Part 2
I can see why Carter thought the kid was so cute. Doc hasn't been able to get glasses that will fit his face yet, so the full effect of those ridiculously huge blue eyes hits you the second he looks at you. His hair is much lighter than Daniel's, falling to brush his shoulders and perfectly trimmed, the kind of honey brown that looks like it would turn blond in the sun. He's wearing the smallest scrubs we've got—he arrived naked but nobody wants to tell Daniel that—and they're still hanging off him, the cuffs sliding past his hands and slopping over his feet.
He sits on the infirmary bed like he's trying to take up the smallest amount of space possible, his knees tight against his chest and his skinny little arms wrapped around his shins. He watches us all warily, his eyes darting from one person to the next and his mouth a thin pink line in his pale face. I find myself sinking down onto a bed and lowering my head a little, trying to get onto the kid's level. I tried the same thing yesterday but it didn't work.
Daniel takes a dead stop when he sees the kid, an indefinable expression chasing across his face. I know it felt kind of weird to see my own teenage clone, and this one is a lot younger. With Jon it was like—I know you, but I can't quite remember being you. The physical proof that you were once that small and vulnerable is damn unnerving.
When Daniel gathers his considerable courage and starts slowly approaching the boy, he is met with widening eyes and a frantic attempt to scoot further into the wall. He stops and casts about the room, looking for something.
"Daniel?"
He doesn't spare me a glance. "Quiet, Jack," he says absently. "I think... oh. Ohhhh..."
He crosses the room and reaches into a corner, tapping the security camera. Little Danny's arms go very tight around his knees and he shrinks back even more, shaking visibly. Daniel winces, his jaw tight. "No, no," he says softly. "It's not like that. See? I'm taking it down. No cameras." He disconnects the camera from its bracket and sets it on a table so the lens faces away. Danny breathes out slowly and unfolds a little, clearly more comfortable.
"Daniel?" Carter asks uncertainly. "What was that about?"
"Never mind," he says. "Long story."
I raise an eyebrow, watching the kid as he watches the disconnected camera with palpable relief. "Cameras are bad?"
"In the context of a place that looks like a hospital, yes, they're bad." Daniel shoots me a quick, haunted look, and then focuses on the kid again. He starts speaking a language I've never heard from him before, something soft and fluid and incomprehensible. I hear a word here and there that reminds me of the Latin I learned during the time loops, but I can't recognize enough to understand what he's saying. Whatever it is, though, it's clearly getting through to Danny.
The boy stares at him, his jaw dropping, his arms forgetting to hold his legs in quite so tight. Daniel repeats the same phrase over and over again, and I can see the boy's lips moving, following along silently. A lot of the fear goes out of his eyes, and that intrinsic Daniel-curiosity starts to take its place.
Daniel pauses in his rhythmic chanting and looks around again, grabbing a pillow off a nearby bed. He holds it out as he approaches slowly, his empty hand firmly down at his side and his eyes lowered. He bends his knees a little—there's no way he can be smaller than the boy, but he tries his best to look that way.
After a long hesitation, Danny reaches out and snatches the pillow, holding it close to his chest and burying his face in it for a long moment. He sighs hugely and relaxes a little more, darting his eyes up at Daniel in what is almost a smile.
Then, Daniel asks what has to be a question, if the tone means anything, and after a moment he gets a cautious nod. It's not talking, but it's a response, which is more than any of us got out of him. With that, he sinks down on the bed beside the boy, still keeping that non-threatening body language. Danny looks at him for a while, and the older version sits still for it, letting him take his time. The rest of us watch this play out from the other side of the room, half holding our breaths for fear of disrupting something that looks as delicate as disarming a bomb.
Finally, the boy seems to come to a decision. He lets his legs slip down and scoots a little closer to Daniel, the pillow still tight against his chest but his face considerably more relaxed. As the tension drains from him, it becomes obvious that the day he spent awake while we waited for Daniel to get back to the gate has taken a toll on him. We couldn't get him to calm down enough to sleep, and until Fraiser got back all her results, she wasn't about to risk drugging him. Now, the boy weaves back a forth a little, great dark hollows under those unbelievable eyes.
Daniel asks him something else in that sliding, graceful language, and the boy nods again. He stares up into Daniel's face, reaching a tentative hand to the hinge of his glasses, and swallows. Then, for the first time, he speaks.
"Kayel?"
Such hope in that voice. Whatever he just asked, he desperately wants the answer to be yes.
Something strange happens to Daniel's face, his eyes sharpening and his jaw growing tight. He swallows once and puts a hand lightly on the boy's shoulder. "Aio," he says, nodding. "Kayel."
Danny's eyes go impossibly wide, and then he simply crumples, pouring himself into Daniel's lap and dropping the pillow, wrapping his arms around Daniel instead. I can see his shoulders shaking, and hear his breathing hitch into sobs, but other than that the crying is eerily silent. Daniel has his eyes closed, his mouth set in a firm line, his jaw quivering in that determined-not-to-lose-it way he gets when he's struggling for control. He strokes the boy's back in long, sweeping moments and runs his fingers through that long, soft hair. His lips move, murmuring something quietly in god knows what language.
I sidle up next to him, watching Danny for any signs of the panic he showed last time I tried to get close, but he doesn't seem to care now. He's got his face buried in Daniel's shoulder, and up close, the silent crying is even more unsettling. Daniel murmurs soft words to him, a jumble of that language he spoke before and Arabic.
"Hey," I say quietly.
"Hey." Daniel looks at me briefly, his mouth forced into a tight, wavering smile.
"You all right?"
"Sure."
Uh-huh. Tell me another one.
The others gather behind me, forming a loose semicircle around Daniel and the kid. He looks up at us and a muscle twitches in his jaw. He's having trouble meeting anyone's eyes. In his lap, Danny cries endlessly, his hands fisted in Daniel's shirt, the knuckles white.
"So," Daniel says, and then clears his throat when his voice cracks. "So. What now?"
~~~
"He's finally asleep," Carter whispers, leaning over the bed. We moved to one of the empty sleeping quarters on base, once the doc admitted that there was no medical reason for the boy to stay in the infirmary. We made an interesting procession down the hall, Daniel carrying the kid and us bracketing him on either side, radiating 'mind your business' to anyone who looked nosy.
Daniel nods and carefully slides off the bed, leaving the boy curled in the middle of the sheets, looking tiny on the big mattress. He cried for a long time, and then fought sleep even longer, clinging fiercely to Daniel and resisting any attempt to pull him away. Finally, Daniel lay down with him and waited for exhaustion to do the rest.
He's been very unsettled about this whole thing, and sometimes it seems like it's hard for him to look at the kid. I know it was strange for me to look at Jon, and he, at least, didn't act like a child. Maybe Daniel is embarrassed at the child's weakness, as if that would reflect badly on him as an adult.
"Hopefully, he'll sleep through the night," Daniel says, but he doesn't look very optimistic.
"Do you believe that he has your memories as a child, Daniel Jackson?"
He shrugs. "It's looking that way."
Is it now. "So, you were... like that?"
Daniel gives me a quick, enigmatic look. "It was a long time ago, Jack."
"What does 'Kayel' mean?" I ask.
Carter and Teal'c nod curiously—well, Carter does, anyway—and give Daniel expectant looks. He sighs and drops his eyes to the floor again, running a hand through his hair. His other hand drops back down to stroke the boy's shoulder a little, and it's startling to see how his palm swallows the fine bones. Strange to think that he was once that small. His shirt is still visibly damp, clinging to his chest and his right shoulder, where the kid had his face hidden. His pants are still dusty as hell, and his eyes are over-large with fatigue. I know how Daniel gets when he's digging in the dirt and forgets to sleep, and it's not fair to ask him to deal with this right now, but then, fair and Daniel parted ways a long time ago.
"It's something I made up," he admits grudgingly. "Like... you know." He waves a hand at us and nods as if that explains everything.
"Like what?" Carter asks. "It seemed like a name, the way he said it."
"Kind of a name. Kind of... more."
"Daniel..."
He narrows his eyes at me. "Jack," he echoes in the same impatient tone. "It's complicated, all right?"
"It's okay, Daniel," Carter says. "You don't have to tell us if you don't want to."
Ah, there we go. She's giving him exactly the right 'left-out' look and it's tripping all of Daniel's inherent guilt switches. Teal'c, doing something by the door which can only be termed 'standing guard,' stares at Daniel levelly, his face impassive. For Teal'c, this is about as guilt trippy as it gets. I simply let my face soften ever so slightly, going from Jack the CO to Jack the concerned significant other, and Daniel folds like tissue paper.
"Okay, okay," he grumbles. "Since you guys will pester it out of me anyway..."
Carter grins. I manage to refrain from following suit.
"So what does it mean?" Carter persists.
Daniel sighs again and shuffles his feet, and it finally dawns on me that he's embarrassed about whatever it is. "It's just... I had kind of a rough patch after my parents died, and I sort of... made someone up. Like, you know, an imaginary friend."
"That's not so unusual," I tell him gently. "Lots of kids do that, particularly if they're in a situation where they could really use a friend."
"Yes, well, lots of kids make up little secret codes and words, but I made up a whole language. I can't ever seem to do anything halfway, so this... this person that I made up was very... uh..."
"Real?"
His eyes snap up to mine. "I knew he wasn't real," Daniel corrects quickly. "I always knew that. But right now, for him," he gestures toward the boy, "I'm fitting all the criteria. I speak the language that nobody else should be able to speak, and I know the right things to say, and I know about the camera thing, and I'm... exactly what Kayel is supposed to be. He knows that it's only a fantasy, but he's at a place where he very much *wants* to believe it could be real."
"A protector," Teal'c says solemnly. "This Kayel is a protector. That is what you envisioned?"
Daniel stares at the floor again. "Well, you know... yeah. I mean, lots of kids in foster care have that fantasy. Oh, my real parents will come and take me away, and everything will be all right. It's relatively common. Only, I knew my real parents weren't coming, and I really didn't count on Nick very much, so I made up Kayel. This magic person who would know everything that had happened, and say all the right things, and he'd... uh... he'd do what I've been doing for... Danny."
What he's been doing for Danny is hugging the crap out of him and taking him away from the infirmary and into a small, quiet room with no camera. Don't even think I've forgotten about that camera thing, Daniel. We're going to discuss it as soon as we get some privacy.
Carter frowns again, and I'm sure she's going to ask something that Daniel doesn't want to answer, so I step in. "Hey, Daniel, while he's sleeping why don't you get some clean clothes and something to eat? We kind of ambushed you with this thing before you had a chance to clean up."
He shoots me a grateful look and nods, carefully rising from his perch on the edge of the bed, so as to not disturb Danny. The boy mutters and rolls over, gathering the blankets to his chest and holding them tightly, his nose buried in the fabric. Daniel heads for the tiny bathroom attached to the bunkroom, and Carter volunteers to get him a clean uniform. Teal'c nods once at me and slips out as well, the slowly closing door giving me a view of him taking up a position just outside, in the hall. I could go tell him that he doesn't need to protect us, but there's no point. It's what he does.
I sit in a chair and watch Danny sleep, looking up only briefly as Carter returns to drop off the clean uniform and leaves again, this time bent on retrieving dinner for our wayward archeologist. Daniel pops his head out, sees that the room is empty except for me and Danny, and comes out in a towel to get dressed. I watch him, idly tracing the long, clean lines of his body with my eyes and falling into the old habit of assessing him for injuries. He was off-world without me, after all.
"I'm fine, Jack."
I smile. "Did I ask?"
"You didn't need to."
"Ah." I go back to watching the child sleep. Seeing that little face on the pillow does a whole bunch of crap to me that I'd rather not think about, so I don't. The last thing we need right now is me dredging up a lot of old frustrated paternal instincts that should stay buried.
"How about you?" Daniel asks. "Are you fine?"
"Sure," I say. "Just as fine as you are."
He laughs softly and comes to sit beside me, scooting his chair close. We stare at the boy for several long breaths.
Daniel's hand fumbles for mine and finds it, lacing our fingers together and hanging on tight. I automatically scan the room for security cameras, until I remember that Daniel specifically chose this room for its lack of cameras, due to the kid's... thing about them. He's still not looking at me, but I can see the lines of tension around his eyes and a muscle twitching in his jaw. He swallows with an audible click, and then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.
"It's hard to see this, isn't it?"
He nods. "Reminds me of a time I'd rather forget."
I don't know what to say to that, so instead, I pull him close and slide an arm around his shoulders, pressing my lips to his temple. This, apparently, was the right response, because he turns and kisses me, gratitude in his touch. It's lazy and pleasant, a low buzz of attraction, a banked fire. We can't do anything right now and we both know it. We wouldn't even let it go this far if Teal'c wasn't standing guard right outside.
"Daniel," I say when he releases my mouth and leans his head on my shoulder. "You know there's something we need to talk about, don't you."
"I know."
"You know I can't just let something like this go."
He smiles slightly. "Yes, Jack, I know. Because you have to fix everything, and you think that the boy's issue with cameras means something happened that hurt me, and you can't rest until you find out what it is and try to fix it."
"Well." I blink at him and then give the sleeping boy a nonplussed look. "I wouldn't have put it quite that way."
Daniel nods. That little smile still plays about his lips, but I consider that a hell of an improvement over the tight, tense line they were in before.
"Sooooo..."
"Not now, Jack."
Ah. "Okay."
So we sit quietly and watch Danny sleep, and if it reminds me of Sara and I leaning over Charlie's crib at night, I try not to think about it.
~~~
I can see why Carter thought the kid was so cute. Doc hasn't been able to get glasses that will fit his face yet, so the full effect of those ridiculously huge blue eyes hits you the second he looks at you. His hair is much lighter than Daniel's, falling to brush his shoulders and perfectly trimmed, the kind of honey brown that looks like it would turn blond in the sun. He's wearing the smallest scrubs we've got—he arrived naked but nobody wants to tell Daniel that—and they're still hanging off him, the cuffs sliding past his hands and slopping over his feet.
He sits on the infirmary bed like he's trying to take up the smallest amount of space possible, his knees tight against his chest and his skinny little arms wrapped around his shins. He watches us all warily, his eyes darting from one person to the next and his mouth a thin pink line in his pale face. I find myself sinking down onto a bed and lowering my head a little, trying to get onto the kid's level. I tried the same thing yesterday but it didn't work.
Daniel takes a dead stop when he sees the kid, an indefinable expression chasing across his face. I know it felt kind of weird to see my own teenage clone, and this one is a lot younger. With Jon it was like—I know you, but I can't quite remember being you. The physical proof that you were once that small and vulnerable is damn unnerving.
When Daniel gathers his considerable courage and starts slowly approaching the boy, he is met with widening eyes and a frantic attempt to scoot further into the wall. He stops and casts about the room, looking for something.
"Daniel?"
He doesn't spare me a glance. "Quiet, Jack," he says absently. "I think... oh. Ohhhh..."
He crosses the room and reaches into a corner, tapping the security camera. Little Danny's arms go very tight around his knees and he shrinks back even more, shaking visibly. Daniel winces, his jaw tight. "No, no," he says softly. "It's not like that. See? I'm taking it down. No cameras." He disconnects the camera from its bracket and sets it on a table so the lens faces away. Danny breathes out slowly and unfolds a little, clearly more comfortable.
"Daniel?" Carter asks uncertainly. "What was that about?"
"Never mind," he says. "Long story."
I raise an eyebrow, watching the kid as he watches the disconnected camera with palpable relief. "Cameras are bad?"
"In the context of a place that looks like a hospital, yes, they're bad." Daniel shoots me a quick, haunted look, and then focuses on the kid again. He starts speaking a language I've never heard from him before, something soft and fluid and incomprehensible. I hear a word here and there that reminds me of the Latin I learned during the time loops, but I can't recognize enough to understand what he's saying. Whatever it is, though, it's clearly getting through to Danny.
The boy stares at him, his jaw dropping, his arms forgetting to hold his legs in quite so tight. Daniel repeats the same phrase over and over again, and I can see the boy's lips moving, following along silently. A lot of the fear goes out of his eyes, and that intrinsic Daniel-curiosity starts to take its place.
Daniel pauses in his rhythmic chanting and looks around again, grabbing a pillow off a nearby bed. He holds it out as he approaches slowly, his empty hand firmly down at his side and his eyes lowered. He bends his knees a little—there's no way he can be smaller than the boy, but he tries his best to look that way.
After a long hesitation, Danny reaches out and snatches the pillow, holding it close to his chest and burying his face in it for a long moment. He sighs hugely and relaxes a little more, darting his eyes up at Daniel in what is almost a smile.
Then, Daniel asks what has to be a question, if the tone means anything, and after a moment he gets a cautious nod. It's not talking, but it's a response, which is more than any of us got out of him. With that, he sinks down on the bed beside the boy, still keeping that non-threatening body language. Danny looks at him for a while, and the older version sits still for it, letting him take his time. The rest of us watch this play out from the other side of the room, half holding our breaths for fear of disrupting something that looks as delicate as disarming a bomb.
Finally, the boy seems to come to a decision. He lets his legs slip down and scoots a little closer to Daniel, the pillow still tight against his chest but his face considerably more relaxed. As the tension drains from him, it becomes obvious that the day he spent awake while we waited for Daniel to get back to the gate has taken a toll on him. We couldn't get him to calm down enough to sleep, and until Fraiser got back all her results, she wasn't about to risk drugging him. Now, the boy weaves back a forth a little, great dark hollows under those unbelievable eyes.
Daniel asks him something else in that sliding, graceful language, and the boy nods again. He stares up into Daniel's face, reaching a tentative hand to the hinge of his glasses, and swallows. Then, for the first time, he speaks.
"Kayel?"
Such hope in that voice. Whatever he just asked, he desperately wants the answer to be yes.
Something strange happens to Daniel's face, his eyes sharpening and his jaw growing tight. He swallows once and puts a hand lightly on the boy's shoulder. "Aio," he says, nodding. "Kayel."
Danny's eyes go impossibly wide, and then he simply crumples, pouring himself into Daniel's lap and dropping the pillow, wrapping his arms around Daniel instead. I can see his shoulders shaking, and hear his breathing hitch into sobs, but other than that the crying is eerily silent. Daniel has his eyes closed, his mouth set in a firm line, his jaw quivering in that determined-not-to-lose-it way he gets when he's struggling for control. He strokes the boy's back in long, sweeping moments and runs his fingers through that long, soft hair. His lips move, murmuring something quietly in god knows what language.
I sidle up next to him, watching Danny for any signs of the panic he showed last time I tried to get close, but he doesn't seem to care now. He's got his face buried in Daniel's shoulder, and up close, the silent crying is even more unsettling. Daniel murmurs soft words to him, a jumble of that language he spoke before and Arabic.
"Hey," I say quietly.
"Hey." Daniel looks at me briefly, his mouth forced into a tight, wavering smile.
"You all right?"
"Sure."
Uh-huh. Tell me another one.
The others gather behind me, forming a loose semicircle around Daniel and the kid. He looks up at us and a muscle twitches in his jaw. He's having trouble meeting anyone's eyes. In his lap, Danny cries endlessly, his hands fisted in Daniel's shirt, the knuckles white.
"So," Daniel says, and then clears his throat when his voice cracks. "So. What now?"
~~~
"He's finally asleep," Carter whispers, leaning over the bed. We moved to one of the empty sleeping quarters on base, once the doc admitted that there was no medical reason for the boy to stay in the infirmary. We made an interesting procession down the hall, Daniel carrying the kid and us bracketing him on either side, radiating 'mind your business' to anyone who looked nosy.
Daniel nods and carefully slides off the bed, leaving the boy curled in the middle of the sheets, looking tiny on the big mattress. He cried for a long time, and then fought sleep even longer, clinging fiercely to Daniel and resisting any attempt to pull him away. Finally, Daniel lay down with him and waited for exhaustion to do the rest.
He's been very unsettled about this whole thing, and sometimes it seems like it's hard for him to look at the kid. I know it was strange for me to look at Jon, and he, at least, didn't act like a child. Maybe Daniel is embarrassed at the child's weakness, as if that would reflect badly on him as an adult.
"Hopefully, he'll sleep through the night," Daniel says, but he doesn't look very optimistic.
"Do you believe that he has your memories as a child, Daniel Jackson?"
He shrugs. "It's looking that way."
Is it now. "So, you were... like that?"
Daniel gives me a quick, enigmatic look. "It was a long time ago, Jack."
"What does 'Kayel' mean?" I ask.
Carter and Teal'c nod curiously—well, Carter does, anyway—and give Daniel expectant looks. He sighs and drops his eyes to the floor again, running a hand through his hair. His other hand drops back down to stroke the boy's shoulder a little, and it's startling to see how his palm swallows the fine bones. Strange to think that he was once that small. His shirt is still visibly damp, clinging to his chest and his right shoulder, where the kid had his face hidden. His pants are still dusty as hell, and his eyes are over-large with fatigue. I know how Daniel gets when he's digging in the dirt and forgets to sleep, and it's not fair to ask him to deal with this right now, but then, fair and Daniel parted ways a long time ago.
"It's something I made up," he admits grudgingly. "Like... you know." He waves a hand at us and nods as if that explains everything.
"Like what?" Carter asks. "It seemed like a name, the way he said it."
"Kind of a name. Kind of... more."
"Daniel..."
He narrows his eyes at me. "Jack," he echoes in the same impatient tone. "It's complicated, all right?"
"It's okay, Daniel," Carter says. "You don't have to tell us if you don't want to."
Ah, there we go. She's giving him exactly the right 'left-out' look and it's tripping all of Daniel's inherent guilt switches. Teal'c, doing something by the door which can only be termed 'standing guard,' stares at Daniel levelly, his face impassive. For Teal'c, this is about as guilt trippy as it gets. I simply let my face soften ever so slightly, going from Jack the CO to Jack the concerned significant other, and Daniel folds like tissue paper.
"Okay, okay," he grumbles. "Since you guys will pester it out of me anyway..."
Carter grins. I manage to refrain from following suit.
"So what does it mean?" Carter persists.
Daniel sighs again and shuffles his feet, and it finally dawns on me that he's embarrassed about whatever it is. "It's just... I had kind of a rough patch after my parents died, and I sort of... made someone up. Like, you know, an imaginary friend."
"That's not so unusual," I tell him gently. "Lots of kids do that, particularly if they're in a situation where they could really use a friend."
"Yes, well, lots of kids make up little secret codes and words, but I made up a whole language. I can't ever seem to do anything halfway, so this... this person that I made up was very... uh..."
"Real?"
His eyes snap up to mine. "I knew he wasn't real," Daniel corrects quickly. "I always knew that. But right now, for him," he gestures toward the boy, "I'm fitting all the criteria. I speak the language that nobody else should be able to speak, and I know the right things to say, and I know about the camera thing, and I'm... exactly what Kayel is supposed to be. He knows that it's only a fantasy, but he's at a place where he very much *wants* to believe it could be real."
"A protector," Teal'c says solemnly. "This Kayel is a protector. That is what you envisioned?"
Daniel stares at the floor again. "Well, you know... yeah. I mean, lots of kids in foster care have that fantasy. Oh, my real parents will come and take me away, and everything will be all right. It's relatively common. Only, I knew my real parents weren't coming, and I really didn't count on Nick very much, so I made up Kayel. This magic person who would know everything that had happened, and say all the right things, and he'd... uh... he'd do what I've been doing for... Danny."
What he's been doing for Danny is hugging the crap out of him and taking him away from the infirmary and into a small, quiet room with no camera. Don't even think I've forgotten about that camera thing, Daniel. We're going to discuss it as soon as we get some privacy.
Carter frowns again, and I'm sure she's going to ask something that Daniel doesn't want to answer, so I step in. "Hey, Daniel, while he's sleeping why don't you get some clean clothes and something to eat? We kind of ambushed you with this thing before you had a chance to clean up."
He shoots me a grateful look and nods, carefully rising from his perch on the edge of the bed, so as to not disturb Danny. The boy mutters and rolls over, gathering the blankets to his chest and holding them tightly, his nose buried in the fabric. Daniel heads for the tiny bathroom attached to the bunkroom, and Carter volunteers to get him a clean uniform. Teal'c nods once at me and slips out as well, the slowly closing door giving me a view of him taking up a position just outside, in the hall. I could go tell him that he doesn't need to protect us, but there's no point. It's what he does.
I sit in a chair and watch Danny sleep, looking up only briefly as Carter returns to drop off the clean uniform and leaves again, this time bent on retrieving dinner for our wayward archeologist. Daniel pops his head out, sees that the room is empty except for me and Danny, and comes out in a towel to get dressed. I watch him, idly tracing the long, clean lines of his body with my eyes and falling into the old habit of assessing him for injuries. He was off-world without me, after all.
"I'm fine, Jack."
I smile. "Did I ask?"
"You didn't need to."
"Ah." I go back to watching the child sleep. Seeing that little face on the pillow does a whole bunch of crap to me that I'd rather not think about, so I don't. The last thing we need right now is me dredging up a lot of old frustrated paternal instincts that should stay buried.
"How about you?" Daniel asks. "Are you fine?"
"Sure," I say. "Just as fine as you are."
He laughs softly and comes to sit beside me, scooting his chair close. We stare at the boy for several long breaths.
Daniel's hand fumbles for mine and finds it, lacing our fingers together and hanging on tight. I automatically scan the room for security cameras, until I remember that Daniel specifically chose this room for its lack of cameras, due to the kid's... thing about them. He's still not looking at me, but I can see the lines of tension around his eyes and a muscle twitching in his jaw. He swallows with an audible click, and then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.
"It's hard to see this, isn't it?"
He nods. "Reminds me of a time I'd rather forget."
I don't know what to say to that, so instead, I pull him close and slide an arm around his shoulders, pressing my lips to his temple. This, apparently, was the right response, because he turns and kisses me, gratitude in his touch. It's lazy and pleasant, a low buzz of attraction, a banked fire. We can't do anything right now and we both know it. We wouldn't even let it go this far if Teal'c wasn't standing guard right outside.
"Daniel," I say when he releases my mouth and leans his head on my shoulder. "You know there's something we need to talk about, don't you."
"I know."
"You know I can't just let something like this go."
He smiles slightly. "Yes, Jack, I know. Because you have to fix everything, and you think that the boy's issue with cameras means something happened that hurt me, and you can't rest until you find out what it is and try to fix it."
"Well." I blink at him and then give the sleeping boy a nonplussed look. "I wouldn't have put it quite that way."
Daniel nods. That little smile still plays about his lips, but I consider that a hell of an improvement over the tight, tense line they were in before.
"Sooooo..."
"Not now, Jack."
Ah. "Okay."
So we sit quietly and watch Danny sleep, and if it reminds me of Sara and I leaning over Charlie's crib at night, I try not to think about it.
~~~