All the talk we ever have heard
Uttered by bat or beast or bird -
Hide or fin or scale or feather -
Jabber it quickly and all together!

-The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling)


Colonel Jack O'Neill had enjoyed his weekend thoroughly. Over the years he had learned to treasure downtime, to cherish and love it, and miss it when it was gone. As a young man, he had been ambitious and driven, and every second not spent doing something seemed like a second of his life that was totally wasted. But the years had made him wise, and experience forged a more relaxed individual, one who enjoyed many frivolous activities, not the least of which was spending two days fishing.

The pond outside his house had many things in it: mosquitoes, bullfrogs, tadpoles, box turtles, crawdads... but absolutely no fish at all. It took a special kind of person with a somewhat unique set of life experiences to actively enjoy wasting time in such a manner as fishing in an empty pond.

But Jack was also a man who craved action, excitement, and new challenges in life. That was evidenced by the career path he'd chosen when he was just eighteen years old. He'd spent his entire adult life in service of the Air Force, except for the times he had attempted to retire. He'd done a lot of things he regretted over the years, but joining the Air Force had never been one of them.

He was an early riser by nature, and his years of military service had further instilled the trait in him. Still, some days were definitely better than others. Today the sun was shining, he'd had all the fishing he could stomach for one weekend and he was ready and eager to be back to work. SG-1 had a mission scheduled for today, and that meant the possibilities were literally endless. Jack had lost his enthusiasm for a great many things, but stepping through the Stargate and seeing what lay on the other side just never did get old. He had the best job in the world, and worked with the best team in the world.

Colonel Jack O'Neill had never had the dubious honor of attempting to command a more disparate and unruly collection of personalities than the team called SG-1. Of them, only Major Samantha Carter ever consistently listened to him. Teal'c listened when it suited him. Daniel Jackson took instruction about as well as an unbroken colt takes to a bit being forced into his mouth. For all that, they were his team and he loved them, and there was no one he'd rather save the galaxy with than those three people.

Still, working with such people did have its challenges.

For instance, on this particularly fine sunny day, Jack had to stop on the way to work to pick up Daniel.

Two weeks ago, Daniel had taken his car in to a mechanic, and it was still not fixed. It wasn't that Jack minded picking Daniel up on the way to work, it was more that Daniel had very strong opinions and feelings on the subject, and he felt the overwhelming need to share those opinions and feelings with Jack, Carter, Teal'c, General Hammond, Dr. Fraser and really anyone who would listen to him. In fact, Jack was beginning to think that asking Hammond to supply Daniel with a replacement vehicle would be worth it just to make him shut up. The only reason he didn't do so was that he knew full well that -for Daniel- it was never the thing itself. It was the principle of the thing. Daniel's issue was not the inconvenience of not having a vehicle, but the irresponsibility of the people who had failed to repair it in a timely fashion as they'd promised.

Normally Daniel was an understanding, patient man. But ever since the death of Sha're... well Daniel had just been eager and spoiling for a fight. Really, he was coping exceptionally well all things considered. He had found it in himself not to blame Teal'c, and did not withdraw from life as most men would after the brutal death of their wife. Jack recognized and understood the pain his friend was in, and knew that lashing out was his inability to control the emotional turmoil that was raging inside of him. The grief that tried to drown him, the guilt at being unable to save the person he loved most in the world, the fear of it happening again to someone else, the anger at himself, at everyone, at life in general for being so unreasonably cruel.

Daniel had his good days and his bad days, but overall he was being his usual resilient self. One thing Jack had learned not long after they met, Daniel was a survivor; it was in his nature to continue no matter how bad things got, or how dark and big the shadows of life grew.

So no, Jack didn't resent Daniel's occasional flash of temper or redirected aggression. But he was very tired of hearing about that damned car all the way to and from work, and he was hoping that the upcoming mission would distract Daniel enough that he wouldn't do another enthusiastic monologue on his opinion of car mechanics, and his mechanic in particular.

Daniel's loft apartment was the second or third he'd had since he'd joined the Stargate Program. In fairness, the first apartment wasn't his fault. They'd thought he was dead at the time, had a funeral and everything. By the time they found out he wasn't dead and got him back, he had to find a new apartment. Daniel was somewhat less than thrilled, but he took it okay. Jack got the impression that changing homes was not a big deal for Daniel. Jack, on the other hand, had no interest in moving if it wasn't absolutely necessary. Moving was a lot of work, and hardly worth it if you were almost never home. The amount of time he spent off-world, particularly around technologically primitive people, was probably why it didn't bother Daniel that the elevator in his building was out of order, and had been for a couple of months at least. Why that didn't bother him but the car thing did was an absolute mystery.

Usually Daniel was paying attention and noticed when Jack's truck pulled onto the street in front of his apartment and came out rather than making Jack climb the stairs. But some days, like today apparently, Daniel became absorbed in something and forgot to look out the window.

Over time, Jack had learned to take Daniel's eccentricities in stride. The man had a lot of them. Whenever Jack felt himself get genuinely irritated by Daniel's more peculiar behaviors, he reminded himself that Daniel's odd way of looking at the world was what had opened the Stargate in the first place, and also brought the original team home from Abydos. So the man sometimes got a little absorbed by his work and forgot what eating and sleeping were, so what? Once he unraveled whatever mystery had him so enthralled, it usually turned out to be worth it. Even though Jack usually didn't understand exactly what Daniel had uncovered, or found it boring when it was explained to him, he knew Daniel's findings usually had real value to someone in some way.

After a relaxing weekend of fishing, Jack wasn't inclined to be really irritated by Daniel, but he did enjoy messing with his friend. To Jack, that was absolutely the strangest thing about his life since joining the Stargate Program. For sure, Daniel had been the sort of child who got beaten up and excluded because he had glasses and weird interests. And Jack had been exactly the sort of child who would beat up weird little kids. They were both adults now, and though the habits established in childhood weren't easy to overcome, they had sort of managed to get past all that.

Somehow, without really wanting to or realizing when exactly it had happened, Jack and Daniel had become friends. Despite the fact that they couldn't even agree on whether or not pineapple should be allowed on pizza, and that they had each come with no small amount of prejudice against the other's occupation, and that Daniel could really be a huge pain in the ass... Jack knew on some level that he had never had a truer friend than the one he'd found in the geeky little archeologist with the hay fever and disorganized notes detailing his outlandish theories.

Jack arrived at the door to Daniel's loft and knocked. There was no response.

"Daniel!" Jack called, knocking on the door again.

No response. Jack felt a pang of concern. He checked his watch. Surely Daniel wasn't asleep this late, not on a mission day. Other than being asleep, Daniel had no good excuse for not responding. One thing Jack knew about Daniel was that he had very acute hearing, which was part of why he could pick up new languages so easily. There was no way he couldn't hear Jack knocking on the door from inside his apartment. It was big, yes, but not that big.

"Daniel!" Jack shouted, then tested the door and found it unlocked.

That in itself wasn't terribly concerning. Daniel had a bad habit of forgetting what locks were for. When Jack had called him on it, he'd shrugged indifferently and remarked that the Abydonians didn't even have real doors for the most part. Jack had warned him repeatedly that being careless about locking his door was an open invitation to be burgled, particularly since he was often away from his apartment for days or even weeks at a time. Daniel had evidently not taken the scoldings to heart.

Instinct bade Jack move to one side of the door as he opened it, even though he as yet had no strong reason to suspect anything was dangerously amiss.

"Daniel?" Jack inquired into the foyer.

Nothing. Jack moved cautiously into the apartment. The caution was in part due to the fact that Daniel's continued silence had him on edge. But it was mainly because the man's abode was a picture of highly organized chaos and carefully arranged disarray.

Structurally, the loft apartment was a bit weird, with stairs where they shouldn't be, oddly pitched bits of ceiling and walls that just didn't seem to fit the way ceiling and walls ought to. But it wasn't so weird as to be remarkable. However, Daniel's way of decorating his home left one feeling like they were walking into a museum. A tiny museum with too many exhibits and pathways that weren't quite wide enough. Only unlike a museum, most of what Daniel had was not replicas.

Over the years, Daniel had collected hundreds and hundreds of ancient artifacts from around the world. Every piece in his home had some meaning for him, including the rugs he had in hallways and under tables which wouldn't seem strange but for the fact that the floor was mostly carpeted, which meant the rugs were a bit redundant. Knickknacks perched precariously on shelves and antique pieces of furniture Jack didn't even want to guess the names of, all carefully arranged so that an errant hand or elbow could easily brush them and knock them off to their doom. Jack had once remarked that it was an adequate substitute for a burglar alarm, and Daniel had made some remark about priceless artifacts needing to be treated with a bit more respect than that.

To Jack, it was all just massive stacks of books left everywhere, dusty old vases, odd carvings, roughly made statues, hanging tapestries, and the occasional skull (which was always disconcerting and seemingly out of place). Daniel's décor was definitely in the brown section of the color wheel, but that was mostly because ancient artifacts tended to be brownish. It was unclear to Jack whether Daniel even realized colors were a thing that existed. The accent walls of the apartment were a pale blue, but Jack suspected they'd been painted that color before Daniel arrived.

"Hey, Daniel!" Jack shouted after he'd made it down the hazardous entry hall.

"I'm here."

Jack felt the breath he'd been holding go out of him when he heard Daniel's voice. The worry that had been knotting itself in his gut turned into annoyance at Daniel for scaring him like that. But it was mixed with relief at how reassuringly calm Daniel sounded.

Daniel's voice had come from the living room, but it took Jack a second to spot him amidst the clutter. Daniel had moved the chair he used in place of a piano bench over to the window. He was sitting at an angle so he wasn't quite facing the window or the rest of the room, holding a book that looked quite a bit newer than the majority of the books he had lying around his house. It was paperback instead of hard or leather bound, which was unusual for Daniel.

Jack tilted his head to the side so he could read the title of the book on its binding.

"'The Lives of Wasps and Bees'," Jack read aloud, "Taking up a new hobby, Danny?"

"Hmm?" Daniel looked up from the book, his brow furrowed, "Oh. Uh... no, no... actually it's just that there are these wasps building a nest outside my window."

"They do that," Jack said.

"Yes, I know they do," Daniel said, then hurried on, "But I've never really stopped to pay attention to them. Usually because I'm not here until the nest is established. But also they're usually not nesting where I can see them from inside my apartment."

"Since when do you have an interest in bugs?" Jack asked.

"I don't, but I do have an interest in communication," Daniel mumbled as his eyes returned to the pages of the book he'd been reading when Jack arrived.

"With bugs?"

"What?" Daniel looked up, "No, of course not. No. Just, just hear me out."

"I'm listening," Jack said, with no small amount of reluctance.

He never enjoyed being a spectator to one of Daniel's tangents. It always made him feel like a ballet fan watching hockey. Out of place and out of depth. Even though he liked playing the fool, mostly to keep people from expecting too much of him but also to keep them off balance, he didn't especially enjoy feeling like a fool. Daniel made him feel that way almost constantly.

Suddenly overflowing with enthusiasm for his discovery or theory or flu or whatever it was he'd got, Daniel set aside his book and stood up, beginning to gesture somewhat wildly.

"As everyone knows, dance was one of the earliest forms of communication, being best documented in the dance a bee does when it tells the hive where to find nectar to make honey."

"Of course they do," Jack said, wondering who Daniel thought 'everyone' was.

"But what a lot of people don't realize is that they also use another form of communication."

"Of course they do," Jack repeated.

"Pheromones," Daniel said decisively, growing very still for a moment as he looked directly at Jack.

"Excuse me?"

Daniel began to pace and gesture again, "Scent, they use scent to communicate with one another. So too, as it happens, do wasps. Or the social ones at least."

"Yes... the social kind of wasp, as opposed to the antisocial one that stays home to drink beer and watch Wheel of Fortune instead of attending wild frat parties."

"Polistes exclamans," Daniel exclaimed, snatching up the book about wasps and shaking it at Jack.

"Italian?" Jack queried.

"Latin, actually," Daniel replied, seeming slightly thrown off by the question, and he frowned as he waved a hand towards his window, "It's uh... a species of paper wasp, specifically the kind that's building a nest outside my window."

"Of course it is," Jack said, for lack of anything more clever to say.

"When you dropped me off Friday evening, I came in here and saw this wasp sitting on the molding at the top of my window. The next morning, there were two wasps, and they were starting to build this nest. In the afternoon, a third wasp showed up, but they wouldn't let it on the nest. Some other wasps had shown up, but they were chased off. For some reason this third wasp wasn't. The third wasp spent the whole rest of the day sitting near the nest, defending it from other insects that flew by. It acted like it was trying to... ingratiate itself into the colony," Daniel paused for a moment.

"You don't say," Jack remarked, beginning to wish Daniel would go back to complaining about his car.

Like his apartment and his office at the SGC, Daniel's mind was messy and full of things. Scattered bits of theories, fragments of ideas and little morsels of information all floated about the edges of his consciousness in a soup of several different languages. More often than not, the result was that he looked and sounded slightly unhinged whenever these snippets of trivia and fractions of knowledge coalesced into a spark of brilliance so strong it seemed his body could barely contain it. Jack had a feeling he wasn't seeing a flash of brilliance now, but the smoke signals from a half-baked idea.

Daniel hurried on, "The next morning, there's suddenly four wasps there and they're all working on the nest. Now, I've been watching them and I know that this all started with one wasp, and not just any wasp is allowed to help build the nest. So... so I went out and got this book, because I wanted to find out what kind of wasps they were, and how they were communicating."

"Fascinating. Can we go?"

"Don't you get it?" Daniel was beginning to babble in his frantic excitement, "These wasps... they are somehow communicating complex information over relatively long distances through nothing but scent! Jack, we've already encountered races that don't use words to communicate. You remember the planet where they used sounds we couldn't hear, don't you?"

"I remember having a headache," Jack confirmed.

"And," Daniel continued, "You remember Hathor? Pheromones."

"I thought you and I agreed to never speak of that again."

"Jack! This is important. Some day we might encounter a race that doesn't use the type of language that we do on any level, and it's important to realize that there are other ways to communicate without... talking. Do you get that?" Daniel asked, then waited for a response.

"So?"

"So, so... so I think it's a possibility we have to consider."

"Dammit, Daniel!" Jack practically shouted, though he was more bemused than annoyed at this point because it was clear his friend was being completely silly and had absolutely no awareness whatsoever of how ridiculous he sounded, "With all your little brushes and crevice tools and notebooks, you're already carrying a pack as heavy as you most of the time."

"What's your point?" Daniel asked.

"My point, Daniel," Jack said firmly, "is that I'm not letting you carry around some bottles of perfume based on your theory that we might someday encounter aliens that communicate entirely through pheromones! I forbid it!"

Daniel's eyebrows went up at Jack's choice of phrase, and he repeated it, "You forbid it?"

Jack hesitated, then said, "...Yes. Forbid. That's a thing I do."

There was a pause as they silently acknowledged two things. One, Jack was the leader of SG-1 and therefore was in a position of authority. Two, Daniel would pull against the chain of command until he choked himself or broke it when he felt very strongly about something.

"You're gonna do whatever you want, aren't you?" Jack said finally.

"Probably," Daniel replied mildly.

Jack decided to just let the issue rest and changed the subject.

"Daniel?" Jack said.

"Yes, Jack?"

"Do you know what day it is?"

"Uh... well, you're here, so it must be Monday," Daniel answered.

"Which means you spent the entire weekend sitting by this window, watching some wasps."

"Pretty much," Daniel admitted calmly, and then what that meant finally dawned on him and he suddenly twitched, checked his watch and said, "Oh! Right! The mission! I forgot all about that!"

"Yes... that happens," Jack said slowly, "Anyway... we need to go. Your Political Exultations-"

"Polistes exclamans," Daniel corrected.

"Those too," Jack continued without missing a beat, "They will be here when you get back. So come on, time's a wastin'. General Hammond waits for no man."

"He waits for you all the time," Daniel pointed out.

"Well let's not keep the General waiting then," Jack persisted.

Daniel considered this, then nodded, "Okay."

Jack looked Daniel up and down. Even though he couldn't remember what Daniel had been wearing when they left the SGC on Friday, he suspected that it was this particular sweater. The new, shorter haircut Daniel had recently adopted helped to conceal whether or not he'd showered or used a comb that morning, but the beard stubble certainly gave away whether or not he'd shaved since he got home.

"What?" Daniel asked, looking at himself, then at Jack quizzically.

"Nothing," Jack replied, "You look fine."

Daniel frowned and looked skeptical. When Jack and Daniel had first met, Daniel's interest in personal appearance would have been best described as nonexistent. In the last couple of years, he'd shown the beginning of some level of awareness that people responded to how he looked, usually more than what he said. Being an expert in communication, he understood that first impressions were important to relations between people. But he was not conscious enough about his looks to actually notice for himself what it was that Jack saw. Jack preferred it that way. They were going to be late as it was.

"Keys," Jack said simply.

Daniel looked around his apartment, turning in a slow circle, questing after the keys to his apartment. Then he set off in the direction of the room he had converted into an office. Jack couldn't see what he needed an office for. He had one of those at the SGC, and it seemed his entire apartment was overflowing with pieces of his life's work. In fact, the only clear and clean place in Daniel's home was his kitchen, which was spotless (if a little cluttered with cooking paraphernalia. Pots, pans, ladles, spatulas, whisks and so on), almost as if nobody lived here. As little time as Daniel spent at home, that might as well be the case.

Daniel returned from his office a moment later.

"Keys," He said, holding up the ring so Jack could see it.

"Let's go," Jack said, turning and leading the way.

He'd almost made it to the door by the time Daniel made it back to the dining room. They would have gotten away clean had Daniel's phone not suddenly rung. Daniel hesitated, looking puzzled. But then he picked up the cordless phone from the counter-top in the kitchen. Jack returned to the hallway, grumbling impatiently to himself.

"Hello?"

Jack was close enough to hear the gravelly-voiced response.

"Hello, Daniel."

He observed as Daniel stiffened, clearly recognizing the sound of the voice on the line. Jack was also close enough to watch as Daniel's pupils visibly dilated for a moment. Then Daniel seemed to remember Jack was there. He self-consciously hung up the phone and set it down on the counter.

"Who was that?" Jack inquired.

There were a lot of languages Jack didn't know. But one he could recognize every time was the unspoken language of fear. Daniel's words when he answered Jack said everything was fine, but everything else about him said it was not.

"Huh? Oh, no one. A wrong number. That's all."

Whoever was on the other end of the line, they had Daniel scared to death.


Author's Note: This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day. It is potentially slightly AU, but not on purpose. It's set somewhere in season 3, shortly after the events of Forever in a Day. I wrote this for my entertainment, and I am publishing it here for yours. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.