Part Five

It wasn't the first time Daniel had had to face dying. Not as some abstract philosophical conundrum, but as an imminent reality. His life hadn't flashed before his eyes, only ways of keeping it. He didn't feel a whole lot. His mind got too clear for that. His experience of death was of a simple thing. Twice, a brilliant flare of light he put himself in the way of, tremendous force striking his chest, searing all through him, a world of pain, hurling him down. It ended with the falling. Another, the world of pain centred in his shoulder, Jack's stricken face before him, forcing Jack to let go of him but holding on himself. Not falling, but crawling. Dragging himself to a sarcophagus. His mind was that clear.

There was nothing he could do here. Nothing he could think of. There was only that world of pain, his own body failing him, and Jack close by him. Jack. Daniel had never imagined Jack would take it so hard. He'd never known he'd reached into Jack this way or touched him so deeply. It was a wonder to him.

He wanted to hold on. He wasn't done with life or with Jack.

His mind was clear on that.

He was telling Jack he loved him when he saw the brilliant white light beaming around them and was conscious of annoyance his death was being hijacked by cliché. The light took him, not to some existential, soft-hued afterlife, but to a small grey alien with eyes a million years old.

Jack hated clichés but loved his little buddy Thor. He let out a triumphant whoop and swept his little buddy Thor into a swooping bear hug the ancient Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet bore too patiently, even when Jack practically threw him at Daniel.

"Dr. Jackson," Thor greeted him mildly. Thor was always mild. Always nice. You live a million years, you go everywhere, you see and do everything, it makes you...nice.

If living made Thor nice, dying made Daniel smart. He was smart and clear and sure on a lot of things he hadn't been before. Mostly he was clear on Jack. He was sure he loved and wanted Jack. He was – he was sure Jack loved him, unconscious fuck-up that he was, and apparently would be a while longer.

There was more light. Balls of light now, not beams. Light balls buzzing around him. It seemed profoundly wrong to him Jack didn't swat at a single one or drop an awful pun.

"You okay?" he whispered. It was difficult to breathe through the pain. Difficult to live through it.

"Am I?" Jack choked.

That was it. This was why. Jack. Daniel was sticking around for Jack. "Not through," he promised. Not yet.

The light faded.

Daniel started out small. He started out...breathing. Slow and shallow, then quick, then slow and deep. Not a stab, not a thrust, not a throb or a spasm. Not even a niggle. He tried sound.

"Thank fuck!"

Then he tried movement. He opened one eye, then the other, looked up at a ceiling instead of the inside of his eyelids. Wriggled a finger. A toe. Got daring and felt around, trying to understand what it was he was lying on. Some kind of platform, both firm and yielding, even to the curious prod of his finger.

Still, nothing hurt.

"You're not dead, you know." Jack sounded as relieved as he was amused. He sounded suggestible. Malleable.

"Get over here and prove it."

"What kind of proof do you require, Dr. Jackson?"

Oh. That was...nice. That was Thor.

Daniel was dumb again, which meant he was alive. He should've thought of listening before he opened his big fat mouth and stuck his foot in it. Listening came first.

"Where am I?" Dumb Daniel went for the traditional back-from-the-dead cover story. It was also a point of genuine interest, because he didn't recognise the deep earthy red of the rippled wall ahead of him or the vivid, pitted blue of the others around him. The floor was mottled and huge windows showed the milky white slipstream of hyperspace.

"You are aboard my ship the Biliskner," Thor informed him. "Returning to Earth."

"We'll be home in less than an hour," Jack said cheerfully.

"That's nice," Daniel responded inadequately, guessing that Mawai had lied about it taking more than two years for an Asgard ship to reach Tiya along with everything else. He felt more of an effort was required from him in response to his salvation and sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the platform. Thor and Jack were both quite pleased to see him in one dumb functioning piece, he thought. "What happened with my appendix?"

"Asgard medical technology is fully cognisant of human physiology," Thor explained.

"Which troubles me on, oh, so many levels," Jack interjected with a pantomime eye roll. "Although in this case, it was pretty cool. Thor just beamed the pus right out of you."

"Pus?" He was finally on board the awesome Asgard mothership he'd watched obliterate the Goa'uld on Cimmeria in mere seconds, speaking face to face with the supreme being whose mere presence had had Heru'ur exiting the planet at a dead run, and this historic, hoped for meeting involved not minds, not a scholarly exchange of history, language and culture, but pus?

Daniel's unparalleled lucky streak was holding.

"It was not difficult to isolate the bacterially infected cells and eradicate them from your system," Thor said calmly. "There will be no residual after-effects or possibility of recurring infection."

"No scar either," Jack noted with perhaps a soupçon of disappointment.

Daniel had a little feel around the general area, poked and prodded thoroughly, shrugged off the disappointingly mundane medical miracle and hopped off the platform. "Thank you," he said gratefully to Thor. "For a while there, I was concerned."

"I had you covered," Jack insisted balefully. He really was very good at this denial thing, not letting little things like overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary get in his way.

"I know you did," Daniel said gently, smiling at him. "What happened to Mawai?"

"She's in the brig," Jack announced with unrestrained malevolent glee.

"Conservator Mawai is not incarcerated." Thor seemed to feel this required explanation. "Despite the fact Colonel O'Neill forcefully expressed to me his opinion of her recent actions. She is merely resting in her quarters."

"With guards on the door."

"An aide to see to her comfort."

Jack clearly didn't appreciate these well-meaning attempts to mess with his fantasy.

"Conservator Mawai has asked..."

"I don't want to see her," Daniel interrupted Thor. "I'm sorry, but I don't. You see, I remembered something else while you were gone, Jack. Something else she and I had talked about. You remember what she said to me about my not despairing?"

Jack nodded. He put on his encouraging, listening face.

"I remembered where that came from. How she knew that about me. You see, I'd told her about Ernest Littlefield." Daniel couldn't begin to express his dismay at this. Recalling that one conversation among their many had destroyed the small, final hope he'd had that Mawai had some justification real to her for what she'd done to him in taking his freedom from him. He had hoped she was blinded by a – a grand design, something greater than herself she was bound to serve no matter how wrong-headedly. Realising what she'd done to him and Jack was for her own sake, her own aggrandizement, had been pretty crushing. "I mean, the parallels were blindingly obvious," he went on. "I told her what Ernest had said to me when we rescued him: that as admirable as it was to preserve the past and a universal language and history, all of the great knowledge he'd obtained from his lifetime of study at Heliopolis meant nothing if he couldn't share it. And this," Daniel gestured simply from himself to Jack, "was what she made of it."

"She's a monster," Jack snapped, his face darkening, the anger too quick to surface.

"Sociopath," Daniel corrected. "Mawai has no empathy at all for other people. It isn't natural to her make-up and she was never socialised to care for the needs of other people or put them ahead of her own. I didn't appreciate how calculating she was. I didn't see her for what she was. In fact, I don't think I ever saw her at all," he acknowledged his naïveté sorrowfully. He'd never seen the real Mawai until the moment when she'd believed he would die and had found it in her to be honest with him. She had wanted his forgiveness, had nothing she wanted to give or say to him to make his pain easier to bear for a moment. It hadn't occurred to her to do anything for him. He had seen her very clearly then and now he never wanted to see her again. He'd failed in his reading of her character and this would trouble him for a long time to come.

"In the circumstances, I have offered Mawai a refuge on the Asgard homeworld Othalla," Thor placidly informed them. "The Conservator has chosen to present a petition to the High Council for a scientific team to be despatched to Tiya in order to continue and significantly expand upon her preservation efforts. Mawai will remain under Asgard protection until such time as the outcome of the petition has been decided by the High Council and our physicians have determined she is able to once again make a rational decision about her future."

Behind Thor, Jack's finger rapidly made little circling motions by his ear.

Daniel frowned at him.

"Flipped her lid," Jack elaborated. "Nutty as a..."

Thor frowned up at him.

"Fine," Jack said coolly, putting up impatient hands. "She's taking a psychotic break from the reality that didn't work out exactly the way she engineered it to and trying out another one inside her head because that's the only place reality meets her requirements."

"Thanks for dropping by to save my life and rescue us, Thor," Daniel pointedly changed the subject. "I hope we didn't take you too far out of your way." Which was a ridiculous thing to say to a being who could cross the universe faster than Daniel could cross town.

"You are welcome," Thor responded politely. "As I was telling Colonel O'Neill, the Biliskner was merely embarking upon a routine reconnaissance mission to determine the current strength and disposition of the enemy which plagues our home galaxy."

"The enemy that's worse than the Goa'uld?" Daniel recalled.

"Replicators," Jack announced with a certain relish. "They're called Replicators."

"I hope the people of Earth never have cause to come to know more of this enemy than its name," Thor said soberly. "When I have returned you to your home, the Biliskner must depart immediately. We cannot afford further delay."

"What about a teeny, tiny one?" Jack hinted broadly, holding up two coaxing fingers bare millimetres apart. "There are some irregularities surrounding our unscheduled departure from the SGC. An endorsement from a powerful ally such as yourself would go a long way to reminding the folks in charge I'm worth all the trouble of keeping me around. If you can't, you can't. I mean, I understand completely. Places to go, Replicators to kill." Jack's energetic hands, at their most persuasive, were doing a lot of his talking. "You just need to understand that if you don’t take the time now, next time you drop by looking for me, I won't be around."

Thor tilted up his head to look quizzically at Jack, who smiled warmly back. Having been intimately acquainted with humanity since its hunter-gatherer infancy, he obviously knew a play when he heard one, but he let Jack hook him and reel him in regardless.

Wuss.

The Biliskner's intercom activated for a short announcement in the hushed, difficult Asgard language.

"We are entering Earth's solar system," Thor translated. "Let us proceed to the transporter bay."

"Sure you don't want to see Mawai one last time?" Jack asked Daniel searchingly.

"I'm sure."

"There's nothing you want to say to her?"

"Nothing I want to hear."

"Then we're good to go."

"One thing," Daniel asked Thor. "You'll let us know how it turns out for Mawai? If she stays or if she goes back to Tiya?"

Jack was staring at him, obviously wanting to make something of this.

"I don't hate her," Daniel said quietly. "I don't." He wasn't quite at the stage where he could pity her, he felt too much anger and recrimination for that, but pity would come. The convictions and lessons of the whole of her life had been for nothing. He wasn't sure she could live with the failure. "I just want to know." For his sake, not hers.

"I will let you know," Thor promised graciously, leading them into a corridor as dark and striking as the room they'd just left. Asgard architecture was sleek and confidently eclectic in colour and style, solid but oddly fitting to the small, fragile aliens who moved with such delicacy, as if the air around them was too heavy.

Smiling, Jack elbowed Daniel. "They named a ship after me," he said proudly.

"Who?"

"The Asgard."

"A ship?"

"It's called the O'Neill. It's named after me."

The Asgard did? The Asgard? Honestly, the mighty Thor, all-powerful protector of the known universe, was so whipped, Daniel was starting to have serious questions about his sexuality. All of this interest in Jack, it wasn't natural.

"Cool name." Daniel smiled encouragingly as Jack preened delightedly, consoling himself that however whipped he might be, at least Jack put out for him.

Thor invited them to stand with him in the centre of a completely empty room, white light pooled around them, flared, and then faded again, leaving them standing in the briefing room of the SGC. The startled duty-officer impulsively sounded the red alert, then barged to his feet, drawing his sidearm as he advanced towards them.

"W-w-w-w-wait!" Daniel jumped protectively in front of Jack and Thor, his arms spread wide to cover them. "It's okay!" he said urgently. "Put down the gun!"

"Hold your position, Airman!" General Hammond barked as he rushed out of his office, anger and incredulity warring with relief at seeing them alive and safe. "Dr. Jackson! Colonel O'Neill! What in hell is going on here?"

"Greetings, General Hammond." Blithely ignoring the tension and the speedy influx of bristling SFs armed to the teeth, Thor walked fearlessly over to say hi to the general.

"Commander Thor," Hammond acknowledged courteously. "The Asgard are always welcome here."

"But Colonel O'Neill is not?" Thor enquired in an equally courteous tone. Jack having his hands up at this point, dead – no pun – centre of a forest of guns, leant a lot of weight to Thor's bargaining position. "Does Stargate Command intend to punish a man for actions he committed under the control of a sophisticated technology that went undetected by any means available to you here?"

Daniel hoped Jack was paying attention to this salutary lesson in diplomacy. There was Jack's way and then there was the rational way. Jack mostly got his way and here he was, with his hands up, trying not to make any sudden moves in front of his own subordinates, while Thor made nice with the general and Daniel returned a few welcoming grins from the security guys. He was touched they were quite pleased to see him back. Some of them had helped him with his books and things, from time to time.

"We're well aware Colonel O'Neill was acting under duress," Hammond began to respond.

"Does that mean I can put my hands down?" Jack interrupted incorrigibly. "General! Come on! It's me!" He spread his arms wide in an expansive display of ego. "I'm back!"

God help us, Daniel thought fondly. "General?" He directed a beseeching look at their C.O. "Please. Jack is fine now and no harm was done."

"Not to you, perhaps," Hammond said grimly.

Daniel started, finally realising that his cheek wasn't sore at all, his lip didn't pull when he spoke. The bruises were even gone from his wrist. Thor had taken care of everything.

"But a nurse in the infirmary wasn't so lucky," Hammond informed them heavily.

"What happened?" Jack's bravado deserted him.

"Jack has amnesia, General," Daniel explained quickly. "He doesn't remember much of anything that happened from when he stepped onto the elevator to attend the briefing scheduled at the start of all of this." His elation at their safe return home evaporating, he felt sick and afraid. A nurse? A nurse was hurt? He hadn't known. Jack hadn't really talked about what, if anything, he remembered from that time. Looking worriedly at him, Daniel could see that he was devastated. Jack took his rank and responsibilities much more seriously than he ever willingly allowed anyone else to see. For him to have hurt someone who was supposed to be able to trust him, to turn to him, went against the core values that made him who he was.

"Is she alive?" Jack grated.

"Recovering well from strangulation sustained during your assault," Hammond explained gravely. "It appears you used a chokehold to subdue her before sedating her and tying her up. It was more from luck than good judgement the injuries you inflicted weren't fatal."

"The Tiyan nanotechnology affected Jack's limbic system," Daniel argued in Jack's defence. "Dr. Fraiser made that determination even before Jack got really sick."

"Tiyan?" the general queried.

"Tiyan nanotechnology, very advanced, very sophisticated," Daniel explained rapidly. "We had no warning of its invasiveness because Colonel Makepeace suppressed evidence of Tiyan technology functioning off the homeworld, I imagine so his buddies at the NID could add it to their galactic shopping cart."

Hammond held up an authoritative hand and the SFs put up their guns, allowing Jack to ease clear of them as they fell back to take watchful positions against the walls. "Perhaps we should all take a seat and take this from the beginning."

Rapid footsteps echoed along the hallway outside and Sam flew in, flushed, breathless and beaming. She nodded quick acknowledgment to the general, smiled respectfully at Thor and rushed over to her teammates. "Colonel! Daniel! Are you okay?"

"We're fine, Sam. Everything is fine," Daniel said reassuringly, resignedly accepting an uncharacteristic hug from her. It was rare Sam would get personal with Daniel in front of her superiors. She preferred to keep her professional demeanour intact. This was a warm gesture of friendship under the circumstances.

"Sir," Sam acknowledged Jack, her questioning eyes tracking his face.

"I cannot remain, General Hammond," Thor announced. "I must return to the Biliskner." He came over to Jack, holding out a tiny, almost translucent hand. Jack took it carefully. "Colonel O'Neill, I look forward to our next meeting," Thor expertly played to the crowd. "When I hope to be able to greet you from the bridge of the O'Neill."

"They named a ship after him," Daniel supplied, feeling protective. Jack was broody and upset over the nurse he'd accidentally injured and there might not be a moment they could snatch to talk about it any time soon.

"The most advanced ship the Asgard have ever constructed," Thor endorsed the good ship O'Neill while the O'Neill he was holding hands with showed faint indications of resuscitation. "A sign of the great confidence the Asgard have in your abilities, O'Neill."

Jack's ego, Daniel thought indignantly, did not need that kind of inflation!

Thor bid them a polite, inclusive farewell and vanished in a beam of light.

Hammond let out a gusting sigh and took his accustomed seat at the head of the briefing table. He dismissed the SFs as Daniel and Jack sat on his left, Sam on his right.

Teal'c came in unhurriedly, bowed warm acknowledgement to Daniel and Jack, then sat next to Sam.

"Sorry to disturb you," Jack sniped, not pleased by this lack of enthusiasm for the prodigal colonel's return.

"I was engaged in Kel'No'Reem," Teal'c explained repressively.

"Sorry to wake you," Jack corrected himself pissily.

"It is good to see you again, DanielJackson," Teal'c smiled.

"It's good to be home, Teal'c," Daniel sighed.

"It's good to have you home," Hammond agreed unexpectedly, giving Daniel some hope all of this was fixable. "Now, would you two gentleman kindly explain to me where you've been and what in hell has been going on for the past four days?"

"Four days?" Daniel repeated blankly. "Is that all it was?"

"Believe me, there's been barely time enough to complete repairs of the damage inflicted by Colonel O'Neill on the dialling computer," Hammond retorted with undiminished severity. "Normal gate operation only resumed at 0430 this morning."

"No wonder you look tired," Daniel said to Sam.

She only smiled at him.

"Jack was under the control of Tiyan nanotechnology," Daniel reported, thinking he needed to take the initiative.

"Tiya?" Sam queried.

"Was that not one of the worlds you visited while O'Neill was trapped on Edora, DanielJackson?"

"Yes, yes it was, Teal'c, which is how this whole thing started," Daniel said crisply. "While I was there, the custodian of Tiya, a woman named Mawai, became convinced that I should be her successor in caring for the living museum Tiya had become. To achieve this end, she caused me to ingest an essentially benign Tiyan nanotechnology intended for the, er, the ceremonial transmission and sharing of specific memories." Best to gloss over the context of that ceremony, he thought. "That technology was never intended for human physiology and so it malfunctioned before it spread from me to Jack."

Hammond put up his hand again and the duty officer came running. He stooped, Hammond whispered something to him, and he went out of the room. "We'll have copies of the mission reports momentarily. Go on, son."

"The memory implanted, the triggering memory, was of Mawai's home. It was designed to lure me back there. Now, I had memories of that place but Jack didn't, which is why I didn't get sick and Jack did." The truth was irrelevant to Daniel at this point. His heart was beating very quickly and he wanted only to be plausible, to be reasonable. To be believed.

"Janet did speculate that whatever was influencing Colonel O'Neill was affecting his memories," Sam recalled, "As part of the wider attack on the limbic system of his brain."

"Exactly. Jack didn't have the required physiology to make him receptive to the memories that were being imposed on his mind, and the nanotechnology went haywire overwriting real memories with the implanted ones."

"O'Neill phone home," Jack intoned, giving them his best throaty E.T. impression.

"More or less," Daniel supported him. "The memory was originally targeted at me, it was intended to lure me, call on my positive experiences on Tiya to such an extent I would want to go back there. The technology translated that into Jack's mind as an absolute imperative to return me to Tiya for my own safety and welfare." Daniel looked seriously at the general. "Jack was never attacking anyone, Sir. He was only defending me to the best of his ability. He did amazingly well to contain the severe side-effects of the memory implantation, which made him so aggressive to anyone he perceived to be a threat to me." Daniel took a deep breath and took a bold risk. "You know Jack's training, General. You know his capabilities. Can you honestly tell me he didn't do his utmost to protect the personnel and the operations of this base under the circumstances?"

Hammond's face tightened.

"No fatalities, no permanent injuries or irreparable damage," Daniel persisted.

"I do not believe O'Neill could have done more," Teal'c judged with superb confidence.

"With his judgement and self-control so impaired and the implanted, overriding imperative to aggressively protect Daniel from an environment and personnel the colonel was forced to see as hostile, I don't believe he could have done more either," Sam backed them up.

"For what it's worth," Jack said soberly, knotting his hands together before him on the table. "No one can make me feel worse about this or more responsible for what I've done than I already do. I put that nurse into a hospital bed. No matter what the circumstances are, what influence I was under, that's on me. If that means I go up on charges, then so be it."

This had the effect of softening Hammond slightly.

"I almost died, by the way," Daniel announced, shocking everyone rigid. "My appendix burst. Jack saved my life."

Sam flashed him a mirthful, chiding glance. Bad, bad boy!

"You appear to be in excellent health," Teal'c, the cynic, objected.

"When I was dying, Jack managed to coerce Mawai into sending for Thor. He arrived..."

"Barely in time." Jack looked down at the table, his knuckles whitening from the pressure of his grip. "Mawai had disabled the Stargate. We had no way to determine how much damage was done or if it was repairable. The city we were trapped in was fourteen hundred miles from the gate and the transporter system which had taken us there was also disabled. Mawai refused to reverse the damage. Short of torturing it out of her, I was out of options to force her to release us."

"We were making plans to walk to the gate with some kind of power source, see if we could dial out manually," Daniel said. "I thought, we agreed, the most likely damage would have been to the DHD rather than the gate itself."

Sam nodded her agreement to this assertion.

"There were a lot of difficulties to be overcome in that English isn't the written or spoken language on Tiya. I was forced to begin to learn the language in order to translate the documents and resources we'd need to make the journey to the Stargate."

"What if the Stargate could not be repaired?" Teal'c wanted to know.

"The transporter located near to the Stargate was programmed to return us to the city," Jack replied. "Mawai told us it was the only one in the network still functional outside of the city itself."

"How did you deal with the nanotechnology?" Sam asked. "You both seem...yourselves."

"We used the Zat," Daniel said confidently. Of course he didn't get away with it. Everyone looked shocked and reproachful again, mostly in Jack's direction. "It was a calculated risk!" Daniel argued crisply. "Like with nishta. Teal'c used a Zat on Rya'c that time and an electrical shock worked to reverse the effects of Seth's mind control. We figured it couldn't hurt." He thought about that. "Well, I don't mean it didn't hurt. It, it, er..."

"We get the picture, son," Hammond let him off the hook. "Zatting worked?"

"Honestly, I don't know what worked. It could have been as simple as the technology shutting down when it had achieved its purpose. All I know is, when Jack came to, he was back to normal," Daniel reported with complete conviction if economy with the truth. "Suffering from amnesia but otherwise fine. And working from that moment on to get us out of there."

"The clinching argument was Daniel dying if Mawai didn't help us," Jack told the general. "When it came down to it, she couldn't just stand there and watch him die."

"Mawai is in the care of the Asgard, General. She, er, she..."

"Finally cracked," Jack came to Daniel's rescue. "The woman was looney toons, Sir, that's why she thought this would work. She actually believed Daniel would be grateful to her for what she did."

"Does this Mawai present any kind of security risk?"

"The only risk she presents is to herself," Jack said coldly. "The security of the SGC was never compromised on any level while we were on that planet. Mawai was all about getting Daniel there, not what was going on here. Memories were implanted, not read, and the technology was contained to Daniel and myself."

"I want full medical examinations conducted on both of you," the general ordered. "And I want you to remain on base under Dr. Fraiser's supervision until she sees fit to release you from her care."

Knowing the bottomless shit he'd be in with Janet Fraiser for injuring one of her staff, Jack acknowledged this command with the greatest reluctance.

"As for the question of charges," Hammond said finally, "No one here doubts Colonel O'Neill was not acting of his own volition. Had the lieutenant died, I don't know what situation we might all be facing now. The Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn't address alien influence as a mitigating factor in an airman's defence. However, I must acknowledge that all personnel assigned to the SGC fully understand and accept the often extraordinary risks they're exposed to on the base and off-world."

"General, if I may?" Daniel could see an opportunity to help Jack. "This isn't the first time people at the SGC have been compromised. It's not even the first time for SG-1. When the base was exposed to the Touched virus from the Land of Light, Sam was stabbed in the stomach in a fight with her cellmate. No criminal, no disciplinary action was taken against the woman who made the attack. There are other instances. SG-1 are also responsible for sabotaging the dialling computer on a previous occasion and instead of a court-martial, Jack and Sam got medals for it. The precedents seems pretty clear to me."

"I'm aware of the precedents, Dr. Jackson," Hammond said dryly, "And of the secrecy and exceptional circumstances that protect the men and women of this command. Which is why no further action is to be taken against Colonel O'Neill." His serious face lightened somewhat. "Much to the dismay and disappointment of a certain senator who's taken an obsessive interest in the recent developments."

"Senator Kinsey," Sam said distastefully. "He wanted Colonel O'Neill shot on sight as a traitor."

"I'd be more than happy to return the compliment!" Jack snapped.

"As would I, O'Neill," Teal'c expressed a similar sentiment.

"So that's it? No charges, no repercussions?" Daniel wanted clarification before he would trust this rush of exhausted relief.

"Other than submitting yourselves to a complete medical work-up in order for Dr. Fraiser to officially clear you for return to active duty, the comprehensive written reports you'll both have on my desk by 1700 tomorrow, and a full debrief at 0900, Friday?" Hammond responded dampeningly. "If that's not enough?" he hinted broadly.

"Fine. It's fine. Thank you."

"Looking forward to making that call to Kinsey, eh, Sir?" Jack sat back, much more at ease. The worst was over. There were only the formalities left to deal with.

"Almost as much as Dr. Fraiser is looking forward to having you gracing her infirmary again, Colonel," Hammond replied pleasantly.

Daniel, the innocent victim in all of this, tried very, very hard not to look smug. Under the table, Jack kicked him.

Hammond leaned back and included them all in his tired smile. "Welcome home, SG-1," he said softly.

There was a discernible atmosphere in the infirmary. Daniel was sorry for it but as he wasn't directly the target, it was difficult to know how to counter it. There was resentment in the sly or open glances directed at Jack, curiosity, a sour, inappropriate note of humour in the low-voiced conversations that stopped instantly when Jack would look at someone. The gossip surrounding them since Jack had first attacked Daniel had been spiced up by the kidnapping and Jack's spectacular escape off-world. Daniel was angry on Jack's behalf but Jack himself was inclined to just take it on the chin. He'd fucked up and he expected to be made to pay. The expression on his face was unreadable, even to Daniel.

Since neither of them was technically ill, they were stuck in the main sick bay, where it was convenient for Janet and her staff to run their barrage of tests. If Janet was aware of the atmosphere, she didn't show it. She banned Sam and Teal'c from her infirmary, smiled at Daniel and treated Jack with cool respect. Firing questions the whole time at them about what they knew of the nanotechnology and all they remembered of its effects on them, Janet did her job with stunning efficiency. Daniel guessed she was kicking herself for not catching how sick Jack had been and not taking greater precautions for his safety and the safety of her staff. Jack had escaped and kidnapped Daniel on her watch and she had something to prove, even if it was only to herself.

She took blood samples for a complete work-up, urine samples and stool samples. Physically examined them from head to toe with microscopic thoroughness. Then she scanned them inside and out. X-Rays, full body CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, ECG, EMG and ultrasound, PDQ and ASAP.

Daniel got an extended grilling because of his appendix having inconsiderately exploded and then even more tests because Janet wanted to be satisfied the surgical skills of the Asgard met her exacting standards. She also didn't appear to be entirely convinced his appendix was actually gone. He was decidedly less sympathetic towards her after being put through all of this, and livid when she refused to let him have some coffee. He was still grumbling under his breath about medic's inhumanity to man when they were deposited in a side-ward and denied visitors on the grounds that Janet, one, had extensive test results to exhaustively analyse and, two, was pissed off with Jack.

The moment the world stopped making demands of them, Daniel was slammed flat by exhaustion. He'd been assaulted, sexually confused, watched over a desperately ill Jack for days, kidnapped, dragged off-world, zatted, beaten up, almost raped, imprisoned, had body parts explode on him, almost died, had a pus-punctuated ride on the mighty Thor's Chariot, and made love with Jack. He needed a nap.

He also needed to let Jack know something, before they went any further. It was not what he wanted to say and it certainly wasn't what he felt. He loved Jack though, and this had to be offered. There were so many other demands now, so many other considerations, responsibilities and consequences, more lives touched than their own, because he loved Jack. And because he fucked up with pitiful regularity.

"If it's not the same here, if you – if we can't go on, I'll accept it," he gave a quiet, painful promise and then, despite everything he felt and wanted to give of himself, the bastard world greyed out on him. He slept.

There were times Daniel Jackson punched out your heart. There were times he made you want to smack him. And there were times like this, where he managed to do both at once and then fell asleep on you before you could do anything.

Not that Jack could do anything, or even argue anything, because Daniel had sure picked his spot to have his say. Jack was the only show in town so far as the pissed and prying infirmary staff were concerned. With Daniel snoring, a little of that pinched exhaustion easing from around his eyes, Jack decided now was a good time to take care of some business, make some things right.

First, he spread a blanket over Daniel and put his glasses close by where they could be found easily. Then he went to see Janet Fraiser, letting his ass hang out of his gown for edification of the gawping gals in the cheap seats.

"Doc."

She looked up from her computer monitor to frown at him, here blocking her doorway when he should be there in his bed.

Jack came in, closed her lab door behind him and thanked her.

"For what?"

"For not embarrassing Daniel with questions in the middle of all those people." For doing the physicals and the tests herself. For looking out for them even when she was mad as all hell with Jack. "You found some bruising."

"Only on you," she retorted, standing her ground. "I did check."

"That nanotechnology Mawai gave to Daniel?" Uninvited, Jack took a seat on the stool by the lab bench. "She told us it was used in wedding ceremonies." He felt bad about lying with the half-truth to Fraiser, she was good people, but he didn't feel bad enough not to do it. He was still pretty goddamned cold about everyone but Daniel. "She was definitely not expecting to see me turn up with Daniel. What went on between Daniel and me," he explained carefully, "that was a side-effect of the malfunction. Those little buggers were never intended to get inside two guys. They weren't designed for it. When I came to, the last thing I wanted to do was jump Daniel's bones."

Fraiser wanted to believe him, it was less exhausting, and if he could be trusted, if she could keep her faith in him, then her world made more sense than if she couldn't.

"The bruising?" Jack said forthrightly. "It got pretty bad between us. Daniel did that to me and then he zatted me," he admitted disarmingly. "I'm still limping."

Fraiser's face said good!

"I was back to my old self when I woke up," Jack promised. This she found easy to accept because it was the truth he was telling her. "Daniel told me I was, how did he put it? Out of my head the whole time. He insists I was trying to look out for him, even when it got pretty bad. That I never wanted to hurt him."

"I can see that Dr. Jackson doesn't have any trouble placing his trust in you, Colonel," Fraiser admitted. "Nor does he have any issues with your proximity or display any of the behavioural signs I'd typically associate with a victim."

"To be fair, Daniel never does."

Fraiser's lips twitched unwillingly.

"I found it hard to believe Daniel was okay with me," Jack said frankly. "He had way less trouble with not blaming me than I have with not blaming myself."

It was so easy to do. Put these truths out there, let them be heard, understood, trusted. When the other person wanted or needed to trust you, they heard all of these small, individual truths and believed the larger 'truth', the lie you needed them to. They took you on faith. It didn't make them weak to not see the lies and misdirection, only human. Easy.

"About the nurse?" Jack asked. "For what good it might do, I'd like to see her, apologise to her. I feel bad about that."

"Sam told me you accepted full responsibility," Fraiser said softly. "That you offered to face charges if it needed to go down that way." Her approval of Jack not shirking blame was clear and now he'd made it okay for her to do so, she could afford to ease up on him. "Nurse Taglieri was pretty shook up," she told him. "But she kept saying, over and over, that she couldn't understand it, that you just couldn't have been yourself."

Jack had been himself. Just himself with all the walls in his mind knocked down. All of his control and his discipline gone. He was more than capable of killing that woman and he guessed everyone knew it. It was hard for them to face this about him and harder to face the same essential truth in themselves. They wanted to let him off the hook because by extension, they were off the hook too.

"Taglieri is taking some medical leave," Fraiser said in a more natural tone. "I think she'd appreciate a vast, expensive bouquet and a 'sorry' card to keep her going until she's back at work and you can grovel in person."

"Expensive?"

"She loves orchids, not daisies." Fraiser's smile was unpleasantly smug. "Sgt. Harriman likes Arturo Fuente cigars and Technician Dennehy likes good imported Irish whiskey. Good whiskey," she repeated unnecessarily and somewhat hypocritically, given her aggressive advocacy of clean living.

Ooo-kaaay. Jack could do this. Small price to pay to make things right with his people.

"Sam," Fraiser went on relentlessly, "likes Godiva's chocolates. The ones in the really big gift baskets. Teal'c likes Star Wars. The digitally re-mastered boxed set is out on video."

"And what do you like?"

"Me?" Fraiser sat back, smiling. "I like my patients healthy."

"And are we?" Jack nodded towards the scary display of someone's innards looming large on her monitor.

"You both appear to be in perfect health." The doc folded her hands neatly in her lap, thinking things through. "The blood samples we took from you during the initial attack had to be teeming with the Tiyan nanocites, yet no one exhibited even the mildest signs of infection. There was nothing in those samples that I could see then," she confessed in frustration. "Nothing in these blood samples to see now."

"We saw Mawai step out of thin air," Jack told her. "I've got no idea how that stuff worked, only that they backwards engineered that hi-tech wedding cup of theirs from the little buggers they were using to keep five thousand year-old tapestries in one piece. You could walk through water and not get wet. The stuff was everywhere, saturating everything, but you couldn't see it. You could only touch it."

"You think maybe the reason Dr. Jackson finds it so easy not to blame you is because he blames himself? He was the carrier," Fraiser reminded Jack reasonably.

He realised this was the first time anyone had asked him his opinion directly since Thor had dropped them off. The first time he was asked about Daniel, not Daniel about him.

He was back.

Word that Jack had wormed his way back into Fraiser's good graces spread rapidly. So rapidly, the first visitors beat him back to his bed. When he walked in, Carter and Teal'c were sitting side by side on his bed, fondly watching Daniel snore.

They wanted to know everything, so Jack obligingly went over Daniel's plausibly abbreviated everything with them, adding some local colour about the drones, his triumphs over Tiyan technology, run-ins with stinky, scaly, honking cows, plus the edited highlights of Daniel's battles with Mawai, amazing exploding appendix and gnawing envy that Jack had had an Asgard mothership named after him. For some reason this made Carter laugh.

Daniel went on snoring.

When Teal'c finally got up, he smoothed Daniel's blanket back over the shoulder it'd fallen from and offered Jack a firm handclasp.

"It is good to have you home again, O'Neill."

"Likewise," Jack said agreeably, thinking this was more like it.

Carter slipped over to fuss with Daniel's hair, looking disappointed when this outrageous imposition failed to wake him. She sighed, fussed a little more, then told Jack she was glad to have them both back too.

As she and Teal'c left, Ferretti came bounding in, seemingly in search of grapes, cookies and other goodies that might have been provided to ease the patients' suffering. Seeing Daniel was sleeping and more importantly Daniel's snack cupboard was bare, he very generously offered to return to later. He was wearing a virulent t-shirt with the DayGlo slogan 'Aliens Make Me Do It,' which was, he said, in honour of Jack getting jiggy in the main base elevator. Jack asked if the Air Force had remedied the gross administrative oversight that had recently seen Ferretti promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Some base, some place, there was the real, deserving Feretti. Or Ferreti. After agreeing to disagree over who could kick whose ass and just who it was played like a girl in their impromptu, infrequent games of street-hockey, they amicably parted company.

Robert Rothman came in with Nyan in tow. When Daniel didn’t immediately respond to their presence or to his name, Rothman shouted it and poked Daniel in the shoulder.

Robbing Jack of the pleasure of forcible eviction, Daniel was groggy but happy to see them. Sitting back down on his bed, Jack gritted his teeth. Then he lay on his bed with the pillow over his face and gritted them some more. Then, as the cut and thrust of informed archaeological debate intensified, he told himself a hundred thousand times that Daniel liked Rothman, Daniel liked Rothman, Daniel liked Rothman.

Jack still wanted to kill him.

Rothman too.

General Hammond came to their rescue, implacably dispensing with Rothman's inimitable presence before Jack was forced to harm him severely, which made Daniel get all sulky and cranky and disappear under his blanket again.

"I guess this means you don't want to go home tonight after all," the general indulged in a little sarcasm. "I'll inform Dr. Fraiser she should hold you a little while longer, son."

"Home?" Daniel re-emerged, reviving as if by magic.

"Home."

No sooner said than done. Daniel was out the door and asking for his street clothes so fast there was practically a sonic boom.

Jack sensed someone was regretting something stupid he'd said earlier.

"If you'll excuse me?" he asked the general politely, wanting to initiate pursuit before Daniel got too much of a head-start on him.

"Good to have you boys home." Hammond's bemusement gave way to amusement. Always did.

"General," Jack said in all sincerity, "It's good to be home." A few hours back on his own turf, he was insane, infuriated and chasing after a guiltily speeding, eel-elusive Daniel.

Situation normal, all fucked up.

"You've said some stupid things to me, Daniel Jackson," Jack asserted repressively the instant he opened his front door to the most annoying man who ever lived. "But what you came out with back there in the infirmary was the dumbest in the history of dumb! Whatever else might be going on with us, I haven't changed, so quit your whining!"

"Oh. Okay." This was about it for Daniel's penitent lover schtick.

Jack grabbed a fistful of shirt and dragged Daniel into the house. Brightening visibly, Daniel decided this was a nice game and he wanted to play if it got him laid. He bounded into Jack's arms and kissed him exuberantly.

"We can talk about it, if you like?" he offered Jack generously. "In bed."

"There's nothing to talk about." Fielding Daniel neatly, Jack kicked his front door shut.

"So we talk about nothing. In bed."

"I'm sensing a theme here."

"Bed, Jack."

That'd be the one.

In the bedroom, it emerged that the mutual touching of cocks hadn't exactly made the archaeologist less shy. Daniel stripped rapidly, even with a certain enthusiasm. Except the shirt. The very blue shirt baring his throat. The shirt stayed on, flirting enticingly around his slim, finely muscled thighs when he moved. When Daniel pulled back the blankets and slid into Jack's bed, Jack was prowling along right behind him.

They lay back against the pillows. Turned naturally into one another and kissed quickly, questioningly. Then, sure of each other again, they kissed slowly, softly, deeply. Daniel's hand curved possessively over Jack's hip when he buried his face lovingly in Jack's throat and needed to stay there, quiet for a while. Just breathing, breathing Jack in. Holding on to him.

"I do love you," Daniel gave his promise intensely, kissing Jack's jaw.

"Me too."

"And nobody loves you better," Daniel joked wickedly, with another whispering, starting-to-be-serious kiss.

"Are we going to have sex or take a time-out for reaction to set in?" Jack wanted to know.

"Sex."

"You scared me," Jack had to say, although Daniel already knew it.

"Scared me too. Didn't expect my body to fail on me like that." Daniel wanted Jack's mouth and took it, murmuring pleasure. "You didn't," he whispered. "Didn't fail me."

Jack was still not so sure.

"You saved me." Daniel was serious and their kiss grew serious, sexy, wanting.

They were both pushing, they always pushed. It was entirely natural to them to push each other with mouth, belly, hip and thigh, fabric folding, knotting, rubbing, cocks dry and deliciously grating, trapped between them. They ground mouths and cocks, Daniel turning onto his back, pulling Jack with him, the wince of bruised balls sweetened by urgent fingers fondling his ass. They pushed harder and harder, bellies slipping and cocks thumping, pushing always together.

Jack felt very close to Daniel then, felt in their lovemaking there was an essential truth, a mingling, a mutually sustained balance that was who they were.

Daniel came with a quiet sigh of satisfaction and strong hands proud on Jack's back, seeing him through. They were good together and it was okay then to let the feeling show. Jack's head found Daniel's shoulder, his arms those comfortable places to be. Daniel's hands found his hair.

"I don't remember everything," Jack mumbled, still needing to say a few things before he was clear of it all. "I'm sorry for what I do remember, except for one thing. Being honest with you and with myself."

"I'm glad."

"You were right about those walls coming down."

"I'm not grateful to Mawai. Maybe there would've been a time for you to be honest with yourself and with me, but Mawai took that choice from you and she took it from me and I don't forgive her because it worked out for us. It could just as easily have destroyed us."

"From now on," Jack warned, "you ask questions, Daniel. Lots of questions."

"You can lighten up," Daniel took advantage with a lightning counter-proposal. "I don't think you have quite so much to prove to yourself as before?" he asked, sensitively not pressing Jack for an answer, for specifics. "So maybe you can ease up on that big, bad military mother you hide behind."

"It's who I am."

"It's only part of you," Daniel argued patiently. "If it was all of you, if you were that rigid and unfeeling, I wouldn't be with you. You wouldn't have the imagination to be able to stand wanting me and I...well, I wouldn't want you."

"I never knew anyone who could pay a backhanded compliment as effortlessly as you do."

"I learned it from you."

"You learned to lie from me too."

"Maybe." Daniel was amused. "I don't think of what I did today as lying so much as it was an expression of enlightened self-interest. If you're doing hard time in Leavenworth, I'm stuck here crying into my pillow and doing my own right hand."

"See? That's how you do it," Jack praised him. "That's the beauty of economy with the truth. Keeping it so rare makes the real gems so much more precious." He kissed a mulish mouth. "It won't kill you to admit you love me and you didn't want me to go to jail."

Daniel grumped a shoulder. It might very well kill him. It was just his luck.

Meekly, Jack kissed the offended shoulder. "I didn't want me to go to jail either. I know what I said about facing the charges and all, but – look, it's not that I don't care about everyone or that I don't need to do right by them, because I do. It's just...I love you."

What Jack had learned in his long night of soul-searching was that he loved by degree. Until he met Daniel, the person he loved most was himself. He'd fought against loving Daniel as hard and as long as he did because of who he was. An egotistical, self-centred sonovabitch who was supremely talented at locking away all the feelings and all the people that didn't fit into the neat, labelled boxes he controlled when he opened. What he'd had to learn the hard way was there wasn't a box he had that fit Daniel or that Daniel wouldn't turn right around and bust out of. The hard way was seeing this not as a threat to Jack's control but as an assertion of equality. Daniel was never trying to take something away from him, only to give Jack something of himself and be given something back of Jack in his turn. Daniel only wanted to love him. It was an uncomplicated, freeing feeling.

"Yeah," Jack smiled, glad his mind hadn't fucked his body over this time. "I love you."

Everyone else stayed in their places, in the boxes Jack had made for them. Maybe he was a little sorry for that, but he wouldn't change it. That was his, what did Daniel call it? His big bad military mother. The man in the uniform. Daniel knew that man well, accepted he was a part of Jack but not the best part. Maybe Daniel would never realise the best part was his and his alone. He could take a lot on faith, he was sweet that way and it was part, a small part, of what made Jack love him too.

"Don't get any more stupid ideas about making things easy for me," he ordered Daniel. "If I wanted easy, I wouldn't want you."

"If I wasn't an unconscious fuck-up, I wouldn't want you either," Daniel smiled.

The cold part of Jack was always going to be able to function. Always get him through. He would always do his job and fulfil his obligations the best way he knew how. He would still willingly die for the people he commanded and still calmly keep them from ever knowing who he was. Warm, easy, loving moments like this, he couldn't regret the cold pragmatism that relentlessly compartmentalised his life. It gave him Daniel.

Adjustment was not difficult for Jack or for Daniel. If there was an edge, an intensity to their accustomed bantering exchanges, to Daniel's demanding wilfulness or Jack's exasperated indulgence, only the two of them saw it. To everyone else, even to the ones who knew them best, it was same old, same old. The base drew a collective sigh of relief.

SG-1 was functional again, trapped on base in a scheduled cycle of paperwork, reporting and scientific projects. Jack was crabby, opinionated, sarcastic and bored, bored, bored. He was thrashed by Teal'c at boxing, ping-pong and Doom. He scoffed at Daniel's single-minded pursuit of better living through translation and broke something he shouldn't have been demonstrating his academic excellence with in Carter's lab. The gossip surrounding Jack and Daniel and their off-world escapade withered in the face of the unrelenting mundane reality of mission down-time.

Each night they met up in their private time, at Jack's place or Daniel's. They talked a little, ate a lot, drank beer, watched some history, some sports, argued incessantly, got along, touched, made love. The shirts came off.

Neither of them was used to being happy, they didn't trust it, so they ignored it, expecting it would go away. After three or four nights, nothing had changed between them. They had to give in and admit to it. They were happy.

General Hammond finally, finally took pity on them and called SG-1 in for one of those blood-on-the-carpet temples .v. tech things where Daniel and Carter duked it out for dibs on the next off-world destination. Carter always started out wanting to change the face of physics but what usually got changed was her mind. Somehow, Daniel always managed to pull a rank on her he wasn't supposed to have.

The two of them were in full combative flow when the Stargate began to dial in, the red alert sounded, an unauthorised off-world activation was announced and Hammond led them pounding down the stairs into the control room. An eighth and final chevron engaged and the walls shook as the wormhole erupted.

A signal was coming through, Harriman reported within moments. He caught Jack's eye and smiled briefly, greatly reconciled to being zatted by expensively aromatic Cuban stogies. With Teal'c at her back, Carter slipped into her usual seat at the console, tippy-tapped away, and Thor popped up in all of their monitors at once.

"Greetings, Colonel O'Neill and Daniel Jackson," Thor gratifyingly singled them out from the common human herd. "I bring you the news that you requested of Tiya and the Conservator Mawai. My ship Biliskner was called into battle against our enemy the Replicators when our presence in their sector of space was discovered. During the battle, the ship became infested with the technology. The Replicators accessed the ship's computer, which contained information about the planet Tiya, and plotted a course there. The crew was transported from the ship. Before abandoning the Biliskner, I disabled the outbound transporter, preventing the Replicators from escaping.

"With the Tiyan Stargate also disabled and no extant population to be harmed by punitive action, the Asgard High Council ruled that the sacrifice of Tiya was an acceptable price to pay for destroying our enemy in great numbers. Under my command, the O'Neill led the Asgard fleet to Tiya. The planet, the Biliskner and the Replicators were obliterated by sustained bombardment from high orbit. The world of Tiya is no more.

"Colonel O'Neill and Dr. Jackson, had your presence on Tiya not resulted in Conservator Mawai summoning the Biliskner to her aid, the Replicators might instead have targeted Earth as the most technologically sophisticated of the Protected Planets recorded within the ship's computer. The greatly superior technology of Tiya, an unprotected and unpopulated world, proved too great an opportunity for them to logically ignore."

Thor faded from their screens to be replaced by an image of Tiya, the Shullay Castle, its towers listing drunkenly and walls crumpled, crawling, literally crawling with a sea of metal bugs. The image panned back to show the carnage in the city, the biblical scale of this seething plague of techno-locusts.

"Freeze it," Jack ordered.

Daniel had the grace to be aghast at the destruction of all of that history, an entire culture wiped from the universe as if it had never existed, never touched anyone's life. "My god. What about Mawai?" he asked in a low, stupefied, private aside to Jack. "It's because of what she did to us Tiya is gone instead of Earth."

Mawai would live out her cosseted days alone among the Asgard, rueing the day she'd hurt Daniel Jackson and brought Jack O'Neill into her life. He hoped she lived forever, knowing Tiya was gone, knowing she'd brought the destruction of all she'd lived for entirely on herself, hating him as much as she hated herself.

"Looks like justice to me, Daniel," he said gently.

Daniel looked around at Jack, strove to find an objection and had, in the end, to admit he was only human. "It's nemesis, Jack."

With poised, lingering satisfaction, Jack smiled.

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 |

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