AN: Thanks so much for reading this sappy little vignette series. :)

Peace and love to you all!


If schedules were constructed of gears and cogs, Jack's would run like a Swiss watch. It is the perfect balance of desk time and meeting time, void of absolutely any margin or room to be late for appointments.

Even his lunch is booked to the minute.

An hour of correspondence when he comes in at nine, coffee break from ten-fifteen to ten-twenty-five, then reports to be read until noon. He briefs himself with one now, during 'desk time,' a file folder two inches thick on radical cell activity in the Middle East. Another sits at the bottom of the pile about interplanetary defense measures. He sips a cardboard cup of coffee that tastes as bad as it looks.

Jack half wonders if he should start scheduling bathroom breaks too. His secretary always wears a frown when he comes back from one, always with a docket or note in hand as if the world somehow ended in the three minutes it took for him to hit the head. Sometimes she jabbers about how a tight oiled ship is the difference between defeat and victory.

Marines. Typical.

Most officials at the Pentagon wear their dress uniforms to work, and his secretary is no exception. He sees a flash of black blazer on the muted green background of her office wall through the adjacent door—the usual signal that she's darting around her desk and towards the hallway.

Jack goes back to the block of text, only to see it swim for a moment. He pushes up a pair of reading glasses. There. The words sharpen.

It's an absent gesture, though he makes sure not to broadcast the fact that he needs them now. Can't have other generals giving him shrewd looks during anti-terrorism briefings because he has to peer down his nose at the text. He's taken to memorizing his own notes when he's the key speaker.

Raised voices clutter the adjacent hall but Jack tunes them out. He's had a lot of practice tuning out noise in much worse places, desert dunes and firefights and Walter Harriman during a technical update lecture.

Jack scowls. No use wandering down that mental trail.

He doesn't, his mind already back on satellite data and a particularly riveting note about fuel budgets for Humvees on the ground. The financial chart somehow takes up two single spaced pages. Jack sighs. This already feels like a long day and it's not even half past eleven.

"You can't go in there!"

"…Security risk?"

"…He…"

"Stop—!"

"…No badge!"

Someone hand Jack a gold medal—he manages to tune out every last scrap of bruhaha with stunning grace.

Right up until a pair of ratty white sneakers stop beside his desk.

Not in front of his desk, as is the manner of other Washington officials. Not the door. Not even near the window like the president does when he's in a chummy mood at one of their face-to-face briefings, peering meditatively down at people below and making secret service agents twitchy.

No, this is up close and personal. Bold, comfortable. A motion repeated many times since Jack's working life was relegated to a desk instead of an embarkation room.

The sneaker laces have sand in them. A hole on the side has been repaired by hand, with a too-big needle, probably bone, and linen thread. Also made by hand. A woman's hand a very long time ago.

There is one specific noise Jack is not so good at tuning out, aside from memories inside his head, and that is…

"Hey Jack."

Jack follows the sandy laces up a dark denim pair of jeans to a tweed blazer and amused blue eyes. So shockingly blue. Full of hutzpah and will continue to be, long after Jack and his endless reports are gone.

Daniel catches Jack's open jawed look and smiles, a blinding thing. "Figured you could use some real coffee."

It's a mug and everything that Daniel plants on the desk (dangerously close to a stack of eyes-only classified reports and Jack's mail for the day), an old Oxford mug that's been chipped by Daniel dropping it on cement floors one too many times. Dark Italian roast wafts up to Jack's nose. It perks his back along with his energy.

"I'll have you arrested!" Jack's secretary runs in a beat later. She glowers at the interloper and his caffeinated offering. "You cannot be here, let alone in the building without a visitor badge!"

And that's a feat, even for Daniel.

Jack keeps his eyes on his friend while he speaks. "It's alright, Janice. He's with me. Not a threat."

"General—"

"He's a…security consultant."

She looks doubtful. "Security consultant?"

"Yes." Jack doesn't smile like Daniel—which is currently spreading—but his eyes catch some of the mischief. "He's testing the Pentagon's entry security. It clearly needs some work, by the way."

Janice flushes. "Yes, General. I'll be right out in the hall if you need anything. You and this…stranger."

It's a disdainful aside at Daniel, who apparently ruffled a few feathers if the men with guns at the door are any indication. Jack's eyes prickle for a different reason than coffee steam.

"He's not a stranger," says Jack, with a touch of the quiet authority he doesn't typically use in everyday life. "He's my best friend."

Everyone relaxes, even Daniel, who's played it laissez faire up to this point. It's a telling, well…tell. One of those body language admissions that had him losing at team poker nights on base. The ever-so-slight tension in Daniel's shoulders releases as well.

"Thanks for the coffee, Doctor." Jack takes a sip and both their eyes twinkle now. It tastes amazing, of course, but then Jack's standards for good coffee are low now. "The stuff around here could clean out a drain."

One of the heads of security, a burly man from the Congo, jerks in surprise. "Doctor? As in…?"

"Doctor Jackson, nice to meet you!"

Daniel, master of disarming people (literally, in this case), bounds over and shakes the man's hand hard enough to rattle the stars on his chest. The one not holding a Glock, thankfully.

"An honour, Doctor. Your work is well known around here."

"Thank you," says Daniel, and looks like he means it.

Then he glances at Jack, brows up in question.

Jack nods. "He knows, Daniel."

"Apologies for the intrusion." Daniel has to lean back to make eye contact with the tall security official. "I beamed into the elevator from a ship in orbit. Nothing you could have done, really."

Jack's brows rise. "Then you did test our security after all. We'll have to make a note of that."

This hole in the Pentagon's safety net must scare the security chief enough, for he scurries away speaking into his shirt cuff. Daniel watches him go, smile shifted into a smirk.

"You beamed all the way here to bring me coffee?" asks Jack, going back to his report, his gut in an odd twist for reasons he doesn't want to pin down.

"We just finished a mission and Caldwell docked us over Europe so I figured…" Daniel shrugs when he turns around. "Why not bring my reclusive friend some quality coffee?"

Jack chokes on another gulp. "This is actually Italian roast?"

"Beans ground right in front of me at the café and everything."

"And Caldwell was okay with this?" Jack can't help but ask. That's a flippant use of Earth's invaluable defense apparatus, even if it is the best coffee he's had all year.

Daniel leans forward on the balls of his feet. "It was a big mission, big save. He was feeling generous."

"Uh huh." Jack stares into the cup at his own grim-mouthed reflection. Then he slides it across the desk, away from himself. "I can imagine. You're pretty handy with a P-90 now. A little birdy told me you scored higher than Siler on your last accuracy sharpshooter test."

Daniel doesn't reply to this one, and the twist cinches.

Only then does Jack clue in to the key word. "Reclusive?"

"Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic," says Daniel, with a steady gaze that winds Jack. "We just miss having you around every day. We…I miss having someone to confide in."

Jack stacks report papers to hide a mental blip over the words. "You're doing great. SG-1 runs like a dream and saves more lives than ever. Self sustaining, really. Cam has been a great addition to the team, along with Vala."

When he dares to look up from enthralling gasoline charts, it's to see that Daniel has leaned closer in that time. His left hand braces on the desk, his right clasping Jack's forearm for a moment.

It retreats, a heartbeat of pressure, but Jack can only stare at the tiny wrinkle between Daniel's eyes.

"I know you think I don't need you anymore—"

"Your mission today proved my point rather well."

"—But Jack…have you ever considered that maybe you need me?"

The twist unravels in a spectacular fray. Papers slip out of Jack's hands when they flinch, now in a disorganized mess all over the desk like his emotions. Stark surprise on his face irons out the wrinkle on Daniel's. His smile is small, compared to the impish one of earlier, but something achy and warm thaws behind his eyes and Jack is transported over a decade into the past.

It's the exact same smile, line for line, that Daniel gave Jack before they parted ways on Abydos.

They both have more wrinkles, and Daniel's hair is shorter and Jack's is grayer, and they face threats that weary their souls more than their bodies, and both have new scars they never could have fathomed eleven years ago…

But it's him. The smile is quintessentially Jack's Daniel and forever will be. Even when their bodies dissolve into stardust for the next generation to gaze up at in wonder like they did so long ago.

"I'll always need…" Jack clears his throat and still can't shake the breathless tone. "But you shouldn't have an old man hanging off you or hovering for the rest of his days."

Long before Jack finishes, Daniel's head shakes. "For such a smart man, you can be thick sometimes. You know that?"

"Takes one to know one."

Daniel huffs, lights up, and there he is. There he is. There is the man who convinced Jack that life was still worth living, the vibrant, fiery soul more expansive than any galaxy.

Jack takes in a ballooning breath and his eyes soften too. Daniel's go bright.

"Jack, just because I don't need your physical protection anymore, doesn't mean I don't want your advice, your help not to get lost inside my own head."

"You're getting better at that too, I might point out."

"A heart is only as good as the compass that guides it home."

It's a sappy line maybe, something Daniel would say to sway a civilization's leader or ease a hard-nosed general's resolve. But his tone is brittle, pleading in a way Jack hasn't heard for a long time.

Daniel reaches out again. At first Jack's not sure what he's going to do, if it's an impulsive, got-to-keep-my-hands-busy motion to help clean up papers or Daniel will shove the cup in front of him to insist he drink that gourmet coffee that just traveled three thousand miles in two minutes before it goes cold.

He does neither, in the end.

Daniel's index finger makes it to Jack's nose so fast he doesn't even have time to register being flustered or pull away.

And Daniel pushes up Jack's reading glasses.

"That's you, by the way," Daniel clarifies, eyes back to twinkling with a heavy comet tail of affection. "Just in case you weren't clear. You're my way home, Jack. Always have been and always will be. No amount of accuracy scores or battles will change that." He inhales a short breath and lets it out slowly. "There, that's…that's what I really came to say."

Daniel's hand shifts to retreat again, somewhere other than painfully close in the personal bubble of Jack's face, but Jack captures it in tense fingers.

The truth spills from his lips without censoring—"Didn't even want a home anymore 'til I met you."

Daniel stills. His big eyes lock on Jack like the runes of an undiscovered language. Jack's face grows hot, but he forces himself not to break eye contact.

Then Daniel flips his hand around so it can grip Jack in return. "That makes two of us."

His face falls for a moment after he says this, just a brief tweak that only adds to the pained compassion sharpening every angle of it.

"Danny?"

"You've been avoiding us. Me. Thought I'd done something wrong."

Jack holds on a little tighter. "No, I just…you guys don't need me on the team anymore so I thought this would be the best way to provide backup for all the dangers you face. At least be a bodyguard between you and Washington."

And forget the eyes—Daniel's entire body melts like an ice cream cone. "Jack."

"Daniel."

Easy as breathing. Jack would respond to that word, from that voice, even half unconscious or delirious. He knows this from proven experience.

Daniel drags over the chair from in front of the desk to the side. He never can do anything the normal way. "Maybe I need support after missions. Ever think about that?"

A memory of holding Daniel's sobbing frame in the supply closet comes to mind.

"Yes." Jack itches the skin below his hairline, only to feel himself sweating a little. "I have. All the time."

"Then you know why I'm here."

A yoke breaking over Jack's head in goopy streams wouldn't startle Jack as much as this does. The sudden realization that Daniel's eyes are content, grounded…

But oh so wistful.

"Bad mission?"

"No." Daniel cants his head. "My soul just needed some reminding that everything will be okay."

"It will be," says Jack at once. And this too is automatic, reassuring those he loves. "You're not doing this by yourself."

"Sometimes it feels like I am."

This gives Jack pause. He thinks about missed calls and the times he doesn't reply to their emails, the days he saves SG-1's mission reports for last because though it's nice to see the fruit of all that training, how independent they are now, he still misses it. It hurts to see them so successful and not be a part of it.

He has been reclusive, pushing them away.

"I'm sorry, Danny. That I've made you feel I'm not available or like I don't care."

"I'm sorry too, for not being clear that I'll always want you in my life. I can't do this without you."

The prickles become a burn and this Jack has no hope of swallowing back. He flicks the inside of his eye quickly, to get rid of the moisture, and Daniel's presence is unwavering and consistent.

I almost didn't have this.

If he'd left Daniel on Abydos, or if he'd never descended, or if the sarcophagus hadn't worked even one of those times or if…or if…

The utter gift of Daniel's mere presence and lucid eyes where they watch Jack work through all this rattle Jack like church bells on Christmas morning. It claps over his head in a clanging, beautiful sound.

Jack nods. "Maybe we both need some help."

"Good thing I've got a best friend for that."

Despite the tease underneath these words, an echo of earlier, Jack still can't stop the rough note in his voice.

"And that'll never change, Daniel. Even when I'm dead and you and Teal'c argue over who gets my hockey card collection."

"Stop it. That's not happening anytime soon." Daniel takes a sip from the mug in retaliation. "I'm my own person now, whole. But even whole people get overwhelmed sometimes."

Jack's grin returns in small stops and starts, when his stomach flutters at these sentiments and the simple sight of Daniel wiping a coffee bubble mustache off his lip. "Do whole people get a craving for mozza sticks?"

Daniel laughs. "They do. Only if they're from that Tuscany place I scouted down the road."

"As if there's anywhere else."

"Plus Caldwell flew off, so…I'm bunking at your place for a few days until my flight."

"Casa de O'Neill always has a spare room with your name on it, Spacemonkey."

Daniel hears the squirrely tone. "You stacked it full of those pack rat boxes of National Geographic magazines, didn't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Daniel laughs again, light and free. Jack stands, and to do so he has to let go of Daniel's hand. He bites the inside of his cheek, skin suddenly cool.

It's worth it in exchange for the quick fingers that straighten a spot on his lapel. Jack guides Daniel by the elbow in return, towards the door. Easy as you please. The wordless dance resumes as if it's been five minutes since their last contact rather than five months.

"Uh…Jack?" Daniel points to his own face, brows up. "Your glasses? Don't you want to…?"

Jack's grin widens until his eyes crinkle. "I think I'll keep them on for a while."