Work Text:
"It was like looking into the hand device when Amaunet was trying to kill me."
They were in the locker room again, facing their open lockers again, only the two of them again. Deliberately set up this time; Teal'c and Carter had sensed the same change in Daniel that Jack had, and dressed fast after showering, headed right out to go keep Jonas company in the infirmary.
"When you were staring down the mouth of that staff weapon?" Jack said, swapping the Suunto Vector he wore on missions for the regular sports watch he wore off-duty.
Daniel nodded. "Same lifetime-in-the-blink-of-an-eye kind of thing, only instead of a series of possible futures, it was ... all the context I'd been missing, just ... there again."
"Well, they say clichés are clichés for a reason. Whole life passing before your eyes and all that."
Daniel laughed. It was a regular Daniel laugh, relaxed and resonant, not one of the playing-along-with-the-joke kind of huffs he'd been prone to since he came back to the SGC. "More like mortal peril didn't ring enough of a bell, but looking death right in the face -- that brought it all back."
"We do do that kind of a lot."
Daniel closed the locker Jack hadn't let anyone clear out this whole long year and leaned against it, hands in the pockets of his fresh fatigues. "Yeah. I know."
Jack was running out of things to futz with in his own locker. He took his leather off the hook and slung it on. Patted it down for his keys. Checked how much cash was in his wallet. Daniel watched him. It should have been unnerving, or at least annoying, but it wasn't. It felt ... familiar. It made him wonder whether Daniel had been watching him like that all year, and whether he remembered that now too.
He closed his locker and faced Daniel. He said, "So."
"So," Daniel said.
"You remember everything?"
Daniel nodded. "Pretty much."
"How do you know?"
"I don't know. I just know. How do you know you don't have amnesia? Do a quick inventory of all your memories periodically, make sure there's nothing missing?"
"Nope." Jack shook his head amenably. "I just know."
"I know you didn't move on."
Jack's vision sharpened, bringing every detail of Daniel's features into clear focus, resolving every nuance of expression. This wasn't something ascended guy had observed from glowy omniscience. But it wasn't a guess, either, or a fishing trip, or egotistical self-confidence. Somehow he just knew.
"I kept moving," he said, finally. "I had to. But no, I didn't move on."
"Maybe now you can. Maybe now I'm back you can have some closure that wasn't possible when I was gone but not technically dead."
A statement like that would have galled the crap out of him, once upon a time. Once upon a time was very long ago, now. "Does it feel like yesterday to you? Jake, the infirmary, that crap I spewed, the reactor room, Kelowna?"
"The shouting match?" Daniel said, following the reverse chronology back to the night before that mission, back to his apartment. "You storming out?"
Grimacing, Jack nodded.
"It feels like a lifetime ago. A long, hard lifetime I don't remember."
"You were on your fucking deathbed and I was still so pissed I could hardly get six words out."
"I don't think you really believed I was dying. You were right, actually. I mean, we always find a way. You found a way. You got Jacob there in time. It was my choice to go."
"I'm sorry I walked out, Daniel." The words sounded stilted, inadequate, juvenile. But they'd needed saying for a year. He'd needed to say them for a year. They had to be said.
Quietly, Daniel said, "I'm sorry I did too."
He'd been an ass, a coward. He'd cracked under the stress of what felt like adultery to the Air Force and directed his rage at the situation and himself into a spectacular, door-slamming exit. All that Daniel had done was offer to end it because it was killing him. What had happened on Kelowna and in the infirmary after that, what had happened in Baal's fortress, had felt like a sick, ironic inversion of that moment, repeated again and again. Daniel had offered to let him go because it was killing him, because the alternative was seeing him live on crippled and in chronic pain, and Daniel loved him and couldn't stand that, and the choice was so unbearable that he lost his shit. Daniel's ascension was completely different, it seemed to him. But yeah, they'd both walked out. Now Daniel was offering again, the same offer, the same choice, the one he'd avoided making by shouting it down, slamming out. A year and a lifetime ago. As if it were yesterday.
The door hadn't closed behind him. He'd flung it open so hard that eight kinds of priceless crap fell off the foyer walls, but it hadn't hit him on his way out and it hadn't bounced closed. None of the crap had even been dented; he'd checked when they packed up the place.
"Maybe we can call it even," Daniel said.
Another offer. A different offer.
"That only adds up if I come back too," Jack said, carefully.
"So come back," Daniel said.
An offer to stay, this time. An offer to hang on.
It had been a lifetime since that night. A long, hard lifetime. He'd looked death in the face more times than he could count, during his military career and before it, and he'd never seen his life pass before his eyes, but he'd never lost his shit either. Looking the death of this relationship in the face had been more than he could handle. He'd learned, since then, that it was because he had it backwards. He'd figured out since then who he was married to, and it wasn't the Air Force.
"OK," he said. "So, I'm back."
"So we're even," Daniel said, and smiled. "Welcome back."
They were in the locker room, still. No active surveillance, but a high likelihood of being walked in on even at this hour, and the brusque manly hug they could afford would be torture right now. Daniel drew a hand out of his pocket, then looked at it wryly and let it drop, because a handshake -- bare skin on skin, palm to palm, the grip of bone and muscle, warm living flesh -- would be even worse. He looked up at Jack and raised his brows. Jack waved a finger in the direction of Daniel's locker. "Still have a coat squirreled away in there?"
Daniel's smile deepened and curved. He could wear the pants and boots home with Jack, but he had to lose the blouse with the SGC insignia, and he'd need something over the T-shirt.
"I'm buying a house this time, by the way," he said as he pulled out the denim jacket that Jack knew perfectly well was in there, and put it on, and closed the locker for the night. "I think Mrs. DeLuca in 8-2 nearly had a heart attack."
"Oh, yeah, like a few feet of grass in between is gonna keep your life from freaking out the neighbors ... "