Jack's shoulder stung where the thorns had pierced his hide, and the blood on the back of his neck where the howler had bitten him was drying into an uncomfortable crust, but he didn't feel either of those things at the moment.

He was worried about Daniel.

He knew that Daniel could take care of himself. Daniel had a seemingly unlimited supply of luck combined with surprising acumen and boldness that protected him from getting killed, or staying dead when he was. It didn't stop him from getting hurt in the process though, and today he'd gone in wounded. Physically he seemed fine, if a little sneezy, but there was something going on under that, something throwing him off his game. When he was hurting, Daniel acted like any wounded animal, and lashed out. Considering what the howlers had done to Jack just for being a smart-ass, he didn't even want to imagine what they might do if Daniel lost his cool. That's what had Jack worried.

Carter had insisted on looking at Jack's wounds after the howlers left with Daniel.

"The punctures aren't deep," she'd said, "Looks like your shirt took the worst of it."

"Yeah," Jack had shot back rather irritably, "Unless that monkey's rabid, I'm doing just fine."

Carter didn't seem to take it personally. She was worried about Daniel too. And Jack, like Daniel, tended to get snippy when he was hurt, and when he was worried. Carter knew that as well as anybody.

A couple of hours passed, largely in silence. Despite the number of times the team had been caught and imprisoned over the years, they'd never come up with a good solution for passing the time. They were always inevitably preoccupied with trying to figure a way to escape, and with concern for each other.

On TV, people always had some kind of angst going on to pass the time. Some unresolved romantic tension, some type of deep dark secret, an unfinished argument they at last found time to fight about now they were in prison. But the reality was that such things seldom came up, because they were so utterly trivial under the circumstances as to not bear mention. Granted, the only other option was the skull-crushing boredom that is sitting in a box with nothing to do, but it was utterly moronic to generate tension and instability in a team when they were already under the pressure of having been captured by some less than friendly folks. Only an idiot would bring up petty grievances under these conditions.

"So," Jack suggested, "How 'bout The Minister's Cat?"

Teal'c and Carter simply stared at him in disbelief.

"Well we can't play poker," Jack replied, "Unless one of you brought an extra deck of cards."

Carter, evidently deciding to humor her commander, said, "I think I left mine in my other pants."

Teal'c inclined his head slightly, seeing no escape from this nonsense.

Stoically, he said, "I am not in possession of any cards."

"Well there ya go then," Jack said.

Eventually, as the sky was beginning to darken, the howlers in the trees got all noisy again, then the door to the enclosure swung open. Daniel entered carrying a canteen, then turned to look back the way he'd come. A howler pulled the door closed, and only then did Daniel turn to look at the rest of them.

"So?" Jack said, "How'd it go?"

"Badly," Daniel replied, and it was clear his nose was thoroughly stuffed up at this point.

He quickly crossed to where the others were sitting, and handed Jack the canteen. Jack wasn't sure which one of them it had belonged to originally, but he was glad to find it had water in it. He passed the canteen around as Daniel sat down with them.

"I tried everything I could think of, up to and including charades," Daniel sighed wearily, "They clearly communicate at a fairly high level, but I can't figure out how to talk to them."

"Any idea what they want?" Carter inquired, before taking her turn to drink from the canteen.

"Something to do with the device we found. That's all I know," Daniel shrugged in defeat.

"I'm guessing they didn't say anything about letting us go," Jack ventured.

"I wouldn't know if they had," Daniel answered.

"Okay, well, while you were wasting time with the Bandar-Logs, we've been describing the Minister's Cat," Jack said helpfully, "So now I think it's your turn."

Daniel took the canteen back when it was passed to him and asked which letter they were on, remarking that he'd always preferred Consequences.

"X," Jack said, then admitted, "We've actually been there for awhile."

Daniel took a thoughtful swig from the canteen, then said, "Xanthous."

"Gesundheit," Jack replied.

"It means yellow," Daniel told him.

"I knew that," Jack -who had up to now been winning- said somewhat defensively, "We're playing progressively. But since you weren't here for the previous letters, I'll give you a mulligan on that one."

To his credit, Daniel didn't say anything to this, he simply raised an eyebrow.

Carter, going next said, "Well I guess the Minister's Cat is a Yellow cat," she then repeated it including all of the adjectives that had come before.

"The Minister's Cat is a really ugly cat," Jack remarked dryly.

"No, the next letter is Z, sir" Carter corrected.

"That's not what I meant and you know it," Jack protested.

"Sorry sir," Carter gave him a sheepish look, "You know the rules."

"Now that's just dirty pool," Jack muttered.

"We're still describing the cat," Daniel told him, "We can talk about the pool during the next round."

And so the evening passed away into night. The time of their scheduled check in with the SGC passed without their remarking on it. It wasn't the first time that had happened, and they all knew what that meant without having to discuss it. With obnoxious efficiency, Daniel took over the game of Minister's Cat. Jack forbade him from using words that didn't appear in an English dictionary, saying using adjectives from other languages -particularly dead or alien ones- was cheating. This quickly devolved into an argument because Daniel insisted that the languages English had developed from had to count (there was a brief skirmish over whether a word stopped being a word if people stopped using it), and by proxy any languages that branched from those roots also had to be allowed, a point Jack vehemently disagreed with, and each man valiantly defended his position until the sky turned indigo and the stars appeared, shining bright through the branches of the trees overhead.

In truth, Jack was relieved that Daniel was so ready to argue with him. Often he was tweaking Daniel because it was fun, and also a kind of soft revenge for how often Daniel was really annoying (particularly when he was right). But it also gave him a base line for how Daniel reacted to certain things, which offered him a means of quickly and accurately judging Daniel's mental and emotional condition in a very similar way to how pinching skin could help diagnose dehydration.

Quickness to defense wasn't enough. The method and humor (or lack thereof) also factored in. Jack wasn't really interested in the language argument itself, Daniel was probably technically right about it anyway. Jack just wanted to know how swiftly, with what tone and which logic Daniel would use to guard his position on the issue. After that he pretty much just kept going because it was fun, and a welcome distraction from their predicament.

Maybe it was Jack's imagination, but it seemed to him that Daniel was doing an assessment of his own. In the early days of their friendship, arguments had been all about being right. Gradually, there had come a subtle but critical transition where being right came secondarily to being understood. Eventually, it grew into arguing in an attempt to be clear about matters, to make sure the other person's opinion was a solid one even if you didn't agree with it. Now it was a parlor game of its own, wherein they tried to trip each other up, and eventually come to a consensus, sometimes over a period of weeks or months or even years of coming back to that single point.

Jack had never had so much fun arguing with someone in his life, and it was clear to him that Daniel felt that way too. Their friendship was based on trust and respect forged in fire, upon which had been built understanding that did not require agreement, and affection that was not dependent upon the avoidance of certain sensitive topics. Between them, no subject was sacrosanct, not religion, not politics, not family. They didn't have to draw lines in the sand because they each had enough trust in the other to know that those lines would not be crossed.

Tonight, it was clear that Daniel was frustrated, and his arguments were punctuated by clearing his throat and sometimes pausing to cough, but otherwise he was in fine form, and even seemed to be quite enjoying himself, arguing vehemently about something that patently did not matter one bit in the grand scheme of things. Jack was just glad to see Danny being his usual passionate and lively self.

Carter and Teal'c didn't get it. To them it looked like Jack and Daniel were just fighting, and over something extremely trivial to boot. To Teal'c, words were largely unnecessary. To Carter, you asked someone if they were alright by asking if they were alright, not by picking a fight with them. With anyone but Daniel, Jack might've agreed, though a sarcastic comment was always more his style. And of course nobody was more caring and protective of his friends than Daniel. But with each other, bugging the heck out of one another was how they showed they cared, it was simply their way. Carter and Teal'c didn't get it, but they accepted it as a fact of working with Jack and Daniel.

Once it was well and truly night, Carter intervened, declared it a draw and suggested they get some sleep. Neither Jack nor Daniel could argue with that, and so they decided to accept Carter's ruling. A mere look from one man to the other confirmed that they were both amused by how uncomfortable Carter was with their arguing, finding the idea that she thought they were at all serious hilarious.

Jack didn't bother setting a watch. Not only were they in prison, but Teal'c was functionally always on watch, and Jack had quickly figured out that not taking advantage of that was pure foolishness. Military doctrine insisted on certain practices, such as rotating watches and who was on point position, but it didn't take alien worlds into account and it certainly didn't take the abilities of a Jaffa into consideration. Retired from the Air Force multiple times, Jack had learned to be flexible.

A team in the field learned a lot of things about each other. They didn't necessarily learn about family histories or anything like that (though they often did), but they learned the stuff that really mattered. They knew how much pressure any one of them could take without breaking. They knew which of them did well in the sand, and which did better in the snow. They could recognize when one of their number was starting to flounder, long before anyone on the outside would even know something was wrong. They knew how far and how fast each of them could go without a rest. Each knew exactly how good of a shot the others were, and how well they could handle themselves in close combat as well as ranged, which meant they also knew exactly when to help and when to let one of their number handle something themselves.

But they were also familiar with even more intimate details. They each had habits and rituals before sleep, and there were circumstances under which each of them would find it difficult or impossible to sleep. None of them snored regularly, not even Daniel with his clogged sinuses, which was a very good thing in the field. But they all occasionally suffered from nightmares. Even though Teal'c didn't technically sleep or dream, he did sometimes find it difficult to Kelno'reem, usually because something was bothering him, in the same way that real fears turned into nightmares during sleep for the rest of them. Because it was an affliction that came naturally with the territory, they all understood both its cause and its natural consequences in more than a merely intellectual way.

Tonight, the nightmares were with Daniel.

When Daniel's sleep was plagued by nightmares, he was usually very quiet. Only rarely did he disturb anyone if he was awakened in the middle of the night by a bad dream. Teal'c was likely always aware of such occurrences with any member of the team, but seldom reacted, behaving as if he had not noticed. For those that knew him, it was clear that he did this out of respect and kindness. It was his way to handle personal trials alone, and so it was also his way to let others do the same. Any other response seemed to puzzle and even distress him to some degree. Personal affairs were personal by definition, and he disliked outside interference with his own inner demons, and therefore typically (and quite masterfully) feigned ignorance about anyone else's.

In this case, Daniel didn't wake Carter. Likely he wouldn't have disturbed Jack either had the Colonel not been in a very light stage of sleep. Even so, by the time Jack had woken up, Daniel was quietly sitting up. He had his legs drawn up, his arms wrapped around them and his forehead was resting on his knees. The only evidence of distress was that his hands were balled into fists and he was clearly putting pressure on his legs with his arms to prevent himself from shaking.

When they talked about nightmares, most people talked about a big bad monster of some kind, and certainly SG-1 had their pick of the litter as far as horrible alien things went. A lesser sort of nightmare involved intense personal embarrassment, usually involving being nude while speaking publicly. But people like Jack and Daniel knew another kind of nightmare. For those who had dealt with tragedy, and loss beyond what anyone should have to endure, there was another kind of horror that came to one in dreams. The kind where the dead returned, only to remind you in a painful way that they were gone forever. That sort of nightmare cut like a knife, even once you were awake, because that nightmare was true, and had the power not only to frighten a dreaming mind, but to reopen a very real wound to the soul.

After the death of his son, Charlie, Jack had mostly stopped sleeping because whenever he closed his eyes, he saw his son. Whenever he slept, he dreamed that he had been there the moment of his son's death, that he had stood by and watched, for some reason unable to move, unable to stop it from happening. He had dreamed his dead son came and asked him why. Why had he died? Why did it have to happen? Parents were never meant to outlive their children. Jack had told himself that over and over, and descended into a kind of grief that seemed only to have one way out. The Stargate had been his way out. But, because of Daniel, it had not been the way he'd expected.

It was a different wound that Daniel had suffered, and he was dealing with it better than Jack ever had, but that didn't make the agony of it any less. Orphaned at a young age, brilliant but unaccepted by the archeological community he had spent his life trying to better, Daniel had been forced to go to another planet to find someone who believed in him, who loved him for who he was, imperfections and all. That person had been Sha're, and Jack only wished he'd been a good enough man to have loved his own wife as deeply and selflessly as Daniel had loved Sha're. Maybe if he had a better man, he would still be married. Perhaps he would have dealt better with the loss of his son.

But what would have become of Daniel? If Jack had been a different person than he was, he would never have been tapped for the original mission through the Stargate. How would the Abydos mission have ended if there had been someone besides Jack there? Someone less able to do what had to be done? Someone less able to admit to himself what he'd become? Someone who refused to hear Daniel in those critical moments where it had made all the difference? And what about since then? Who else could have called Daniel home from Abydos? Under who else's command would Daniel have consented to serve? And what of Teal'c? Who besides Jack would Teal'c have believed in? Who besides Jack would have fought to bring the Jaffa warrior onto the team? Jack was under no illusions of being perfect or indispensable, but he knew that all the what ifs in the world could not return his son to life, or repair his broken marriage. Daniel had taught him that. It had taken a man obsessed with discovering the true nature of the past to teach Jack that the past is dead, and you can't live there.

Without a word, Jack went and sat beside Daniel.

"I was there," Daniel whispered after they'd been sitting in silence for several minutes.

"I know, Danny," Jack replied gently.

"I was right there," Daniel repeated, his voice barely audible, "I stood by and watched."

"There was nothing you could've done."

"After my parents were killed, I promised myself I would never stand by and watch someone die again. Somehow, someway, I'd find a way to stop it. Whoever it was, whatever it took..."

While Daniel trailed off, Jack flashed back to that moment in Ra's throne room. Daniel had tried to stop Jack, but he'd acted anyway, the end result of which had been Daniel throwing himself into the line of fire to save Jack's life. Jack, who at the time had hated Daniel's guts, had done nothing but insult and berate and drive him, and who sought his own death almost above all else. That's who Daniel had acted to save then, and it would have cost him his life if not for the pride of Ra, which had demanded Daniel be resurrected and used to kill Jack and the others. But for that, Daniel would have been gone forever, and they both knew it. Yet Jack had seen Daniel willing to do the same thing again, with just as much certainty that he would die as he'd had then.

"... but when it was Sha're... I couldn't... I couldn't do a damn thing to save her. I loved her, Jack... but I couldn't do anything," Daniel said, his voice almost a whimper.

"I know, Danny," Jack told him, "I know."

There wasn't anything else he could say. He could tell Daniel it wasn't his fault, but Daniel already knew that. Besides that, Jack had heard those comfortless words a thousand times after Charlie died. That he couldn't have known, that it wasn't his fault, that there was nothing he could have done. But he still felt guilty. Even though Daniel had been there when his parents died, he'd been an eight year old boy, and there was nothing he could have done to save them. When Sha're had died, Daniel was likewise helpless, incapable of doing anything save watch it happen.

But knowing that didn't lessen the pain. It didn't stop the what ifs that came to drown him in the middle of the night. It didn't stop the dreams. Jack knew, because the same thing happened to him sometimes. Not a day went by that he didn't think of Charlie at least once, but he didn't always have the guilt hanging around his neck like a weight. He wasn't stuck in it like quicksand anymore. Most of the time he was okay, even doing well. But every now and then, some inner demon would come tapping at the back of his consciousness, reminding him of his loss, inviting him to wallow again in self-pity and guilt and pain, and it would take everything he had to keep it shut out.

Jack realized he didn't need to think of anything to say. He simply put an arm around the younger man's shoulders. For a tense moment, Daniel didn't respond. Then he let go, and leaned against his friend. Jack didn't know why Daniel was shivering, whether from fear or sorrow or guilt or what, but he knew it didn't matter. What mattered was that Daniel needed him, and he was there.

In a way, that was all that had ever mattered.

In the morning, Daniel showed no trace of how fragile and vulnerable he'd been the night before. Neither Jack nor Daniel mentioned their conversation, because it was nobody else's business what they'd said, and they themselves already knew.

The howlers were up with the dawn, shaking the trees and roaring at the top of their lungs. For Jack, it was a rude and unwonted awakening that came far earlier than he would have preferred.

"What an annoying sound they've discovered!" Jack shouted to be heard above the racket.

"They're staking a claim to their territory," Daniel shouted back, "Reminding any other howlers in hearing distance that they own this patch of real estate."

"They're making my ears ring is what they're doing!" Jack yelled, "It's really obnoxious!"

"So tell them to stop," Daniel suggested sarcastically.

"I'd rather throw rocks at them until they shut up," Jack grumbled

Before Daniel could voice a response, the note the howlers were roaring changed. Jack recognized it as the same noise they'd made yesterday both times the scarred Alpha male howler had come.

"Sounds like his Royal Majesty, Scarface, is on his way," Jack remarked.

"Try not to piss him off this time," Daniel pleaded.

"Wasn't tryin' to piss him off the first time," Jack said.

Daniel said nothing to this, merely gave Jack one of those looks.

The enclosure gate opened, and the big scarred howler swaggered in. Watching the way he paraded around, showing off his size and strength while the howlers that had scurried in after him chattered respectfully and fled from his path when he turned in their direction, Jack wondered what there was to translate, as the communication seemed pretty obvious and straight forward to him.

Of course, Jack had spent a lot of his life around bullies and blowhards, where whoever beat his chest the loudest was king, and the words he spoke were themselves incidental, the important thing was who he said them to and how. If any of the crew he ran with either before or after joining the Air Force encountered someone they didn't know, the first thing they did was try to harass and belittle them to see what would happen. That reflex hadn't wholly kicked in when Jack had first met Carter, but she'd clearly seen it before, and knew the way to defend herself was give as good or better than she got, and then act ready to take the matter straight to the mat.

But such was not Daniel's way. You had to really push his buttons to see what he was made of. He defended his opinions like a lioness with her cubs, but himself he was much less protective of. What was the first thing he'd done with these howlers? Made himself small, insignificant, and subordinate. Suddenly it made sense why Daniel couldn't get through to them.

"Daniel," Jack said quietly while the big howler was still posturing, "That monkey's been yanking your chain. The reason you can't communicate with him is that he's not working with you."

"What?" Daniel asked, managing to keep his voice soft, "What do you mean?"

"I mean he's using you to show off how clever he is."