Title: Pavlov
Author: Kalimyre
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Jack/Daniel
Category: First Time, Drama/Angst
Status: Complete
Series: No
Season: Seven, spoilers up to Chimera, minor for Grace and Avenger 2.0
Synopsis: Daniel has a theory. Can you ever really have too many "Aliens Make Them Do It" stories?
Notes: Thanks go out to Darcy, for being so enthusiastic and responding so well to my transparent flattery attempts. To Mamabeast, for giving me good ideas and making me think. And to She Who Must Not Be Named for making me want to be better at this.
Warnings:
A
R
N
I
N
G
S
P
A
C
E
Possible coerced sex. Graphic sex. Some language. Clichés galore.
Disclaimer: If they were mine, there would be less clothing, more exploration, and the stargate would appear in every episode. I'm not making any money from this.
Part 1"Well, this is a cliché," Jack said, peering up at the blank white ceiling, his hands patting across his chest for a weapon that was no longer there.
Daniel turned from his examination of the plates of food laid out at one end of the room. He followed Jack's gaze to the featureless walls and a small line appeared between his eyebrows. "It is?"
"Well, yeah." Jack waved, as if his meaning should be obvious. "Here we are, trapped in a little room, all our gear gone and no way out. Haven't we done this, oh, a few hundred timed already?" He leaned forward slightly, tilting his head to one side, fixing Daniel with an irritated stare.
"Sam and Teal'c will get us out," Daniel said absently, already studying the food again. "I think these plates are laid out in some kind of pattern. It's almost familiar."
Jack raised an eyebrow. His voice was deliberately calm. "Daniel? Perhaps it's time to reconsider your priorities. We're prisoners and you're talking about china patterns?"
"I wasn't--" Daniel stopped, recognized Jack's baiting for what it was, and rolled his eyes. "Right," he said. "I'll just wail and pull my hair and bang on the walls for a while. I'm sure that'll help."
Jack considered coming up with another sarcastic response, but Daniel would only match him at every step and he was bored with the game. Maybe later, he thought. When staring at the wall lost its limited charm. "Not wailing," he said instead, sauntering over beside Daniel. "Did you hear me wailing?"
"Hmm," Daniel said, which bugged the crap out of Jack. It was one step above outright dismissal. Sometimes he thought that Daniel had never really come back from being a glowy light thing. His head was still in the clouds. But then, it always had been.
"What've we got?" Jack asked, considering the food. It was, at least, more interesting than the slick, white, not-quite-plastic of every surface in the room.
Daniel slid his eyes sideways to Jack, and his lips twitched. "Food," he said.
"How do you know?" Jack countered. "Have you tasted it? Maybe it's fake. Hell, maybe it's decoration."
"Our hosts don't seem to be too big on decoration."
Jack nodded, grimacing at the stark, angular room. Even the food looked plain and boring. A shelf protruded seamlessly from the wall, and on it were several white circles, which couldn't really be called plates because they were perfectly flat discs. Jack pushed at one and found it locked in place, not just on the shelf, but part of it.
The food looked innocuous enough, dried meat and largish square chunks of flat bread, along with some vaguely carroty vegetables and something round and red that Jack assumed was fruit. It looked like a dietician's idea of a healthy balance. Jack hoped they wouldn't be here long enough to need to eat it.
"At least we won't go hungry," Daniel offered, casting another sidelong glance at Jack's sour expression.
Jack grunted and considered the non-plates for a moment longer. He didn't see any pattern. He suspected that Daniel was trying to see a pattern because there was nothing else even remotely interesting to look at. "Can't say I think much of the facilities," Jack said, tilting his head toward the other end of the room.
Daniel walked over, falling into his surveying habit and counting his paces, coming up with fifteen. The room felt small, stifling, the walls uncomfortably close. He wondered where the clean air was coming from, since as far as he could see, there were no vents or gaps anywhere.
"There's water," Daniel said. He was trying to find a bright side.
"I'm not big on drinking from the toilet," Jack replied. He wasn't helping Daniel find the bright side.
Daniel's mouth turned down at the image Jack just created for him, and he wrinkled his nose. "Jack," he said, short and irritated.
Shrugging, Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets and shut up. He decided that his displeasure at the situation was now sufficiently clear and it was time to quit whining and do something about it. "Water looks clean," he said, and he began to scan the room for anything that could be used to store the water, just in case it stopped running down the wall in that steady stream.
"Hmm," Daniel said, tilting his head back and appraising the water system. "This design is actually quite ingenious. Everything we need for survival and relative comfort in a very compact space." The water came from a point high up on the wall and poured down in a smooth, constant column. It was caught in a basin at chest level, and gathered there in a pool, then drained from the bottom of the basin in another stream, flat and wide against the wall, to splash in a bigger bowl. The lower bowl was thick, with a rim broad enough to sit on, and the water inside whirled away constantly, disappearing into the floor.
Jack shook his head and grimaced at the thought of taking a crap with Daniel in the same room. "What, no toilet paper?" he muttered.
"Whoever built this place must be at least humanoid, if not completely human," Daniel continued as if Jack had said nothing. "Either that or they have a working knowledge of human physiology. There's even..." He paused and dabbed a finger into the little bowl beside the upper basin. It was a semicircle, half buried in the wall, containing some sort of cream. Jack peered at the cream and was wholly unsurprised to find that it was white.
"Haven't we had a discussion about you touching things?" he asked, narrowing his eyes as Daniel lifted a fingertip of the cream to his face and sniffed. When Daniel didn't acknowledge this, Jack sighed and said, "So? What does it smell like?"
"Nothing." Daniel dipped his hands into the water and rubbed the cream between them. It lathered obediently and he smiled. "It's soap. I thought so."
Jack was liking this less and less. Everything about this place said that it wasn't a temporary waiting room. The cell was designed to keep them alive indefinitely, and that was always a bad sign.
"Any thoughts about how we're going to got out of here?" Jack asked, crossing over to the food again. He picked up a piece of dried meat, sniffed it, found that it smelled as bland as it looked, and put it back down.
"I'm still not entirely clear on how we got in here."
Jack winced slightly, his lips tightening into a rueful little smile. He had so been hoping Daniel knew something he didn't. "What's the last thing you remember?"
"We came through the gate," Daniel said. "I was going to check out the DHD, you were saying something to Sam, and then I woke up here."
"Yeah," Jack replied. "That's about how I remember it."
"Were we drugged?"
Jack shrugged and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "I don't feel drugged." And considering how often he'd been drugged, he ought to know.
Daniel nodded and pursed his lips as he stared at the floor, his eyebrows drawn together, his fingers tapping against the sides of his legs. "Do you have anything but your clothes? Anything in your pockets?"
"Nope." Jack rocked back on his heels, and then forward again, patting his shirt pockets as if he might have missed something the last three times he checked. "I hate when this happens."
"They even took my watch," Daniel said, frowning. "But not my glasses. Why is that?"
Jack shook his head, throwing his hands into the air briefly. "Hell if I know. They took my dog tags. What was up with that?"
Jack considered the possible weapon construction properties of bootlaces and broken glass, decided that Carter could probably came up with something, then gave it up as moot when he realized that Daniel would not give up his glasses unless he could provide a damn good reason.
"Sam and Teal'c will find us," Daniel said, then remembered he already said that. Its reassurance value didn't seem to grow with repetition.
"What if they're in another room just like this one?"
"Then General Hammond will send another team to find us when we don't report in," Daniel replied doggedly.
"And when they got treated to the same little white box as the rest of us?"
Daniel folded his arms and glared at Jack, who had the grace to look slightly apologetic. "Maybe instead of pointless sarcasm, you could try to focus on what we're going to do?" Daniel asked. Each word came out crisp and sharply enunciated.
Jack shrugged and perused the food selection again. "We should ration this," he said in his best conciliatory tone. It wasn't very good, but Jack figured he deserved points for effort, at least.
"You think they won't give us more when we use that up?"
"How do I know?"
Daniel frowned and said nothing. He was used to manipulating information, drawing conclusions from all the facts at hand, creating the big picture from the small details. But this place didn't have small details. There was no writing, no decoration, no sound or color or anything to indicate why they were there. Every surface in the room was joined to every other surface, as if it was all carved from a single piece of stone, only it wasn't stone.
He walked to one wall and pressed his hand against it, then rapped it with his knuckles. It was perfectly smooth, and a little bit slick, like glass, but it didn't produce the sound that glass made. It seemed to suck all the sound from the room. Daniel pressed his cheek against the wall and sighted along it, looking for any irregularity that might mean something, but there wasn't even a ripple in the surface. His fingertips glided easily over the wall, and he kept coming back to that one word. Slick. Everything was slick. Not wet, or slippery, but still somehow unpleasant. He rubbed his fingertips together and imagined that he had picked up some residue from the wall, but he had not.
Jack watched this, bemused, tolerant. He had a deep rooted certainty that Daniel would fix this, somehow. He would pull the answer out of his ass in some way that was baffling to Jack. He had seen Daniel do this so many times that it had become routine, so he waited, and watched, and hoped they got out of here in time to still got the weekend off.
Daniel began to circle the room, sliding his palms along the wall, a little frown creasing his forehead, and Jack turned to keep him in sight. Soon, he thought, Daniel would call out that he found it, and he would push something and turn something else and a door would appear. That was what Daniel did.
But Daniel didn't call out. He circled the room three times, and just when Jack was getting dizzy watching him, he stopped and kicked a wall. His foot bounced off harmlessly and he winced, half crouching as if to rub his sore toes, and then straightening. He cast a slightly embarrassed look over his shoulder.
"Nice," Jack said, lifting his eyebrows. "Feel better?"
"There's nothing here, Jack. I've got nothing to work with." That, more than the captivity itself, seemed to piss Daniel off.
"Could be worse," Jack told him, and Daniel nodded. Because yes, it could be worse. They had food and water, the room was, if not exactly comfortable, at least livable, and they weren't hurt. No one had come to make threats or drag them off to be beaten, and that was very good. But the incessant whiteness was giving Daniel a headache, and he focused on Jack, who wasn't flat and white and empty, but real and solid and alive. Daniel thought that after all the white, the dark, rich brown of Jack's eyes was oddly soothing.
When Jack shifted uncomfortably and looked away, Daniel realized he was staring. He blinked and looked up at the ceiling again. The walls gave him nothing, but he wasn't ready to give up yet.
"I wonder where the light is coming from?" Daniel said, craning his head back to try and look at the entire ceiling all at once. It was high, by most human standards, and it wasn't until he turned to take in the entire room that he understood. The ceiling was as high as the walls were long, and the floor was wide. They were in a cube, and Daniel was willing to bet that it was a perfect cube. It seemed to fit in with the hollow precision of the place.
"The walls?" Jack guessed. He waved his hand close to one of the walls, but it cast no shadow. And now that he was thinking about it, he saw the room had no shadows at all. The diffuse light was everywhere, not too bright and not too dim. Just as the room was not too hot and not too cold. Jack suddenly thought of Goldilocks and despite the situation, the corner of his mouth curled upward. He would have to mention it to Daniel later, when he ran out of more clever things to say.
Across from him, Daniel was performing the same shadow check and coming up just as empty. "How about this?" Daniel asked, turning back to Jack. "Where, exactly, are we? The UAV didn't show any structures."
Jack shook his head, because the question was pointless. "You know everything I d, Daniel. Maybe we're out of the range of the UAV. Maybe we were taken through the gate. Maybe this place was camouflaged. Maybe we're underground. It doesn't matter where we are; what matters is how we get out."
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Daniel argued. "The more information we have, the better chance we have at solving the problem."
"And why do you think I have information you don't? I wasn't exactly consulted about this."
Daniel opened his mouth and then shut it again, biting back his first response. He told himself that Jack really hated being held prisoner, being helpless, having his team cut in half. Daniel could be patient.
So Daniel said nothing, and that turned out to be the most effective rebuke, because Jack dropped his gaze and muttered, "This is turning into a bad day." Which, for Jack, was an apology.
Before Daniel could come up with a suitable reply, the lights started.