Jack didn't know James Chianti from Adam, but he did know Daniel. If he hadn't, he would've assumed that Daniel was letting old fears guide his actions, that packing a gun was overkill. But Daniel didn't have a look of abject panic, or cold vengeance. He had the look of the calmly logical, the one who knew he was about to come face-to-face with a killer, and had no intention of doing so unprepared.
Still, Jack was relieved when Daniel made the crack about blood on his carpet; it said the first thing on his mind was not death, that he would prefer another option. Jack wasn't so sure he himself felt that way. He didn't need details, the raw fear in Daniel's eyes whenever the subject of Chianti came up was enough. Jack knew that there wasn't much in this world or any other that really scared Daniel right to the core. Even when he did get scared, Daniel was damned good at masking it. All except for the eyes, which often betrayed his fear. But Chianti had set a stake of fear so deep in Daniel that it showed all over, in the widening of his eyes, the way his skin went pale, the way he'd start to shake before he could stop himself.
The source of that level of fear could be nothing less than evil, and Jack wanted it dead. He didn't care that this was no Goa'uld, no alien shape-shifter, no villainous clone. Human, Earthling, whatever, James Chianti was just as much a monster as the aliens Jack and his team faced all the time. Only unlike the vast majority of those things out in the galaxy, Chianti had his hooks deep in the psyche of a member of Jack's team. And that wasn't just evil, it was unsafe. Anyone with that tight a hold on Daniel inside could sooner or later get him killed, even if they weren't physically present at the time. This last mission was a small sampling of that. Daniel had been distracted right from the start, and it has slowed him down, rendered his judgment suspect, and gotten him hurt.
If Chianti could do that with a single phone call, Jack shuddered to think what the man had accomplished when he was supposedly Daniel's guardian.
What really bothered Jack was whether the Daniel that was riding shotgun now would be the one who walked through the front door of the apartment a few minutes from now. This Daniel was unafraid, calm, collected, and sure of what he was to do. But Jack knew resolve could crumble in the face of terror. If that deep fear in Daniel broke through, all bets were off.
Years of working with Daniel had taught Jack that the man was steady, reliable, and astonishingly graceful under pressure. But this was different from their usual. At least, it was different in Jack's mind. But he realized that, to Daniel, it might all be the same. After all, to Daniel, Sha're wasn't some girl from an alien world. Sha're was his guiding star, his beloved, his wife. For Daniel, Abydos had been home. He'd lived there with those people. It seemed that no world was truly alien to Daniel for long, no more strange to him than Earth itself. Perhaps in his mind, Chianti was just another enemy.
Jack couldn't feel that way. He'd fought on Earth, and he'd fought off it, and they weren't the same. Not to him. And fighting on home ground itself was yet another thing entirely. He couldn't see it as all one and the same. But maybe Daniel could. For his sake, Jack sure hoped so.
"So, Danny, is there anything else I need to know?" Jack asked.
Daniel had told him some about Chianti, but in a vague way, and certainly not hitting every detail that might be relevant if this guy was going to try and kill them. Instinct said to prepare to fight for his life. It wasn't just experience and training alive in Jack. Jack didn't entirely realize it, but his instincts were attuned to Daniel's. Because instinct bade Daniel assume the worst, Jack felt the sense of danger like the pressure in the air before a coming storm.
"He's been in prison a long time," Daniel said, "That may have changed him."
By his tone, and the look in his eyes as he spoke, Daniel was not implying the change had done him any good. Some people went to prison, were remorseful, and changed their ways. Others just dug in deeper, into the anger, into the hate, giving themselves over to a rabid mentality. Jack had seen it both ways. He'd even seen some people go in and come out just the same. Jack didn't get the sense that would be the case with this guy. Nursing a grudge for a lot of years did things to a person. A lust for vengeance had a way of draining the soul, until there was less humanity left than when a Goa'uld took on a host. Chianti must be getting old, Jack supposed. But he knew that the limitations of age also came with advantages. Patience, caution, experience. All these replaced the lightning reflexes, endurance and sheer strength of youth, and the man who had them in spades would beat youth every time.
But it was just one man, a single human who might or might not have a gun, might or might not know how to fight, might or might not have violence on his mind. Perhaps he thought Daniel would come cowering, like a frightened child. But if that was what he expected, he was in for a rude awakening, because Daniel was coming home like a once tame wolf whose former master has betrayed it.
Jack decided to keep his eyes (and his mind) on the road. After all, none of it would mean anything if they didn't get there in one piece. It crawled across his mind that they would have to climb a lot of stairs to get to the apartment, and he felt a twinge of dread at that.
Jack's knees were still complaining bitterly about the earlier running and jumping he'd made them do, and the suggestion of stairs in their near future sent them in paroxysms of spasming complaint. Disadvantages of a violently adventurous life and being well over the age of forty. The combination of age and repeated previous injury was hell on the joints.
Evidently Daniel wasn't feeling stiff. No sooner had Jack parked the truck by the curb then Daniel was out of it and headed for the stairs. At the base of them, he paused and looked back, waiting for Jack.
"You know," Daniel said when Jack reached him, sounding as if he might be hoping the colonel would opt to try and talk him out of going up the stairs, "Normal people call the cops when someone invades their home."
"Normal people don't spend a week being held captive by space monkeys," Jack replied without hesitation, "And they don't have a journals full of national secrets in alongside the cake recipes in their bookshelf."
"I don't have any cake recipes," Daniel pointed out.
"Yeah, well," Jack said, starting up the stairs, "A normal person would."
Daniel stared after him for a moment, then followed wordlessly.
In truth, neither Jack nor Daniel were much for figures of authority such as the police represented. More, getting the police involved would mean having to dance around questions they weren't able or allowed to answer. Of course there were measures and resources in place to make sure any legal entanglements were quickly slipped, but it was always better to go unnoticed than to leave people with a mystery. Gunshots would attract attention, and Jack supposed they could have told someone where they were going and why, but that might take too long. Not only might Chianti have gone by the time they got it through all the proper channels, but Daniel's nerve might have gone too.
Not only that, but there would be more questions than Jack had asked. More prying into a part of Daniel's past that hurt him, and for no reason except to satisfy governmental curiosity. Better to ask forgiveness after than permission before. Besides which, once it was done, there would be a rush to cover it up before the press got wind of it. The other way around, the process would be slow and rife with red tape. Government run operations always had pencil pushers at the top, determined to drown the world in paperwork. Waste of time, as far as Jack was concerned.
Jack was the kind of man who preferred to just solve a problem rather than discuss and argue over the right way to do it. Fortunately for him, he was good enough at what he did that he could get away with it. Being called from retirement for the Stargate Program gave him a certain status of which he was very much aware. They needed him. And they needed Daniel too.
More importantly, there was no reason anybody would ever have to know that Jack and Daniel had been aware in advance that there would be someone in that apartment. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about them both being in Daniel's apartment, or their both being armed. And there would be little inquiry as to why they had shot an intruder if it came to that.
When they reached the apartment, they saw at once that the door was ajar.
Daniel paused, glancing at Jack. Then he took a steadying breath and nudged the door open. Jack moved to the wall beside the door, going for cover under the assumption that anything might be lying in wait on the other side. The action wasn't planned, just years of training and experience forming an instinct as strong as breathing. Daniel moved through the door and into his house. Then he paused again. Jack had started to follow him, but was stopped when Daniel blocked his path. Unsure what Daniel was thinking now, or if maybe his nerve might be slipping, Jack waited in silence.
Daniel turned slightly, making sure Jack could see when he removed his glasses.
Jack knew the action plunged the world into blurry shapes that sort of melted into one another indistinctly, as Daniel had described it once. But Jack knew that, despite his miserable vision, Daniel was still able to locate and hit center mass on a shooting range even without his glasses. Daniel had clearly never forgotten Jack's remark about glasses looking like weakness, so he had purposely practiced both shooting and running obstacle courses without them. It was probably hell, but he could do it. Practically blind, but knowing he externally looked more confident without his glasses on, Daniel continued into the apartment.
Daniel was a strange man.
Jack had thought that from the first moment they met. There was just something about how he was wired that wasn't like other people. Here he was, scared to death of the man in his apartment, and yet he now put himself at what Jack considered to be a critical disadvantage by removing his ability to see properly. If they hadn't already been in the apartment, Jack would have asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Thing was, Jack actually knew perfectly well what Daniel was doing. He was going to try and present himself in a position of power or authority, pretending to be confident. And, weirdest of all, he was going to try and resolve this situation without bloodshed.
A line from an old western that Jack had taken very much to heart came suddenly to mind: 'I do not need weapons to fight men who make war on children'.
Jack didn't expect that things would be going Daniel's way, and he strongly suspected he would have to take over to cover for Daniel, who seemed to be planning on using all of the courage he had at once, saving nothing for a more extended encounter. That was Daniel's way. He always threw himself whole-heartedly into everything he undertook, leaving himself no safety line and no easy way out once he was in. His method of moving forward always seemed to be to shut off his way to go back.
For his part, Jack really preferred to have a way out.
Again, Daniel halted so abruptly that Jack almost ran into him. Jack looked over Daniel's shoulder at the man he realized was sprawled on Daniel's couch. James Chianti was smaller than Jack had expected, and nowhere near as scary looking as Jack would've assumed. In fact, he looked really quite ordinary, with a forgettable sort of face and uninteresting haircut for his black hair, which was thoroughly graying. He was also, as it happened, wearing rather large, round glasses.
Jack's first thought was that maybe Daniel had been a little overly paranoid after all. Then he reminded himself how feeble Daniel had looked when they first met, with the glasses and the sneezing and the tripping over stuff and getting tangled up in things. And yet, though he'd lacked the wisdom to realize it at the time, Jack knew that even then Daniel was a little like a force of nature, he just sort of happened to you, and there was no stopping him when he decided on a course.
If this seemingly unimposing, bespectacled man was anything like him, small and harmless as he looked, there might be blood on Daniel's carpet yet.
With a slight twitch, as if turning on a power switch, Daniel moved forward. As he went down the stairs into the living room with deceptively easy movements, Daniel kept his eyes on what to him was probably nothing but a dark shape blending in with his couch. Chianti straightened slightly, but didn't get up. Jack hung back, seeing as Chianti had not noticed him yet.
But he found it hard to focus on Chianti because of what Daniel was doing.
Jack had seen Daniel do many imitations in attempts to communicate with peoples on other worlds who used languages he did not know. Daniel had been known to do impressions of chickens, airplanes and any other number of strange things to try and get his point across. Now he proceeded to do an impression of something far more elaborate and intimidating than barnyard fowl. Jack recognized the cadence of speech instantly, even though it had been years. Daniel was doing an impression of Ra, as he had sounded when he found the team from Earth had invaded Abydos.
In part, all Goa'uld bore resemblance to Ra. They were supremely confident to the point of being beyond arrogant, calm and relaxed in the presence of foes they saw as lesser beings. All Goa'uld had a fluid grace to their movements, but there was a particularly feline quality to the way Ra moved that marked him even among the Goa'uld as something other.
The shift in Daniel's way of moving and speaking momentarily alarmed Jack, his mind flashing back to Daniel's brief descent into a Goa'uld-like madness brought on by using the sarcophagus too often. Though it was not realistic, Jack had an instant's fear that Daniel could have somehow suffered a relapse. His performance was that perfect. Jack had to give the man credit, he could play the king as well as he could portray the slave, behave as both sinner and saint. While he probably could not fill the role of a thug, there was little else beyond his grasp. The fear had to be killing him, in fact Jack had seen it was doing just that, but the only thing he showed was a cool, almost indifferent anger towards the man who had broken into his home, invaded his life, and taken control of his present. For the first time, Jack wondered if Ra had been frightened when he was confronted by the Earthlings. Was it possible the outward calm was only an act?
"Shouldn't you be wasting away in a prison somewhere?" Daniel asked.
"You're a hard man to find, Danny," Chianti said, not rising from the couch.
Daniel's eyes narrowed slightly, bristling at the use of the familiar term that Daniel's parents had used when addressing him, and which Jack occasionally -without conscious intent- lapsed into calling him.
"You're avoiding the question," Daniel said, and his acidic, yet still somehow serene tone conveyed a second message of 'Don't call me that.'
"I'm out on good behavior," Chianti told him.
"I doubt that," Daniel responded, the quiet anger under his level tone reflected in his shuttered eyes.
Daniel had come to a stop in the living room. He stood looking down at Chianti, a cluttered coffee table between them. Jack recognized the object on top of the piles on the coffee table as Daniel's journal for Abydos. It was lying open and face down, and Jack knew seeing it must be driving Daniel up the wall, but the younger man gave no outward sign of even being aware of it.
After staring at Chianti for a moment, Daniel moved away, not back towards Jack, but the other side of the living room, where the large windows looked out on the street. Darkness was falling outside, but Chianti had turned on several lights in the apartment and so the effect of the setting sun was minimal. Jack, still an observer to this drama, wondered just what Daniel's game was.
Chianti had to crane his neck awkwardly to see Daniel, or else sit up. He chose the latter. Daniel, his back to Chianti, tilted his head slightly, looking at something above him. Jack couldn't see from his angle, but he guessed it was the wasp's nest which had been so fascinating to him before the mission.
"You came here for a reason," Daniel said, still looking at the nest, ignoring everything behind him.
Chianti was silent for several seconds, then finally said, "You've changed."
"What was it you expected to find here?" Daniel turned his head slightly, seeming to gaze at Chianti out of his peripheral vision Jack knew he didn't have, and continued in placid tones with just the barest edge of icy anger revealed beneath them, "Did you expect to find the boy you terrorized? A fragile shell of a person you could shatter with your presence? A child in a man's body, still afraid of the monsters that hide in the dark?" Daniel smirked slightly, then returned to looking at the wasp's nest, "Do you really believe you have that kind of power?"
The mannerisms were horrifically familiar, and wrong on Daniel, and Jack half-wanted to yell at him to stop it. But even if it hadn't been for Chianti's continued unawareness of him, Jack would still have held his tongue, morbidly fascinated by Daniel's performance. It had never occurred to him that Daniel might be a fine actor in addition to everything else, and he had the unsettling premonition that this would not be the last time Daniel would put his life on the line using this talent of his.
"I've thought about you a lot the last few years," Chianti ventured, clearly knocked off-balance by Daniel's behavior, "Every day, in fact."
"Funny," Daniel offered a flat, almost derisive laugh, his eyes again settling but not really settling on Chianti, "I haven't thought of you at all."
James Chianti looked at Daniel for a long, silent moment. During that time, Daniel didn't move, sensing he was being appraised. He remained fixed, pretending he could see Chianti perfectly, as if he were a cat watching a rodent, pretending not to see it until the prey wandered close enough for an easy kill. It was hard to think of Daniel as predatory, considering how well Jack knew him, but he actually looked pretty damned convincing.
Without wanting to, Jack half-wondered if the Daniel he thought he knew was the real one after all. He shook the thought off almost as soon as it surfaced. Daniel might be able to maintain a facade for a little while, but years of fighting side-by-side, escaping death by the skin of their teeth on nothing but determination and luck... you couldn't fake that. You couldn't pretend that. Jack knew Daniel. And because of that he knew his friend's nerve nearly failed him when Chianti got up and moved toward him. He saw Daniel's weight shift back, just for a split-second, as the instinct of fight or flight tried to assert itself, but Daniel caught it and swallowed it without breaking character. Had it not been so serious, watching the dark storm clouds of emotion gather in Daniel's sky colored eyes would have been funny.
Daniel watched Chianti approach as a bull might watch a lion, with distinct unease, yet a perfect awareness that he could kill the advancing predator at any moment.
Now he was standing close to Daniel, it was evident that Chianti was much shorter than Daniel was. James Chianti was a little wiry man and looked almost like a stick figure in his baggy clothing. Daniel, on the other hand, had developed very noticeable muscles by the regular physical training that was a required part of his job. Even though he was very physically fit and six feet tall, Daniel had a way of downplaying his height and musculature and generally looked very small standing next to almost anyone. But just now he was playing a creature out of myth, larger than life, and radiating power. He was much bigger than Chianti, assuredly much stronger.
Jack didn't know if either Daniel or Chianti was aware of it, because both seemed to be stuck in the past, locked in a moment in time when Daniel was the small one, the weak one. Could either of them see how different Daniel was now? Jack himself hadn't noticed how much Daniel had changed in just a few short years from the wimpy archeologist with the hay-fever and big glasses to the warrior he'd had to become in order to fight the Goa'uld. Daniel's original motivation had been to get his wife back, and Jack had feared he would leave SG-1 when she was killed. Instead he remained, seeming more stoically determined than ever to rid the galaxy of the System Lords for good.
Jack wasn't sure what drove Daniel now. It wasn't the desire for revenge, he knew that much. Anger like that would burn Daniel up from the inside, tear him apart and destroy him. But Daniel wasn't self-destructing. He wasn't out of control or out of his mind. One of those strangely wired parts of him was somehow able to cope with the devastating loss of Sha're, allowing him to hold himself together. Whatever piece that was held him together now.
Daniel turned to face Chianti more fully, in a way that made Jack almost expect to see his eyes glow. Of course they didn't, the flash in them wasn't light, it was anger. But that was just as visible to Chianti.
"You are different," Chianti observed, then seemed to notice Jack for the first time, "And who the hell is he?"
Daniel's glance fell on Jack, but he didn't immediately answer, so Jack decided to do it himself.
"I'm the maid," Jack replied, then took in the typical messiness of Daniel's abode and added, "It's my day off."
"Whatever you came here for," Daniel said, returning Chianti's attention to himself, his voice ice and expression stony but for the dark flashes of emotional lightning in his eyes, "forget it, and get out."
For a moment Chianti didn't move, as if he was not convinced of Daniel's sincerity. Suddenly the phone rang, making them all jump in surprise. Jack didn't realize it for a few minutes, but that phone call was the sound of the storm breaking.
Daniel locked eyes with Jack for a moment, and then brushed past Chianti as if he wasn't there. Chianti started to follow Daniel to the dining room where the phone was, but Jack stepped firmly into his path without a word. The death stare he leveled at the smaller man halted Chianti in his tracks.
Despite the fact that this was his home and so the caller probably knew who he was, Daniel identified himself by name when he answered the phone. Jack was too far away, and paying too much attention to Chianti, to hear the other side of the conversation, but it was almost immediately apparent that Daniel was speaking with someone at the SGC, probably someone relaying a message from Carter or Hammond by the sound of Daniel's side of the conversation.
"That seems bad," Daniel said after listening for a moment, and there followed a pause after which he responded with a cryptic, "Just one," and then another pause which ended with, "That's a terrible idea," and another pause, a sigh and, "We're on our way."
Daniel hung up, and Jack glanced over his shoulder. Daniel had his back to Jack, but his bearing suggested that the news at the other end of the line was the bad kind. After a moment, Daniel reached into the pocket where he'd put his glasses, took them out and put them on before turning around.
No longer was he playing Ra, and no longer was he soft-voiced as he'd been on the phone. Now he was the Daniel that Jack had seen a few times in the field, bold and determined, and knowing exactly what he meant to do. This was the Daniel that had boarded and blown up a Ha'tak along with the rest of SG-1. This was the Daniel that lurked beneath the surface, the only one Jack ever addressed, because it was the one which was real, while everything else was just a screen, a method of self defense.
Chianti seemed to sense the shift as well.
"Daniel?" Jack inquired, but Daniel ignored him for the moment because Chianti was edging away.
Chianti didn't appear confident anymore. He didn't like the way Daniel's moods shifted. And he didn't like the friend Daniel had brought with him. He didn't have power here, and he didn't like it.
But he wasn't given any time to react before Daniel brought out the M9 and leveled it at his head. Jack understood now why Daniel had put his glasses back on. Without them, he would have been forced to simply aim for center mass and hope he was right. With his glasses, Daniel could probably shoot a quarter at a hundred yards, or some other other impressive figure. In any case, he could not miss Chianti from across the room.
"Don't make me clean my rug," Daniel threatened, but Jack noted his finger was on the trigger guard.
Chianti stared at Daniel, his face going sheet-white. Anger and an end to patience blazed in Daniel's eyes as he stared back. It was obvious from Chianti's shocked expression that he had not anticipated Daniel being armed. Jack was now fairly certain Chianti hadn't found Daniel's M9 in the closet, otherwise he wouldn't have looked quite that surprised.
"Get out of my apartment," Daniel repeated.
This time Chianti obeyed.