Still filling in scenes during Ascension. Did Teal'c really call Daniel and invite him to go to see jello wrestling? And what was that conversation like? In this part Daniel acts like a man, and Jillian acts like a woman and chaos ensues.

Daniel rinsed shaving cream off his razor and wiped the steam off the mirror. Before his relationship with Jillian had reached the 'staying overnight' stage, it had never bothered him that his condo had one bathroom. Now, trying to shave while she showered was a near impossibility.

Of course, before Jillian had started staying overnight, he hadn't had the privilege of hearing her lovely voice as she sang in the shower. She was currently finishing the first verse of Comin' Through the Rye.

"Every lassie has a laddie
None they say have I."

Daniel grinned as her hauntingly lovely voice hit a note that would fly straight to the sun and make it come up dancing.

Ah no, lassie, he thought, you've got this laddie for sure…..

"Yet all the lads they smile at me

When comin' through the …..ouch."

"Ouch?" Daniel repeated. He was pretty sure that wasn't the last word in that stanza.

"I cut myself shaving," she said.

He had narrowly missed the same fate a few times, but considering some of the places Jillian shaved it could be more of a problem for her.

"Are you okay?" Daniel tried to keep his tone neutral. He had been incredibly over protective the last few days and she had gotten irritated with him last night, enough to get a glimpse of her Scots/Irish temper.

Daniel, I'm all right! Stop fussing.

I'm not fussing…

Yes, you are!

At that point she had taken a step towards him, with something in her eyes that was barely tame.

You want me to prove I'm all right?

Nothing to do with that challenge but let his hands follow the curve of her waist and land on her hips, urging her closer until their bodies was just brushing against each other. She had rolled her body forward, slipping her arms around his neck. Her tongue had caressed his mouth. Her long gorgeous leg had slipped up the outside of his, hooked around his thigh and pulled him closer.

Daniel's blood had gone from warm to sizzling in less than a heartbeat.

Then she had proved to him that she was feeling better, starting in the kitchen and ending much later in the bedroom.

"I'm fine, leannan," she answered him now. Then after a pause, "I nicked my shin."

"Well please be careful," he said, trying to make light of it, "I am very very fond of those shins."

He was extremely fond of her legs in general but if he let his thoughts drift in that direction he might accidentally slit his own throat.

He wiped steam off the mirror again and sighed.

"Jill?"

"Yes?"

"Has it occurred to you that what we've been doing for the last few months is kind of annoying?"

The shower door flew open and she peeked out, dripping.

"Are you breaking up with me?" she asked.

"What? NO! Oh my GOD no!"

He spun sideways to look at her.

"No!"

"Jesus, Daniel! Don't scare me like that."

The shower door banged shut again. He stood there trying to catch his breath.

"Are you going to tell me?"

"What?"

"What's been annoying the last few months?"

"OH! Yeah…. This….."

"This?"

"This going back and forth between two condos, forgetting stuff at one or the other, having to come here just to feed the fish. You've got stuff all over the place – here, your condo, the Base. We've got two sets of recycling to remember, we pay the cleaning service to clean two of everything. I can never remember which hamper I threw which shirt into."

The door slid open, more gently this time.

"You never throw your clothes in the hamper. You throw them on the floor. If they hit a hamper, it's because I put them there. Are you saying we should live together?"

"Sweetheart, we're naked in the same bathroom at 6:30 in the morning. We already live together. We need to get all our stuff in the same place and make our lives easier."

"Is that the only reason? To make things easier?"

Ut-oh. Daniel hesitated. He had a feeling Jillian had abruptly starting speaking 'female' and that was the one language he had never mastered.

Danger, Daniel Jackson! A little warning bell in his head clanged urgently. It hadn't occurred to him that Jillian might need an emotional reason to move in together. He'd assumed the practical and logical aspects would appeal to the scientist in her; that she would weigh the evidence and arrive at the same conclusion that he had.

Whatever he said next could land him in some serious emotional hot water.

But he also had a feeling that blurting out 'I love you' at the moment wasn't going to win him any points either. It was hardly the romantic moment he'd been envisioning.

Butterflies took flight in his stomach.

"It's time we took this to the next level don't you think?" he said, cautiously. When he didn't get an immediate response he said, "I want this. I want you in my life. I want to come home to you every night and not have to worry about where I left my uniform shirt. It's distracting me from what's important when I get to be home for a while- and that's you."

A smile ghost across her face and she shut the shower door again. Daniel exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Have mercy….

"All of my stuff isn't going to fit in your place," she said, "and vice versa. We'll need five bedrooms just for the books"

"No," he said slowly, "I was thinking we could find a place together; a bigger condo, or even a house."

Silence. Nothing but the water running and the occasional splat that meant she was rinsing her hair. Daniel waited and finished shaving while he wondered if his knees were melting. He'd really had no idea this conversation was going to be so stressful.

The water shut off and the door slid open. One graceful arm emerged.

"Can you hand me a towel, leannan?" she asked.

Leannan… okay, she wasn't mad at him. He brought her the towel that had been hanging right over the heater vent and was still warm.

"A house might be nice."

"I was thinking the same thing," Daniel agreed, "Condos tend to have HOA fees for things like pools and gyms and we have those on the Base."

"And I would really like not having people right up against the walls and ceiling," she commented. "In a house I could have a garden maybe."

She sounded so wistful that his heart clenched.

"You can have whatever you want," he swore.

"Rent or buy?"

The butterflies in his stomach rioted.

"Renting seems like a waste, especially if we want it to be our own." Every word made him feel like he was tip toeing through a minefield.

The shower door opened again and Jillian stepped out, with the towel wrapped around her and tucked between the lovely swell of her breasts, emphasizing the shadow between them; tall, soft, feminine, long hair sleeked back, wet as a seal with the light shining copper and chestnut in it. Her remarkable eyes studied him from under her arched brows; glass green, wide and mysterious as the deep ocean. Long, long legs rose and vanished under the lower edge of the towel.

God, Jillian, he thought, tell me what you want and I'll lay it at your feet.

As if she had read his mind, Jillian said, "If we're looking for a house maybe we don't need five bedrooms, just a room large enough to turn into a library; and we need bigger office space."

A library, office space….. Now they were speaking the same language again.

"That would be…..very cool," Daniel said.

Jillian walked over to him, braced her hands on his bare shoulders, rose up on her toes a little and kissed him. He kissed her back, letting his hands come to rest lightly on her hips. He kissed her delicately, softly – the corner of her mouth, the edge of her jaw – and then bent over enough to lightly kiss her throat and shoulder.

"We'll be late for work," she observed, eyes closed, leaning back so he could reach her throat more easily.

"We could stay at the SGC tonight," he murmured, "Put this on hold until then."

Jillian didn't say anything. She just pulled him into a kiss full of hunger and the promise of passion. It was all the answer he had hoped it would be.

(0)

Daniel was on the phone when Jillian came in the door of his office.

"Yeah, I know. Yeah, I promise I'll call you when I have something."

There was a pause and then he hung up. He slumped back in his chair. A deep inverted V appeared between his brows and he stared at some point between him and the desk that only he could see. His shoulders set with tension and Jillian could feel him withdrawing.

She walked into the room and pushed some books and a rolled map off the corner of the table. Daniel's condo was usually cluttered, though thanks to the cleaning service, it was livable. His office always looked like it qualified for Federal disaster relief.

Once she had cleared a space on the table, she put down her books and her laptop, settled her hip on the edge of the table and perched there, waiting.

"Sam?" she guessed, finally, when he didn't say anything.

"Yeah," he answered.

He still remained quiet, much too quiet.

"Is she all right?" she prompted.

Daniel swept his gaze sideways to look at her. In the dim light his eyes had dilated almost to black circled by a slender ring of passionate blue.

"She's bored," he said, bluntly.

"God save us," Jillian whispered, not entirely joking. A bored Samantha Carter was a frightening thing.

Jillian studied Daniel closely.

"You're worried," she said.

"I am and I'm not," he answered.

Jillian lifted an eyebrow quizzically.

"In five years Sam has never passed out on a mission; not even when we've gone days without sleep. To have her collapse on a routine recon with new technology to explore? That just doesn't add up to 'Sam' at all," Daniel explained.

"So that's why you're worried," Jillian concluded.

He nodded and then looked down to study his hands for a moment; long fingered, masculine hands that had held the secrets of the galaxy and explored every secret Jillian had to offer.

"But you're not worried because?" she asked.

"Sam is home and Jack is on the base," he looked up at her again and saw the question still in her eyes. "If Jack believed even for a second that there was something wrong with Sam he'd be camped out in her driveway; or he would have ordered her to stay on the Base."

Daniel paused. Ostensibly, Jack was the commander of SG1, though he kept them all on a pretty loose leash. But if he thought any member of his team was in jeopardy, he was capable of issuing no nonsense orders – brutally if needed. Jillian knew that Jack's relative calm and his insistence that Sam go home offered Daniel a kind of reassurance.

But Jillian had seen the look on Daniel's face before, the haunted shadow in his eyes – self recrimination, doubt.

She'd been so hungry for him last night, so determined to show him that she was healed.

"Come to bed,xīnshàng rén," he had begged her, breathless and needy after one kiss, "We'll do whatever you want."

"I thought we'd just start in here," she had answered, backing him towards the kitchen counter.

Their passion had spilled out into his living room and then, eventually, to the bedroom. She had woken up feeling soft and delicious and feminine and powerful. He had woken up hard and demanding and male and powerful.

The memory had her shiver with delight.

"Daniel?" She asked finally, wanting to distract her own thoughts before she was straddling him on his desk chair.

"What did I miss, Jill?" he asked, though she knew the question was rhetorical. It was what he was asking himself. "I was on the same mission. I was with her. Was I so wrapped up in exploring and all this," he paused and waved an irritated hand at the books and mission report from 636 on his desk, "that I didn't see something seriously wrong with one of my team mates?"

"I doubt that, Daniel," Jillian said, "and I doubt anything is seriously wrong with Sam. She passed out. That could have been anything. Maybe she stood up too fast, or needed to eat."

"I doubt she needed to eat," Daniel said, with a wry look, "Jack would have been in there force feeding her something if she had gone too long without food. He knows the last time all of us ate or slept. It drives us all nuts."

Jillian gave him a sympathetic smile.

"Colonel Mallory is like that," Jillian said, "We eat and then he eats. We sleep and then he sleeps. I swear he probably knows what I had for breakfast this morning, even though he wasn't there."

"I wouldn't want you to go off world with anyone who didn't," Daniel observed. He meant it. He meant it with a kind of desperate ferocity that he couldn't even admit to himself.

Jillian studied him for a moment while he sat there and continued to brood. She wasn't sure how someone so undeniably masculine could also be so heartbreakingly vulnerable.

"You know what we can do to help Sam?" She asked, attempting to pull him out his current mood before it got any worse.

"What?" he asked, turning to her with a hopeful expression.

She tilted her head towards the mess on his desk.

"We can work on translating that, so we can figure out what that thing is and give Sam a place to start when they finally realize she's fine and let her go back to work."

That lit a spark in his eyes.

"Okay, let's do that."

They cleared the table by making piles on the floor and Daniel spread out everything he had brought with him.

"I found patterns that are probably words and sentences," he said. "But if this is an Earth language derivative, then I don't recognize it."

"So we're looking for something Earth-based, to use as a 'Rosetta Stone'?" she asked," and we can immediately eliminate everything you're familiar with."

He nodded. Jillian went to his desk and got her extra glasses out of the middle drawer. Her lovely features were drawn in concentration. Jillian loved puzzles and he was about to present her with a giant one. He dragged his desk chair over to the table and put it in front of her laptop and then settled into the other chair. There as something anthropological about being male and offering a female the best of two options. The scientist in him made note of it, found it amusing and let it go.

Daniel settled into the 'not so comfortable chair' as best he could and reached for Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts. It was as good a place to start as any. Jillian opened her laptop and downloaded the file containing the footage of the script that he had sent her and studied it closely for several long moments. Unable to keep his restless brain on a single topic for too long, even a topic as fascinating as a new language, Daniel said, "I've been thinking about what we talked about this morning. Even if we get a house together, maybe we should keep my condo. It's paid off and we could use the investment."

Jillian looked at him over the top of glasses. Primeval shadows came and went in her eyes and Daniel got the horrible feeling he had just said something wrong again. "

And you'd have somewhere to go back to if none of this works out?" she asked lightly.

Daniel stared at her, struck absolutely dumb. He pulled his glasses off, tossed them on the table and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. Sighing, he sank back in his chair and regarded her. She was still close enough for him to see her clearly, though everything behind her was blurred. Female was an utterly foreign language and right now he wasn't getting the translation at all.

"What did I do, Jill?" he asked, genuinely distressed. She looked so uncertain, and it was unnerving because he didn't understand why she was reacting so strangely to his suggestion that they take their relationship to a new, and more personal, level.

Jillian blinked, and looked startled. "You didn't do anything!"

"I must have. This morning you thought I wanted to break up with you and now I suggest keeping the condo so that we have an investment for our future and you think I want it as some kind of escape route!" "Don't you?"

"NO!" Jillian flinched.

Daniel had a temper – a cold burning temper that caught everyone off guard when he unleashed it. But he had never been upset with her before. Her reaction knifed him through the heart. His frustration evaporated. He came down from the edge of his temper to contrite lover in less time that it took for a single breath.

"I'm sorry," he exhaled, "I just don't understand why we can't talk about this."

"We are talking about it," she said.

"No, it's the same subject but we're coming at it from totally different directions," his thoughts started tumbling wildly over each other and then poured out, "I want us to move in together. I want us to be together. I want to do everything I can to make sure our future is secure. I'm trying to be careful with everything I have right now because, jesus, Jillian, no one knows how quickly it could all be gone better than I do. If the Stargate program ended next week, you might have a career out there again but I'm not sure I do. I'm trying to keep us together and keep us safe and yet I've been accused twice in one day of wanting out of this. It's just the opposite and I can't figure out what I did to make you doubt me. Why, Jill? What did I did do wrong?" He paused for a much needed breath and found her staring as if he was an oncoming storm. He swallowed hard, breathing slowly. Blazing blue eyes begged her for an answer.

"You really just want us to be together and safe?" Her voice shook.

"Yes."

"You didn't do anything, Daniel," she assured him.

"Then what's wrong? If you don't want us to move in together just say so."

"No I want us too! Very much."

"Then, Jill, what the hell is going on?"

She took off her glasses, folded them carefully and put them on the table. Her expression was fathomless for a moment but when she finally looked at him, her eyes beseeched his understanding.

"I never had one," she whispered so softly he nearly couldn't hear her.

"One?"

"A house." Her voice was so filled with fear and longing and uncertainty that Daniel's heart broke into a million pieces; and all those tiny pieces tumbled straight into her eyes and stayed there.

"Jill," he murmured.

She shrugged, trying to act as if it didn't matter but he knew better now.

"I lived in embassies, apartments, huge complexes. Then I lived at boarding school, or college dorms, or at archaeological digs. The condo here is more stability than I've ever had really, and you've seen it. It's not like I really 'live' there. I've barely unpacked. It's nice but it's not a 'home'. It's not somewhere I chose with someone I ….care about," she paused and took a long shaky breath, "I want to move in with you. I want it more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. But if something happened and it didn't work out, I don't think I could stand it, Daniel. So I guess, maybe, I've been giving you a chance to change your mind."

"I don't want to change my mind," he assured her. We'll find a house you fall in love with Jillian, and I'll do everything I can to make it yours…OURS.

"You're sure?"

"Completely."

He was starting to understand. He had approached the entire idea as a man and as a scientist – wanting to find a logical way to keep the woman he loved safe, to make her even more his. Jillian had approached it as a woman being offered her heart's desire, but too afraid to think it might be real. Perhaps Jillian found male to be just as incomprehensible a language. He felt an almost desperate need to hold her, to assure himself that everything was alright between them. He had unwittingly peeled away one of Jillian's defenses and discovered something she cared for most in the world. He could not mess this up.

"So we'll go house hunting? You'll make me a list of what you want?"

"Of what we want."

"Okay," he nodded, "What we want."

Suddenly Jillian's startling eyes flew open, like a child who had gotten a pony for Christmas.

"Oh my god, Daniel," she said.

Alarmed, he sat forward.

"WHAT?"

"I know what this language is." She had already grabbed her glasses again and was rapidly typing something into her laptop.

"What?" he repeated, grabinghis own glasses, getting up and coming to stand behind her.

"It's Elamite," she turned the laptop so he could see it, "the primary language in what's now Iran from 2800–550 BCE. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great. Here, look."

Daniel leaned over her and examined the images on the screen carefully and then nodded. "You're right. Can you read this and make sense of it, so we can compare the two?"

"I think we can get there together, now that we have a place to start."

She twisted to look up at him. Daniel's breath caught in his chest as he tumbled into her eyes in search of the lost pieces of his heart. He lowered his head, his lips parting for a kiss. Cupping one side of her face in his hand he kissed her long and deep. For a moment the galaxy spun end over end with the two of them at its center. When the kiss finally broke, they were still staring into each other's eyes.

"We work well together," Jillian murmured.

"Yes," Daniel said, "We do."