially dangerous situation. “Should something happen again—”
“General,” Daniel interrupts, and Jack is always amazed at the latitude their archaeologist gets in this room that no one else would dare to claim, “no one's saying anyone should directly interface with the device, we're suggesting we extract it and bring it home for study.” Still, despite not seeming to mind the interruption, the General obviously has his concerns.
“The engineering team that studied the last one of these devices you found determined nothing, after six months of research.”
Sam comes to back Daniel up again. “We believe that that device's power source was depleted after Colonel O'Neill activated it.”
“Recent intel suggests that Anubis has become a serious threat to dominate the rest of the Goa'uld in a very short time.” Their commander turns once more to Jack. “We have to consider Earth is at risk now, more than ever. If the knowledge contained within this device can lead us to technologies we can use to defend ourselves, we must pursue it.”
It doesn’t sound like Jack’s input is actually needed here, unless he had a strong objection. Which he doesn’t. He looks across the table at Daniel, giving a little jerk of his head towards Hammond. “Why didn't you just say that?”
“Sorry,” this time Daniel actually does roll his eyes as he mutters it, and Jack can hear the rest of the swallowed words loud and clear in his head - sorry I wanted everyone to have the full picture, sorry I care about more than weapons, sorry I didn’t make it simple enough for you, mister military-man-sir. It’s a good thing that they don’t always need words to communicate, because some of Daniel’s words are best left unsaid.
“You have a go,” the General announces briskly, “and be careful, people.”
Jack could have done without the last part. He hates setting the tone for a mission that way.
The structure is easy enough to find; it rises strongly from the otherwise barren planet face, imposing and covered in writing Jack can’t read. It’s everything one could want from an alien structure - weird architecture, writing nobody can read, depicting a mystery figure... but what it doesn’t seem to have is an Ancient Repository.
His team is still under the structure; Daniel and Sam are studying it, Teal’c ever on guard. Jack’s sitting down, becoming rapidly exasperated. “You know,” he calls back. “We’ve searching this place, up and down.”
“I know,” Daniel says absently.
“We could have Goa'uld on our collective asses any minute now.” Reynolds hasn’t radioed, but it could be any second that he does.
“I know,” Daniel says again, and after a pause, “According to the text on this column, it's inside.”
“Inside, you say,” Jack hauls himself off the ground and starts walking back up the short hill. “Well, let me tell you, my friend: there is no ‘inside’. There's just a whole lotta ‘outside’.” He gestures around them, at the wide open, indefensible field.
Daniel doesn’t look at him, just continues scribbling notes in his notebook. “I know.”
“I'm getting some strange readings coming from here,” Carter offers, running some handheld doohickey up and down a smooth section of rock.
“If I'm right…,” his partner starts pressing symbols on the column he’s standing in front of; Jack goes on high alert. He hates it when Daniel touches things, especially when he’s not totally done thinking things through - the absent way he’s speaking is proof of that.
And, to his total lack of surprise, he was right to be cautious. At the third or fourth symbol Daniel touches, a repository appears. “Look out,” he growls, as they all jump back away from it, Daniel slowest of all. Jack fixes him with a warning glare, which he doesn’t seem to notice as he goes back to his translation. Nobody moves while Jack radios an update to the teams at the Gate.
“Now we just have to figure out how to get this thing out of the wall,” Sam summarizes their new dilemma, sounding nervous. On the other extreme, their archaeologist moves immediately towards it, and almost as quickly has to jump back as it grows towards him.
“Damn,” Jack growls at the same time as Carter grabs Daniel’s shoulder and pulls him back towards the column, with a muttered, “Careful!” This just isn’t going to go well. Jack has that uncomfortable feeling already. “Alright, one more time, why are we doing this, why?”
Daniel opens his mouth to launch into an explanation but Jack cuts him off with one slice of his hand through the air, and then his radio crackles to life. “SG-1, we have incoming,” Reynolds cautions.
The team all turns to look out across the plain the way they came. Goa’uld ships have appeared in the sky, shooting rather indiscriminately at the ground. They duck back under cover, and he adjusts his grip on his weapon. “Alright, let’s go.” They’ve overstayed their welcome, and it’s time to get the hell out of dodge.
“Jack,” Daniel hasn’t moved, he notes as he spins around at the complaint. “We can't just leave!”
“Daniel,” he snarls and points a warning finger at his partner, in no mood to deal with an argument. They have a limited amount of time before the gliders reduce this structure to rubble, and SG-1 along with it.
“We must not let this fall into the hands of Anubis.” Teal’c hasn’t moved either, and doesn’t seem to intend to. Jack can see his point - but they don’t have time for another solution.
For a moment, he’s wordless, arms spread in silent frustration, glaring into Teal’c’s stubborn face and Daniel’s entreating one. Another explosion behind him gives him an idea. “Fine,” he stalks over to the wall, careful to stay beside the thing and not in front of it, and slaps some C4 on the wall, starting to prime it.
“Jack!” Daniel protests.
“Sir, he's right,” Jack is shocked to hear a third voice of dissent, but it doesn’t stop him because they have yet to offer him any other solution. “If we destroy it we lose our only chance of finding the location of the Lost City.”
“O'Neill,” he finishes setting the explosive and turns at the urgent note in Teal’c’s voice, and immediately spots the bigger Al’kesh coming in now that the gliders have cleared the way.
“Crap,” is all he can come up with. Still, he is practicing this listening thing and his whole team has objected to leaving or destroying the repository. “Alright, then what?” he demands of them, hoping for someone to have a moment of brilliance.
He’ll give partial credit to his reflexes and partial credit to long experience dealing with Daniel that he is able to catch his partner by the shoulders, slamming him back against the nearest column. “No!” he snaps, and then just for good measure in case Daniel didn’t catch the first one: “No, no, no, no!” Keeping his hands on Danny’s chest, he considers strangling him.
“Jack, someone has to do it!” Daniel shouts to make himself heard over the explosions around them. “The answer is in there!” He points to the repository. “If we don't find the Lost City we're as good as dead. Let me do it!” He’s glaring at Jack, impassioned, the last part almost a plea. Beyond saving the world, Daniel just wants to know. Jack hesitates, the briefest moment his hands dropping away, but he can’t risk it. Can’t risk Daniel. What if they can’t get help this time?
“And who does the translating when you go Ancient?” They stare at each other for a minute, Daniel not having a response past the plea in his gaze, but are forced to drop to the ground when another bomb hits close by. They’re running out of time. Jack doesn’t see any other way to save the information except to take it. Shoving his hat into Daniel’s hands, he groans, “In fact, you're the one person who can't do it!”
He makes it to the repository before anyone can stop him, or object. Daniel will need to translate the Ancient. Sam will need to build the weapons. Teal’c is needed by his people. Jack’s the only option.
“Jack?” Daniel pushes the door closed behind himself, staring down the hall into the dark house. Jack had gotten quite a head start on him, all things considered; after Jack had left the General’s office he’d left the base almost immediately. Daniel had lingered, to finish his mission reports and to start formulating a plan. But as the hours dragged on with no word from Jack, Daniel got twitchy and finally made his excuses and went home.
Home to Jack’s, anyway.
He toes off his shoes and ventures further into the house, glancing into rooms as he passes. Most are dark and empty, but he finally strikes gold on the back porch. His lover is collapsed into one of the deck chairs, a beer in his hand. A quick survey shows that there are only three empty bottles beside him; not bad given the time. If Jack had wanted, he could have finished the whole pack. Of course, Daniel hadn’t missed the many other options dumped on the dining room table.
Daniel slowly slides the door open and steps out. “Hey.”
Instead of speaking, Jack simply lifts his beer, giving it a half-hearted twitch that may have been intended to be a wave. Daniel shoves his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He’s torn, his feelings changing wildly from heartbeat to heartbeat.
He’s afraid. The fear is cloying, overwhelming in some moments. Last time, they’d almost lost Jack. The only thing that had saved him was the machine he’d built and a jump across several galaxies to have the Asgard fix him. But the Asgard have been notably missing lately, busy with their own affairs across the universe. There is no telling when - or if - they will come to Earth’s aid this time.
To Jack’s aid.
Daniel is also angry - at himself, for not being faster to get to the device. At the universe, for doing this to them again. At Jack, for doing it, as unfair as he knows that is.
Last time had been horrible, and that was before he and Jack were anything more than friends. They face the reality every time they step through the Gate that someone might not come back, but being faced with the prospect of this slow decline is a different sort of torture.
“Sit down and stop thinking so loud or go away,” Jack demands from his chair. Something about it punches Daniel in the gut, and the fear and anger wrest control from the worry and need to come here and comfort Jack. He spins around back through the still-open door, making straight for the front door and escape from the whole situation.
His foot slides easily into his left shoe as a quiet curse from Jack carries through the silent house, but he fumbles with his right shoe and his keys fall out of his jacket pocket as he leans down to yank it on, which is plenty of time for his colonel to reach him.
“Just hang on a damn minute, alright?” Jack scrubs a hand over his face, but Daniel ignores him, getting down on his knees to reach under the entryway bench, grasping around for his fallen keys. “Damn it, Daniel, you know I didn’t mean that.”
When Daniel doesn’t respond right away, conflicting emotions still keeping his shoulders hunched up around his ears and his stomach roiling, Jack takes his own initiative. Hands wrap around Daniel’s arm and he’s yanked to his feet and shoved into the front door. It would have felt violent, if Jack’s other hand hadn’t come around to hover protectively, keeping him from hitting his head on the bench on the way up.
Before he can protest, Jack’s mouth is on his. He’s pressed up against the door, arms bracketing him in. His body responds to the kiss before his mind catches up; it starts forceful and hungry but when he doesn’t resist, Jack softens and deepens it, drawing away slowly. “Stay,” it’s an order, but there’s vulnerability when their eyes meet.
With a catch in his breath that’s half laugh, half stifled tears of frustration, Daniel nods and kicks his shoes back off. Jack dives back in for another searing kiss, and Daniel drops his keys where they’re standing so he can free up both hands to grab at his partner’s shirt for balance because it’s a little more than just kissing at this point, with the way Jack has him pressed up against the cool door, their bodies pressed together.
Caught up in the moment, he lets Jack half drag, half carry him down the short flight of stairs into the living room. Practiced hands divest him of his jacket on the way, and Jack leaves it and his shirt haphazardly trailing on the floor behind them as he drops Daniel onto the couch and then kneels above him, hands eagerly exploring further.
“Jack…” Daniel reaches out to put a hand on his partner’s chest, pushing him away with as much conviction as he can muster, trying to decide how to put his concerns into words. He doesn’t want to just have sex. Not that he doesn’t want to have sex, because right now, with Jack looking at him like that he really, really does.
“I know, you need to talk it through,” Gratifyingly, Jack is also a little out of breath as he speaks, and his eyes are soft when he cups the side of Daniel’s face. “We’ll talk. I promise,” his other hand, ghosting underneath Daniel’s shirt just above his hips, is paired with a dark gaze when he pleads, “...can we... later? After?”
He’s not really strong enough to say no to that, so Daniel responds by hooking his fingers into the front of Jack’s sweats and tugging impatiently as he surges up to meet him in another kiss, knowing if he doesn’t keep his mouth occupied, pretty soon he will be the one begging.
Yeah. They can talk later. Much later.
“Jack.”
“Hm.” He doesn’t move or open his eyes. He has no interest in anything that will follow that serious, semi-regretful tone of voice. The bed shifts underneath him as Daniel moves, propping himself up with an arm on Jack’s chest.
“Jack,” he says again, and this time continues on despite the lack of response. “You know Sam and Teal’c are going to show up today, one way or another. We should probably get cleaned up before that happens.”
That sounds like a lot of work, but given his mental image of how they’d left the various rooms of the house last night with their bouts of love-making breaking up more serious discussions, Jack can’t wholly disagree. He groans, rather than a more coherent response, but does open his eyes. Daniel is watching him, his gaze morose. Jack runs a hand through his partner’s hair, gently, and gets a lopsided smile in response before the other man sits up and moves to the edge of the bed, stretching.
“I’ll get cleaned up and go home for a little bit. Feed the fish. Maybe swing by the base and pick up Teal’c, if he doesn’t hook up with Sam first.”
Jack sits up on the opposite side of the bed. “If T suggests you bring food, make it donuts.”
As expected, Sam shows up just about the time he gets the house put back in order. He lets her in, gets her settled with a drink. The coffee is gone - Daniel drank the last of it this morning - so he switches to beer. It’ll make the afternoon go smoother anyway, and he’s got plenty since he hadn’t had any after Daniel had shown up and effectively derailed his plan to drink himself into a stupor. They kill a few minutes with stumbling small talk, and Jack is beyond relieved when there is another knock on the door. He’s not upset that Sam’s here, not really, but he already hashed out his feelings with his lover last night, and he’s not keen to do it again, which is where they were headed if Daniel took much longer. A get-together today is more about managing the team’s feelings than Jack’s.
“Hello?” Daniel opens the door without waiting for them to get up, feigning uncertainty about their reception.
“In here,” Jack replies. Two sets of footsteps, the door closing behind them, and Daniel and Teal’c descend into the living room.
“Oh, sorry,” Daniel glances at Sam, “are we interrupting anything?”
“No,” Jack answers at the same time as Sam; he works hard to hide exasperation at his partner’s questionable acting skills, while Sam sounds in a rush to reassure the rest of the team that nothing untoward is happening. Jack decides to string along the ruse. “What’re you doing here?”
“Uh, well, uh,” Daniel blinks, not having expected the question since Jack knows full well it was always the plan. “It's a funny story actually. Um, we were driving by and we saw Sam's car in the driveway and, um, um…” His improv skills fail him then, his face scrunched up as he tries to come up with a good excuse.
Jack takes pity on him, tapping Sam on the shoulder to distract her. “‘Funny’,” he mutters, wiggling his eyebrows for emphasis.
“…and Teal'c said, well he didn't really say anything, he just looked at me and did that eyebrow raising thing that he kinda does and I said to him, I said hey, why don't we stop by and -” Daniel is still trying to rally, arms crossed across his chest, looking back and forth from Teal’c to Jack and Sam.
“Is that donuts?” Jack interrupts, indicating the white box in T’s hand.
“Indeed.” Teal’c inclines his head in agreement.
Jack, very aware of not having eaten since the night before, jumps up to relieve him of his burden. “Excellent.”
A couple of hours later, Jack is feeling pretty mellow. The company is good, they’ve mostly stayed in fairly neutral discussion territory, and he’s having a good time watching his team keep bonding. If this goes south, Daniel is going to need these people. Speaking of Daniel, lack of adequate sleep and real food paired with the free-flowing alcohol has made him quite tipsy, so Jack is glad when there is yet another knock at the door.
“Thank God, pizza.” He hauls himself out of the chair and goes to open the front door, only having to take a second to reorient when he finds his boss on his porch instead of any of his usual eager young delivery kids. “Well, you're not the usual delivery boy,” he says before he can stop himself; thank God Hammond has never been one to stand on ceremony outside of the most formal of times.
“Is this a good time?”
“It's always a good time for you, Sir,” Jack says gamely, with a renewed thankfulness that he and Daniel had decided to get up this morning and clean up from last night’s activities. Things he would have been on the fence about Sam and Teal’c seeing he is very glad Hammond won’t be. “Come on in.” They walk back to join the group in the sunken living room, Jack pulling in another seat for their boss, and Sam scrambles to her feet.
“General.”
“At ease, Major, at ease,” He’s an astute man, the General, and they all know he won’t miss anything - but they can also trust he won’t comment on most of it, especially outside of work hours. At this point, outside of the Mountain, the man is a part of this family more than anything else.
“There you are, Sir,” Jack murmurs as he slides the chair behind the General.
“Glad to find you all here,” he says, as if there was any doubt, and sits. Another glance around the room and he points at one of the empty beer bottles. “You wouldn't happen to have another one of those?”
“I would. I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for… food.” He’s half expecting some sort of rebuke for that, one of Hammond’s fatherly moments, but the older man simply looks at the beer in his hands for a long moment and then speaks solemnly.
“I've been relieved of command.”
After dropping that bombshell on all of them, the General doesn’t stay overly long. A part of the family he may be, but he understands the need for them to work on this problem as a team, and to process as a team. Besides, if he has to report to Washington so quickly, he will need to make his own preparations. It was probably all he could do to make time to give them a heads-up; and, in his way, say goodbye to Jack.
Not that he says it in so many words. But when Jack walks him to the door after he finishes his beer, he pauses and turns back, uncharacteristically reaching out to lay a hand on Jack’s shoulder, not in a brief pat, but leaving it there while he meets Jack’s gaze full on. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you, Jack,” he affirms.
“Likewise, Sir,” Jack has to swallow before he concurs, trying to sound optimistic though he isn’t feeling it at the moment. Hammond gives his shoulder another squeeze and then leaves without saying anything else. Jack leans against the closed door for a minute, regaining his composure before he rejoins his team.
Their new boss isn’t the worst one they’ve ever gotten. Under any other circumstances (for instance, if Jack’s life wasn’t on the line, and George had retired voluntarily, and the threat of Anubis wasn’t so dark on the horizon), Daniel thinks he might have even have approved of her appointment. But she’s woefully unprepared for taking over the SGC in crisis mode, and Kinsey’s slimy presence isn’t helping anyone relax.
Daniel has to admit that Weir is handling the situation with surprising aplomb; it can’t be easy to have the vice president breathing down your neck and the ranking military officer of the top-secret space force you’ve just been handed control of clearly on the very edge of losing his temper (and his life).
“Mr. Vice President, if you're suggesting that we'd make something like this up—” Jack is starting to sound very aggressive, and Daniel forces himself to tune back into the conversation.
“Yes, Colonel, that's exactly what I'm suggesting!” Kinsey’s voice is rising, putting Daniel in the same place of discomfort as nails on a chalkboard.
“Yes, well that is exactly what we do. We sit around on our fat asses and create scenarios that put the planet at risk. That's exactly what we do.” Any other time, Daniel would probably smirk at his partner’s sarcasm, but in this case, he thinks Jack could dial it down a little and earn them more brownie points in Weir’s eyes. He shoots him a glare intended to communicate his thoughts to that effect, but Jack is ignoring him.
“Oh, I'm sure you'd do just about anything,” the vice president sneers. Jack opens his mouth, starting to rise from his chair, and Weir is smart enough to intervene.
“Gentlemen, for the purposes of this discussion let’s assume that Master Bra'tac is in earnest. And that the threat is real.”
“Do you even know what the threat is?” he finally leans forward to contribute, remembering the huge stack of files she had been working through earlier. Was she going in chronological order? Oldest first or newest? Had someone earmarked the most relevant files? Was that someone in the know, or was it Kinsey with his agenda? “Anubis is half Goa'uld, half ascended Ancient. With the knowledge and technology to wipe us all from the face of the Earth.”
“What about negotiating?” she says a little desperately - and this is the one concern he has about her background that would have been valid despite the circumstances of the change; even Daniel has been forced to admit that negotiation isn’t always an option, but it took him years. They don’t have years for her to reach the same conclusion.
“Oh for crying out loud, that's derentis.” Jack snaps, too impatient to wait for Daniel to come up with a more diplomatic explanation. They turn, almost comically as one, to stare at him.
“What?” Jack demands, looking back. Daniel can see his thought process - he hadn’t said anything that out of line.
“You just said derentis,” Daniel offers, with a little frown as he notes down the time of this first symptom and tries to remember if it was soon or later than last time.
“Did not,” the colonel protests, scowling.
“Did too,” as he’s affirming it, Daniel can’t help the slightly sing-song tone his retort takes, because this is comfortable and familiar ground. He wants to grin a little, but he chokes that back.
“Derentis, what is that?” So that’s the same as last time, then; Jack doesn’t know what he’s saying or when he’s saying it.
“Latin?” Kinsey’s guess feels a little too astute, and yet lacking; the man has access to all of Daniel’s reports over the years, and he hasn’t read enough to know that Ancient is just similar to Latin? He wants to take his books of translations and use them to bash the man in the head - if he was going to take such a personal interest in the Stargate program, the least he could do would be to actually take an interest and keep up to date.
“No, it's not,” Weir murmurs, and Daniel bristles over the way she’s watching Jack.
“I think what Colonel O'Neill was trying to say is,” he offers, trying to do something other than just flat out translate Jack’s exclamation, “that based on our past experiences, negotiating would be insane, crazy.”
“Yeah, I got that.” Their new commander turns her considering gaze on Daniel now, and he tries not to show his disquiet.
“However, we believe that there may be alien technology within our reach that could defeat Anubis.” Good job Sam, he thinks, as his teammate tries desperately to drag them all back on track.
“So now you're pulling a ray gun out of your hat.” Kinsey is trying to sound superior, but he’s starting to sound desperate.
“There are weapons capable of defending this planet,” Teal’c adds.
“I can't believe we're sitting here listening to this,” Kinsey snarls, but at this point, the only person listening to him with any seriousness is Weir, who just doesn’t seem to have figured out yet that the man is a massive bigot, idiot, and danger to the program.
“Mr. Vice President, on his last mission—”
“Oh, I am aware of the events that have once again compromised Colonel O'Neill's invaluable judgment,” Kinsey snaps at her, and the expression on her face says she might finally be cottoning on to him. “And the fact that on his last official mission he has incurred the wrath of humanity's worst enemy on behalf of us all—”
“Wait a minute,” Jack interrupts his tirade rather gleefully. “I thought you didn't buy into the whole invasion thing.” The man doesn’t have an immediate response to that, and there is a brief silence.
“The fact is, until we know the location of the Lost City—” Weir tries gamely to regain control of the whole situation. Daniel feels bad for the way she’s been thrown to the wolves. At least Jack won’t eat her before he judges her worth, but Kinsey is a different story.
“I know where it is.” Jack declares, and everyone is more shocked by what he says than by him interrupting his commander to say it.
“You know where it is, now?” she asks, with a healthy dose of skepticism.
“I will. It's in there somewhere,” Jack backtracks, but the rest of the team can see this is the moment he chooses to give her a chance to be something other than Kinsey’s puppet; a last chance for her to prove herself an ally, if not a friend, and keep SG-1 from going rogue. “Look, let me make this simple. I come up with the Lost City, we go find it. Yes or no?”
“No!” Kinsey snarls from his seat, but nobody is paying him any attention. Everyone else is focused on the actual two powers in the room, who are hashing out how things are going to run at the SGC in the near future between themselves, mostly through a long and silent exchange of looks.
Jack is the one to break the silence first, but he’s returned to a normal volume. It doesn’t keep his words from being grave and heavy. He draws from the conversation he and Daniel had had after Daniel had confronted Weir this morning; Daniel had summarized the woman’s biography and what he knew about her and thought about her from their brief interaction, and Jack had of course been listening intently, though he may have fooled anyone else looking into thinking he was really into the pie served with lunch. “Who are you? Really? Why are you here?”
“I will consider it.” she says finally, and SG-1 can breathe a little bit easier because her words might have been ‘maybe’ but they all know firsthand how the Stargate program gets its claws into people quickly. Weir is already hooked, whether she knows it or not.
