Daniel had had enough. Jack had been snapping and complaining all day, whining about everything from his still damp clothes to how sick he was of their unchanging food selection. Daniel had tried to broach the subject of what happened with the lights yesterday twice, and twice he had been frozen out. Daniel was patient, he was understanding that Jack was very upset by the situation, but he wasn't a saint. Enough, he thought, is enough.
"The lights will be coming on again soon," Daniel said. Jack tried to look away, and Daniel moved with him, denying Jack's avoidance.
When ignoring Daniel didn't work, Jack said, "Oh? Got a watch hidden somewhere that I don't know about?"
Jack had been bitching about scientists and their crap all day. Daniel wasn't above playing the part to the hilt just to get a little of his own back. "Our circadian rhythms have adjusted to the day cycle in here now," he said. He wished he could have a PowerPoint presentation for that extra edge. "I can predict with a reasonable amount of accuracy when the stimuli will begin based on my own body clock."
Jack was glaring at him. "You're doing that on purpose," he said.
Daniel blinked. Moistened his lips. Widened his eyes. "Doing what?" he asked.
"Knock it off, Daniel." Jack turned away again.
Realizing that he had allowed himself to be diverted once again, Daniel gritted his teeth and followed Jack, leaning down, forcing Jack to met his eyes. "Enough," he said. "I knew you don't like this. I knew you're pissed off. But it isn't my fault, and I'm sick of you taking it out on me."
Jack considered playing dumb, and then decided against it. Daniel would only see through it anyway. "Fine," he said tonelessly. "It wasn't your fault."
"Why does this bother you so much?"
Jack raised his eyebrows and swept his arms out to encompass the room. "Why? I'm being held captive and forced to jerk off with an audience and you want to know why it bothers me?"
"That's the obvious answer," Daniel said, narrowing his eyes. "Of course you hate being a captive, hate having control taken away. But you were dealing with it, accepting that there was nothing you could do, that it could be much worse. You didn't get really upset until yesterday."
Jack tried to turn away again, but Daniel grabbed his upper arm and held him in place. He wasn't going to let this go. "Dammit, Daniel," Jack muttered.
"Is it because of what we did?"
Jack jerked his arm out of Daniel's hand and began to pace. "Of course it is!" he snapped. "How can you possibly be alright with it? How can you just shrug it off with a line of bullshit about lab experiments?"
"It's not bullshit." Jack shot him a dark look. "Not the point," Daniel added quickly. "And for the record, I'm not entirely alright with it, but I don't see how we had a choice. It wasn't..." Daniel sighed and lifted his hands, spreading them toward Jack. "It's not our fault, Jack. Whatever the influence of this place is making you feel, it's not your fault. You're not any less of a man for wanting--"
"Don't," Jack interrupted. He had stopped pacing. He was standing very still, and Daniel felt caught by his gaze like a bug on a pin. "Do not," Jack enunciated very clearly. "Absolutely do not."
Daniel dropped his hands. There was nothing he could say that Jack would hear, and he knew it. So he just shrugged and shook his head, and Jack nodded once, sharply. Glad we got that cleared up, his face said. End of discussion.
There was a moment of charged silence, and then a rush of sound--rustling, tapping noise. The lights were starting again.
Jack closed his eyes for a moment, and Daniel saw that he wasn't just angry, or confused, that he was miserable, and his stomach lurched. He didn't know what to do; he only knew that his best friend was in some kind of trouble and he couldn't help.
They did it facing each other. Jack didn't even bother trying to look away. He recognized the inevitable when he saw it. And for a while, with the lights and colors and that sound, he could forget everything but how good it was, because it was always so damn good.
Afterward, Jack washed up and went to sleep without another word. Daniel lay awake for a long time.
They had an uneasy truce. Jack was as pleasant as he could be, under the circumstances, and Daniel didn't rock the boat. He had decided that he'd give Jack some time to come to terms with whatever his problem was.
Small talk was no longer an option. They had exhausted their supply of it. Facing yet another hour of watching the water run down the wall, Daniel had volunteered some stories of his college days. Jack had reciprocated with what Daniel was sure were wildly exaggerated tales of high adventure in special ops. They had known each other for seven years, under some of the most extreme and extraordinary circumstances possible, and they were finding that they still don't knew all that much about each other.
Daniel knew a great deal about who Jack was, about his courage and his deceptively sharp mind and all his clever defenses, but he didn't knew that Jack lost his pilot's wings over a drunken fight with a superior officer after a particularly bad mission. The failure of the mission and the loss of two members of Jack's team were due mostly to that officer's bad choices, but that did not make breaking his nose acceptable.
So Daniel found these things out, and Jack found out that Daniel wasn't meek and shy and friendless in college, which came as a shock to him. Daniel laughed at his reaction, and told Jack that he'd been taking care of himself most of his life. He'd been a bit lost in the beginning at the SGC, yes, but he was never helpless.
Despite what his team seemed to think, Daniel was aware of his looks, aware that he attracted people. In his life he'd had very few advantages, and his appearance and ability to win people over was something he had relied upon many times. Sex was never his primary focus, but he was certainly not averse to it. He'd been a horny teenager just like everyone else.
They had long, meandering talks about anything and everything, and they threw bits of food at each other when the sameness got to be a little too much, and they devised a system of washing clothes that involved sharing one uniform while the other dried. They discovered that the soap dish refilled itself just as the food did.
And once a day, they masturbated while looking at each other.
If it weren't for that, this would be the best captivity he'd ever been in, Daniel thought. Which wasn't really saying much.
He was beginning to grasp a kind of direction in the way the lights worked. The increasing need for some kind of connection with Jack when the lights and sounds began couldn't be coincidental. Soon, he thought, just looking at each other wouldn't be enough. Touching would come next. It had to, in any kind of logical progression.
They were being pushed into something, and the more Daniel considered it, the more he thought he knew the answer. But if it was what he thought, they were going to be in here for a very long time.
"I have a theory," he said one day. As the leader, Jack needed to know, but Daniel wasn't looking forward to telling him.
Jack, slouched against one wall with his arms loosely crossed over his upraised knees, looked at Daniel from under sleepy lids. Boredom, more than actual fatigue, Daniel thought.
"All right," Jack sighed. "Let's hear it."
"We're specimens."
Jack grimaced, but made a little 'go on' twirl with his hand.
"We've been captured, put in a cage, fed and watered, and completely isolated from all outside influence. We touch nothing, breathe nothing, eat and drink nothing but what they allow us. It's like having control factors in an experiment, so that only the thing you want measured can change. Everything else stays exactly the same."
"Still waiting for the point, Daniel."
Daniel smiled in a small, tight way. "It's actually rather funny, when you understand what they're trying to do."
Jack matched Daniel's false smile. "I'm sure," he said. "Hilarious, no doubt. That's why you're laughing so hard."
Daniel snorted and shook his head, smiling a real smile this time. "So, if you had a pair of unknown creatures in captivity, what would you need to knew about them? If you were studying them, you'd need to discover their basic physical needs, food, water, shelter, that kind of thing."
"Of course," Jack said, in his nodding, 'I knew that' way.
"But it's pretty clear they either determined what we need from what was in our packs, or from a scan of our bodies, so now they're trying to determine something else. The other thing essential to our survival."
When Daniel paused again, Jack raised his eyebrows and waved one hand. "Which would be...?"
"Procreation," Daniel said, trying for his best calm 'professor' tone. "Survival of any species depends on its ability to reproduce. They have a pair of the same species in captivity and they're trying to... well, breed us."
Jack stared at him for a long moment. "Breed," he said. "Us. Breed us. What?"
"Well let's face it Jack, that's the direction we're headed in."
Jack shook his head. "What direction? There's no direction. We're not going anywhere."
"There's more pressure every time, pushing us together. Ah!" he said, holding a finger up, stilling Jack's objection. "You know I'm right. I don't know exactly what's causing the compulsion, but you can't deny it's there. They're trying to create a conditioned response. The visual and auditory stimuli, combined with a physical need being met. It's like Pavlov's dogs, or like a chimpanzee reacting to a bell being rung and pushing a button to got his food."
Jack rubbed a hand over his face. "I should've known monkeys would come into this eventually."
"Jack."
He flapped a hand at Daniel, his other one still over his face. "Yeah, I got it," he said. "They're trying to breed us, and since there's no way we're ever going to make a kid together, it could take a while. Real funny."
"Maybe they don't realize humans need one of each sex in order to reproduce. They could be asexual. Or maybe they just don't realize we're both men."
Jack uncovered one eye and peered at Daniel. "Which one do they think is the woman?"
Daniel found himself grinning again, and after a moment, Jack began to grin back. Daniel dropped his head and chuckled, his shoulders shaking, little snorts escaping his nose. Jack watched this and snickered a little himself, his head back against the wall and his hands hanging limp between his knees.
"You do realize that we'll never hear the end of this," Daniel said.
"Oh yes. Carter, in particular, will take great pleasure in reminding us."
Daniel imagined the look on Sam's face if he ever escaped from here to tell her that aliens had tried to breed him with Jack. He laughed a little more, feeling punchy and maybe slightly hysterical, but he thought he was probably entitled. He'd been locked in a little white room with Jack for a week. Anyone would be going nuts.
"Hey!" Jack shouted, looking up at the ceiling. "It's not going to work! We're both guys!"
Daniel stared at him, open mouthed, and Jack shrugged. "Worth a try," he said.
"Yeah."
Daniel watched Jack for a long moment. Jack was still grinning, his eyes bright, his body more relaxed than it had been in a while. Daniel thought if there was ever going to be a time to suggest this, it was now.
"I had another theory," he said.
Jack waved a lazy hand. "By all means. The first one was such a hit."
"We're going through a process here. A gradual increase in intimacy. Based on what we've done and how far we have to go before we got to anything that could be considered 'breeding,' it could take a long time. It may be that when we reach the end, it will become obvious that we lack the anatomy to conceive a child, and we'll be released."
Jack wasn't smiling anymore. He regarded Daniel with strong suspicion, waiting for the other shoe to drop. "And...?"
Daniel took a deep breath. "And we could save ourselves a lot of time and aggravation by skipping the process, and going straight to the end."
Jack became very still, his eyes hard and unrelenting. He stood and looked down at Daniel. "I can't believe you just suggested that," he said, biting off the end to each word.
Daniel scrambled to his feet, his hands out, palms up, supplicating. "Wait, hear me out." His voice rose slightly in pitch, as it often did when he argued. "We both knew we're going to get there eventually. Why put ourselves through any more of this than we have to?"
"Of course," Jack replied icily. "Why continue resisting, when it's so much easier to give in? Why fight them when we could just give them what they want?"
Daniel closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips against the bridge of his nose, and took a long breath. "You make it sound like I want to give secrets to the enemy."
"It's the same principle," Jack countered in that same cold, hard voice. "Resisting is hard, so let's give up. Let's do what they want, and maybe they'll let us out. It's a slippery slope, Daniel. Once you start down that road..."
"Doing this doesn't hurt anyone. It doesn't compromise the SGC, doesn't endanger anybody--"
"Wrong, Daniel," Jack cut him off. "It hurts us. It endangers us. It compromises us."
Daniel's hands dropped to his sides and hung there, limp. He stared at Jack. He had no idea how deep this went, how unwilling Jack was to even entertain the possibility. "It's going to happen anyway," he tried again.
"Nothing is certain until it happens," Jack said flatly. "We could do it tonight, and be rescued tomorrow. If it comes to the point where we have absolutely no choice, that's one thing, but I will not give them one concession that I don't have to. The moment you stop fighting, you lose."
Daniel shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. You can't have peace until you stop fighting."
Jack just lifted his hands and dropped them again. It was at times like this that he was reminded how fundamentally different he and Daniel were, how there were some things that they would never, ever agree on. And it appeared this was one of them.
"Forget it, Daniel," he muttered, turning away. "I won't do it."
Daniel's mouth opened and closed, working around words that he wanted to say. He wanted to keep fighting, to press and persuade and debate his way around this, to make Jack see that he was right. But Jack's turned back mocked him, told him that all his clever words would only bounce off. Jack had put his foot down.
Daniel slumped back against the wall and shut his mouth.