For abyssinia4077's LeapGate:
prompt: Daniel Jackson/Janet Fraiser; prompt: things unsaid. Rating G. ~300 words.
xxxxxx
Sometimes, when he calls, she lets the answer machine pick it up. Then his message is light-hearted and, though it hurts to hear the hint of false cheer, it's a better alternative to when they actually talk and never say the things left unsaid.
He never asks her to come back, she never asks if he wants her to, whether she could, and they never talk about visiting. The Stargate program has been shut down six months. Three weeks before that, SG-1, minus Sam and plus Janet, came back from an alternate universe with a cure for the Ori plague. What they'd found out there had exposed an awareness, both of them picking up on the grief of that universe's Daniel.
But those three weeks were spent on the much more important matter of the plague. Once it was under control there was a quick and inevitable international clamour for the Stargate program to close before another Earth threatening event occurred. Daniel had snorted at this, at the thought of all the near-disasters averted by the personnel of the SGC, while the rest of the world slept peacefully in their beds.
Janet is fairly sure Daniel thinks she's a coward. Taking a job on the west coast instead of staying at the Academy in Colorado Springs. But he never asked her not to go, so she reserves the right to think of him as a coward too.
She misses him. She knows he misses her too, she can hear the sadness in his voice and that's another reason why she doesn't pick up.
Sometimes, when he calls, she lets the machine take it and then listens to his voice and tries to figure out when she fell in love with him. She's never told him. She's pretty sure he loves her too. But she'll never ask. And he'll never say it.
It's accepted, she thinks; an unspoken agreement between them. Just two more details in a whole list of things unsaid.