Picks up just after the end of the last chapter. Still filling up time between Revisions and Lifeboat, relationship building, no-plot romance
They made two separate stops on their way home, since they were driving different vehicles. Jillian stopped and got an extra-large pizza with all Daniel's favorite toppings on most of it and a little bit of Canadian bacon on the rest for her. Daniel stopped and picked up a bottle of Chianti to go with it.
By the time he got home with the wine, Jillian had the breakfast bar set with plates, napkins, pizza and candles. She had changed into sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said 'Archaeology Dept' over an oval with the letters XXL in it. She smiled at him uncertainly.
"Is this all right?"
The shy-scared look in her eyes confused him. He went to her, laid his palm against the side of her face.
"It's perfect."
He kissed her forehead, gave her the bottle of wine to open and, with a final reassuring smile, went to change. He returned in similar sweats except that his were all Air Force issued. He was carrying his laptop.
"I have to show you what we found on 657," he said, perching on a bar stool and reaching for a slice of pizza full of toppings.
Jillian filled two glasses with Chianti and leaned over to look at the screen after he had called up the file he wanted.
"What is that?" she asked.
"Well, at its most basic, it's a gigantic slab of rock," Daniel answered, with a wry smile, "about twenty feet high, three feet thick, at least what's sticking out of the ground and about ten feet across."
"The edges are completely clean," Jillian said.
"Yes, it was cut, precision cut," Daniel agreed, "But that's not the most interesting thing about it." He jumped through some more photos until he got to the close ups. "It appears to be a map of the entire planet. Look – continents, oceans, polar ice caps. You know more about oceans than I do. Couldn't these lines be currents?"
"Or wind directions across land," Jillian said, "It's impossible to know from this. Which of these shapes are the land and which are the seas? The lines go off the edge of the slab. Did you find more than one of these?"
"No," he answered, "But I noticed that too."
"These markings have to be writing. Can you read this?"
He shook his head, eating absent-mindedly, eyes fixed on the screen. "Not without some kind of Rosetta Stone to tell me where to begin. It's hieroglyphic and I think logo-syllabic. Some of the symbols repeat in a single inscription and then there are breaks. Does it look familiar to you?"
Jillian watched him closely. He was glowing from the inside, oblivious to everything around him. She missed him when they were apart. She missed his smile and the way it would tease at the corners of his mouth for a little while. She missed his laughter and his brightness. She missed his arms around her and the way he was patient with her when she wanted to cuddle for just five more minutes after the alarm went off in the morning. She wanted to see him again seconds after they were separated.
But mostly she missed this -his intellect, his astonishing curiosity, his burning intensity, especially when it was caught by an enigma. The symbols and shapes on the stone were hovering just beyond his ability to distill them into meaning – not a challenge he would take lightly.
"It does," she answered, "But it won't make you happy."
Daniel speared her with a look that said he was way ahead of her, which she didn't find surprising. He looked at her, chewed and swallowed and then said shortly, "It already doesn't. Are you going to say what I think you are?"
"Follow it from right to left and tell me that doesn't look like the Indus script."
Jillian sat back and sipped from her wine glass while Daniel sighed heavily and looked back at the computer as if it was a beloved pet that had turned on him.
"Damn," he murmured. He traced some of the lines on the screen. "That's exactly what I thought. Look at this section….and here again….yeah… There are very slight variations but the resemblance is there; though this looks to have about three hundred characters in total."
"The Indus script has twice as many," Jillian observed.
Daniel pushed the laptop back across the counter, stopped his glasses from sliding further down his nose and sighed.
"Twice as many still won't help without a frame of reference that isn't another indecipherable language. We can't even tell direction from this."
"In most cultures, the top is north," Jillian pointed out. She swirled the Chianti in her glass thoughtfully and took a few more bites of her pizza.
"We found it lying on the ground. Usually I could figure it out from the direction of the glyphs, but now we aren't even sure about that," Daniel finished his pizza and started on another piece.
"What are we using to date this?" Jillian asked, "Is there anything else in the immediate vicinity? Pottery? Ruins?"
"Not really. Even geological strata is only going to help if I can talk someone into letting us excavate around it and we find something that can be dated accurately."
"Finding the tool that carved it would be completely awesome," Jillian said. "What about using thermoluminescence dating on the soil below?"
"That will only tell us how long it's been lying there; and I'm not sure anyone is going to really care enough about this to fund any more research on it," Daniel sighed again and started flipping through more pictures.
Jillian put a sympathetic hand on his arm and studied him. Light and shadow caressed his cheek, creating a stunning purity of profile. Acute concentration furrowed his forehead and pulled his heavy brows together, whispering to her that he was in the process of not just thinking outside the box, but ripping the box to shreds and tossing it out the window. Four years into their relationship and he stilled made her heart stutter and left her breathless.
She pulled her attention back to her pizza. Daniel hardly ever noticed what she ate, but when he did, it was to complain that she didn't eat enough to keep a bird alive.
"The Indus script is a place to start," she said, "If we manage to decipher them both, we can publish an actual paper."
Daniel turned and brushed his fingers against her hand, linked their fingers and squeezed in a quick heart-melting gesture.
"And say what? We got the clues from a planet 490 million light years from earth? One that I walked to?"
"We can cross that bridge when we get to it," she said, brushing a crumb away from the corner of his mouth and then leaning in to kiss the same spot. "Does this mean you aren't coming back to 901 with me? You're going to want to go back to study this?"
"No, I promised you," he said, "Besides, I missed you like hell."
"And we're still going to pick out new tile for the guest bathroom?" she asked, hopefully.
"If you want," he squeezed her hand, let go and reached for more pizza. Jillian wondered if he realized how much he had already eaten. "It seems so normal, how can I say no? While we're out maybe we should get some furniture for the guest room? Your Ambassador father isn't going to appreciate sleeping on that air mattress if he comes to visit."
"I wanted to go to Ikea for furniture," Jillian reminded him.
"It's in Denver!"
"It's not like that's the other side of the world," she said, "We could go for a few days, see the national park, take the bikes and explore our planet for a change."
"You still want normal, don't you?" he asked.
"I just want time with you," she said, "The last few months have been so hectic. I feel like I hardly see you and it's not like we can even text each other across light years."
"So we'll pick out tile, go to Denver for a few days and pick out furniture and then travel light years away to a distant planet to study the sunken ruin of a Goa'uld city," Daniel said, "and that is our normal."
"As long as we're together," she said, leaning in for another kiss, "Why don't we move this into the bedroom? I'll change and you can start a fire?"
"Sounds like a plan," he said, "Do you want me to change too? Into my gray suit maybe?"
Jillian laughed. She was remembering more and more what it felt like to look into eyes like the summer sky and laugh. "No. You can wear that when you take me out to dinner tomorrow night."
"Oh, we're going out to dinner too?" Daniel was starting to laugh now too. There was happiness sparking in her eyes and he was privileged to witness it. He could sense the evening filling up with joy.
"I've had reservations for two weeks."
She jumped off the bar stool and starting cleaning up. Daniel helped, then gathered the wine glasses and the bottle and followed her willingly into the bedroom. They started a fire and tossed some pillows on the floor in front of it.
Then Jillian gave him one of her stunning smiles, the kind that flooded him with warmth and made him wonder what he had ever done to deserve her. She was easy and elegant. Communication was effortless. He never found her staring at him blankly while he frantically tried to retrace his steps in the conversation to find where he had left the other person.
She stood and he knew she was going to go change into that 'Christmas present.'
"Jill," Daniel caught her hand between his fingertips and thumb just before she moved out of reach. He was warm and holding her tight enough that she could feel his pulse.
She tilted her head, eyebrows knitting, looking back at him from the depths of her incredible green eyes and he was lost in the heart of a sun-dappled forest with warm breezes teasing his skin.
"I know you're going to come back out here wearing something… breathtaking," he said, then his voice dropped to a low timbre, resonating with wistful tenderness, "But I'm not in any rush tonight. I just want to be with you."
Jillian visibly melted and smiled at him like a woman in love, the smile that she gave no one else. It was his and his alone. Daniel's heart beat heavily and his body prepared to rebel against his desire for a quiet evening and slow, gentle intimacy. He found he was breathing hard from the sudden impact.
Three weeks, his body reminded him, you haven't seen her in THREE solid weeks.
Shut up, he replied, I haven't TALKED to her in all that time either. "Then be comfy when I get back," she said. "Light some candles."
"And watch the smoke alarms," he said.
Her eyes danced, full of unmistakable delight just before she turned away from him. Daniel watched her go and anticipated the night - to revel in argument and agreement and laughter and conjecture about the wonders they had seen and found, to hold her by the fire and never let go.
To kiss her until she was breathless and then make love until she slept, at last, safely in his arms.
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