Monday, April 19
Reality A001
Daniel's eyes were burning and his head was pounding. The muscles in his back were protesting the amount of time he'd spent bent over this desk, and his brain was beginning to seize up. But he couldn't stop working. Daniel had no doubts whatsoever that Hammond would calmly order his death and . . . and replacement.
He poured himself another cup of coffee and started drinking. It was cold now, but the caffeine was still just as strong. Too much caffeine was probably not good for him, but he needed something in his stomach because the acid was churning.
He'd finished the remainder of the second side of the monument and was now well into the third, but he wasn't absolutely confident that he was making sense. Every time he tried to stop and read what he'd done so far, his nerves wouldn't let him concentrate. The door opened every so often to admit someone bearing coffee, and when it did, he jumped, half expecting an angry General Hammond. He missed the kindly general from home.
The door opened again and he stiffened. It shut and smells came wafting across the room that awakened the hunger that had died grumbling at around three. Daniel turned and saw Jack crossing the room with a plate of spaghetti. He knit his brows. Spaghetti was messy, two-handed food. Jack put the tray down in front of him and Daniel shook his head. "I can't eat this. I don't have time."
"What do you mean?" Jack demanded.
"I have to work. I can't stop to eat, and spaghetti isn't something to you can eat while working. It's too spattery."
Jack didn't say anything immediately. Then he said, "That's not a word."
"What's not a word?" Daniel asked, scanning his writing.
"You made that up," Jack accused.
"Made what up?" Daniel asked. He couldn't see anything that odd or out of place in the text. "What are you talking about?"
"'Spattery.' That's not a word."
Daniel looked up incredulously. "Is so."
"Is not."
"Is so."
"Is not."
Daniel shook his head. "Jack, things spatter, therefore they are spattery. It's a valid construction."
There was a pause, and then Jack cleared his throat. "Is not."
"Jack!" Daniel took a deep breath to control his reaction. "I don't have time to debate this with you. I have to –"
"Eat!" Jack interposed. "You need to eat."
"Can you get me something a little less splattery?" Daniel asked. The spaghetti looked and smelled good, but he didn't dare take the time.
"Now it's 'splattery'?" Jack demanded. "'Splattery' is not a word."
"I am not getting into this with you again, Jack," Daniel said in exasperation. "I need to work. Hammond –"
"Hammond expects you to take meal breaks." Jack sounded like he was trying to be reasonable. Daniel was afraid that meant he was getting angry. "You need to eat to work, he knows that."
Despite the fact that he didn't want to piss Jack off, Daniel felt a surge of anger. "That must be why he didn't feed me breakfast or lunch," he growled.
Jack's eyes snapped and Daniel flinched slightly. "I know. I'm pissed about that, too, but there wasn't anything I could do about it."
Daniel stared at him. That was not the reaction he'd been expecting. Maybe . . . did he dare? He wet his lips nervously. "What about the bomb?" he asked after a moment.
Jack's look of fury deepened, but this time Daniel could tell that the anger wasn't directed at him. "I tried, Daniel, but no luck."
Daniel's arms crept around his midsection, the fingers of his right hand touching the stitches in his left side where a murder weapon had been implanted inside him. It hurt to touch it, but he couldn't help it. His fingers were drawn by the horror of it. "I hate this," he said, gulping.
"I know," Jack said, sitting down next to him. "I'll keep trying. But right now, you need to eat, and if you don't I'm going to take the papers away until you do."
He closed his eyes. "Jack, I –"
"Damn it, Daniel!" Jack yelled suddenly and Daniel jumped, so startled that he nearly fell off his chair. "You have to eat. Trust me, Hammond won't begrudge you the time it takes to eat your dinner."
"I . . ." Daniel took a deep breath. "I have to go to the bathroom. Give me a minute." He got up and went into the little room and shut the door, leaning against it for support. He wasn't sure how much more of this he could take. One minute this Jack seemed so normal, so much like his Jack as they went back and forth in a tit for tat fight, but then the next he scared the living daylights out of him. It was a roller coaster that he couldn't get off of, and Hammond just spiced things up a little.
Daniel crossed to the sink and washed his hands. He pulled his composure back around himself and walked into the room again. Jack had shifted the tray to the end of the desk by the guest chair and was sitting in the desk chair looking at the translation. Daniel walked over and sat down to eat. It was still hot and tasted as good as it smelled. When he started to eat quickly, Jack tapped his hand.
"Don't eat so fast you make yourself sick, Danny. Eat like a normal person."
After that he tried to slow down, tried to behave normally, but it was very hard. He felt like he was caught between dragons, one that blew hot and cold and the other that just blew hot. He was hungry enough, though, that he ate everything on the plate, which he didn't usually do.
When he was done, Jack took the tray and handed it out to the soldiers outside. While he was up, Daniel shifted back to his own chair. A moment later, as he picked up his pencil and started to go to work on the next section of the translation, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and looked up. "I've got to get back to work, Jack."
Jack pulled the guest chair closer and sat down so that his knees were actually touching Daniel's leg. "I know, Daniel, but we need to talk a little about that." He took Daniel's pencil out of his hand and put it down on the table. "Hammond's really got you scared, doesn't he?" Jack asked confidentially.
Daniel shuddered. He couldn't let on how much they both scared him. The only person he'd met since he came to this reality who didn't scare him was Samantha, and he was beginning to wonder when she'd start behaving like a lunatic.
"Well, let me tell you something, you need to take a deep breath and let that go." Jack's hand was still on his shoulder and he squeezed reassuringly. "I know he can be scary, believe me, but he's even more scary if things aren't done right."
"What are you talking about?" Daniel asked, his mouth dry.
Jack reached out his other hand and tugged the paper Daniel had last been working on towards them. "Read that."
"I don't have time for games, Jack, what –"
Jack's hand tightened on his shoulder and Daniel faltered to a stop. "Not playing games, Danny. This is serious. I want you to do whatever you need to do to clear your head of worry and nerves, and read through that page."
Daniel took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he took another one and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was calmer. Not much calmer, but enough that he thought he could look at the page without getting distracted.
He read through it and winced more than once at the awkward translations and the places where he'd translated words without care for context. "Damn it!" he moaned. "I can't focus. Not . . . I –" He broke off, shaking his head. "No – I have to focus. It's not a choice, is it." His voice didn't make that sound like a question, and it wasn't really. It was a fact.
"No, Danny, you don't," Jack said. "But don't be too hard on yourself. This is a difficult situation, and we just have to do what we can."
Daniel looked down and tried not to think about the reasons that this situation existed in the first place. He couldn't think about that without getting angry, and that wouldn't be any help right now. "I'll just read through everything and make sure it all follows." He took a deep breath and looked over at Jack. "Thanks for pointing it out for me."
"Hey, no big deal," Jack said. "What are big brothers for, after all?"
Daniel managed a smile and then returned to work. Jack hung around for awhile, fiddling with things, acting so like the Jack in Daniel's own reality that it made him crazy. Finally, Daniel said, "Jack, not that I mind the company, exactly, but could you go somewhere else? I'm having some trouble focusing."
"No problem," Jack said. He walked over and tousled Daniel's hair. "I'll see you in the morning, Danny."
"Good night, Jack," Daniel replied.
With Jack gone, the work went much more swiftly. He read through what he'd done, and much of it was okay, but there were places where he'd obviously missed not only the boat but the harbor. Taking greater care, he worked those passages through again and then went on. He didn't achieve much more new before the lights dimmed, but he was confident that he'd fixed the problems he'd created thus far.
He took a shower, feeling grungy with sweat and nerves. Then he climbed into bed and curled up tightly. If he took out his feelings and examined them closely, as he only dared do when he was in the dark, he knew he was terrified. He hated to admit it, but he was afraid that his own folks hadn't saved the other Daniel and had somehow not realized that it wasn't him. He was afraid that even if they had realized that the other Daniel wasn't him, they wouldn't be able to find a way to retrieve him and get that Daniel home.
He was afraid that he was falling too easily into dangerous patterns again. He wasn't fighting back, he wasn't trying to escape, he wasn't doing anything but what they told him to. Admittedly, he didn't know how he could possibly escape. There were guards on his door, he'd seen them when people came in and out, and the only weapons he had in here were books. Books could be useful as blunt instruments, but they weren't much protection against guns. Fighting back at this point would only get him very dead. He could just see how angry his Jack would be if they did manage to get here only to find that he'd gotten himself killed in some futile rebellion.
That was another thing. The idea of Jack as his brother was seductive, but not this Jack. His own Jack, who acted about half the time as if he thought Daniel was a major screw up, and the rest of the time like . . . like a brother. Maybe all of the time. He knew guys whose brothers thought they were screw ups. But the words had never been said, the thought never articulated aloud. It wasn't the kind of thing you could ask about or ask for.
He sighed and tucked in tighter. He had to get some sleep. He had to rest or he wouldn't be worth much tomorrow. That, he couldn't risk.
Tuesday, April 20
Daniel set to work immediately upon rising the next morning, feeling oddly energized. His mind seemed to have spent most of the night working through the project in his dreams. He checked through last night's work again to make sure he hadn't screwed anything else up, then kept going, working more quickly than he had the day before and making fewer mistakes.
He didn't like having a bomb next to his heart, and he thought his reaction was perfectly rational. Nevertheless, he had to face facts, and one of those was that if he hoped to get home he had to survive whatever these bastards threw at him. There were things he couldn't and wouldn't do, but short of those, he just had to suck it up and get things done.
He kept bemoaning his lack of choices, but he did have choices. They weren't good choices, but life was like that. Sometimes there were millions of choices and it was hard to decide which option to go with. Sometimes there were as few as two, such as this case. Work or die. At the moment, he was choosing the option that kept him alive. When other options turned up, he'd face them as they came, and choose then, but he wouldn't live to see those choices if he acted the fool now.
At seven thirty, Jack came in with a fresh carafe of coffee. "Good morning, Danny," he said.
"Good morning," Daniel said. He hated that nickname with a passion, but he wasn't going to fight the man on something so paltry. He could almost hear his own Jack, counseling him on an occasion when he was so frustrated with some of the more macho SGC personnel that he could spit. 'Pick your battles, Daniel. If you fight over everything, you'll wear yourself out and lose anyway. Pick the battles that matter.' The nickname didn't matter. The bomb did, but Jack had already said he'd done everything he could to solve it and failed. Whether that was true or not was irrelevant. Daniel couldn't know either way, and pushing it would piss Jack off either way.
"This is what we have this morning in the commissary," Jack said, putting a piece of paper in front of him. "What would you like to have for breakfast?"
Daniel looked at the list in surprise. He chose eggs, fruit and waffles, and, smiling, Jack went away again. He kept thinking, over and over again, how incredibly surreal this was. He shook his head and got back to work.