Lodgecombing
by Komos



Daniel helped Jack put the last of the cartons out in the driveway for the shipping pickup on Monday. It should have been a team moment, Sam and Teal'c should have been helping, but they were already gone off to their separate futures; only he was still here, in the Springs, in the present, waiting on the Daedalus. He tried to believe there was closure in this. Ending his time at the SGC where he began it, alone with Jack in Jack's house.

Well, outside the house, at the moment. Two beers were left in the emptied fridge, for a last toast in the echoing space, but it wasn't quite time for that yet. Daniel stood looking at the rustic exterior, Jack's suburban lodge, and found it difficult not to see the quirky wooden structure as an extension of Jack himself.

He forced the oncoming metaphor to bend and morph into one that he could bear. A house was just a box, really. A place to keep things, including yourself, for a while. Both of them were good at boxes. The nomadic life of archaeology and the transient life of the military weren't that different. You got good at moving on short notice. You got good at packing up and moving on.

He wandered back inside while Jack fine-tuned the arrangement of charity-bound stuff in his truck so nothing would break on the ride across town. Shreds of fantasy drifted across his mind like mist, all the things he'd dreamed would happen in this house and never had. Real memories were darker, richer, more bitter, like smoke. The couch was gone, the chairs, the bed, the dining table, and with them all the things that had happened and not-happened in and on them.

For something to do, he made a last circuit of the rooms, checking behind doors and inside closets for anything Jack might have overlooked, anything he was so used to seeing in just that spot that he wouldn't notice it was there, and leave it behind.

He forced his mind to bend away from the thought that he was one of those things.

He didn't expect to find anything, so when he did -- a torso-shaped shadow in the bedroom closet that resolved, under his fingers, into a leather jacket -- he felt almost happy. Vindicated. As though he'd been of some use here after all.

He went to pull it out, but paused with his hands on it, struck by the feel. Worn smooth by years of constant wear, scored down one sleeve by a deep scratch, it felt like skin, scars and all. It was soft and supple; had Jack treated it, oiled it? Preserved it, over the decades? Daniel had never seen him wear it. Knit piping at the collar and sleeves was clean and unmatted and flexible, as no wool fibers that old had any right to be; but on the right sleeve it had started to fray and never been replaced. Cared for, but not repaired.

It was an artifact of Jack's past. On the left breast were two tiny holes; when he got his wings, was this the first place he pinned them? This rugged, casual jacket, not quite military, not quite civilian? Daniel almost leaned in to inhale the scent of it, brush it with his lips; he recognized his own touch as fondling, and pulled back with effort. Jack had taken pains to preserve this one article separate from the rest. The last thing he should be doing was smearing finger oils all over it, packing dust, bacteria.

"It's OK," Jack's voice said, from the doorway. He'd never lost his commando stealth, he'd never tolerated creaky floorboards in his perfectly maintained house, and in his soft old running shoes he'd come silently down the hall. "Go ahead. It's for you, Daniel."

Daniel blinked at it a few times, then looked puzzled inquiry over his shoulder.

Jack rolled his eyes and was across the room in three strides and shouldering past Daniel to sling the jacket off the hanger one-handed. "Here," he said, offering it, half gruff and half awkward. "It's loose on me now anyway. Had more muscle in the shoulders in my twenties."

Daniel backed up half a step, his longing to touch the skin of Jack's past again was so intense. "I ... Really, that's ... " He couldn't tear his eyes off it, or he couldn't raise his eyes to meet Jack's, or both.

"C'mon, Daniel," Jack said. "Ancient artifact. Right up your alley." When his smile didn't work, when Daniel still shook his head, he said, "Humor me, willya? At least see if it fits."

Daniel's mouth opened but no words came out; the net result of wariness and yearning was silence.

"Aw, for cryin' out loud," Jack said. "Daniel. Turn."

Daniel turned, spun slowly by the tone in Jack's voice. He felt the jacket lift up behind him like a shadow. He thought of sealskins and selkies, transformations and shapechangers. Jack said, "Arm," and he lifted his arm, and one sleeve slipped up over it, sheathing it in a buttery slide. "Other arm," Jack said, and he lifted it at the elbow, and the jacket tilted down and slid up and settled onto his shoulders.

Jack's hands adjusted the collar, then didn't fall away. Daniel felt their weight, the bone and flesh of them, through the second skin of the jacket. They weren't touching him. They were touching the jacket. But they stayed, firmed. Jack leaned just slightly closer.

"Why?" Daniel breathed.

"Because it's part of me," Jack said, quietly, right by his ear. "Because it's ... something. The only thing."

The only thing that could express what Jack could never say. The only thing Jack could think to leave him, the only thing that meant enough. The only thing he could touch Daniel with. Hold him with. The fit of it was an embrace. It warmed to his body heat, eagerly.

Overwhelmed, he cast desperately for something to say that wasn't what he was far too close to blurting. He caught a random thought, flung it out: "It looks like that jacket I wore back from the Rand Protectorate."

"Yeah," Jack said. Confirmation, not surprise. He'd known that. "It does." He paused, then said, "So, it's safe. So no one will ... " Daniel felt his shrug as a shift of pressure in his hands, through the layers between them. "If you want it," he said, faltering. "Kinda hoped you'd want it."

Daniel slid his hands into the silken pockets, pulled the jacket in close around him. "I want it," he said softly.

"So, it's yours," Jack said. Even more softly, he added, "Always was."

For a moment, neither of them moved. Daniel felt a tremor start deep inside him, didn't know if Jack could sense it. Suddenly, Jack spun him back around, one hand pushing and one pulling, then both sliding down, tugging the lapels together, checking the fit. Exactly the way he'd used to do, so many years ago, with Daniel's field jacket and tac vest, when they were new and bulky and ill-fitting and unfamiliar, when Jack was always settling them on him, adjusting them, when Jack's hands were on him all the time. Daniel shivered; he couldn't suppress it.

Jack squeezed his shoulders, hard, through the jacket and the years. "Keep you warm out there in Pegasus," he said. His smile was shy. His eyes were warm and pleased. "Good protection, too. You'd be surprised what a beating these things can take. They don't make 'em like this anymore." He cocked his head. "Little long on you."

"Couple of inches," Daniel acknowledged, without having to look, because that was the difference in their height. He flexed his shoulders a little, under Jack's hands, and saw Jack's eyes darken as Jack's hands rode the slide of muscle through leather. "You're right though, it's good in the shoulders."

Jack looked down, at where Daniel's fists were balled inside the pockets. "I don't want to let go, Daniel."

"I don't want you to," Daniel said. "So, this way you don't have to. I'll just wear this."

Wear Jack's love and Jack's protectiveness and Jack's memories and history snugged around him, known only to the two of them, a shared secret in plain sight.

It was so juvenile, so adolescent, that he almost laughed aloud. It was wonderful. It was the delight of the varsity jacket, the school ring, the pledge pin. He'd never engaged in those traditions; he'd never had a varsity jacket or a girl to wear it for him, he'd lost his school rings on digs and down drains, painstakingly careful with the most minuscule artifacts but unable to hang on to the little ephemera of his own life. He'd never gone to a prom, never felt his date shiver in her strapless gown in the June air, never put his suit jacket around her in surrogate embrace. This would never have occurred to him.

He smiled at Jack, suddenly, filled with a kind of innocent wonder.

Jack smiled back, but after a moment a soft hurt came into his eyes. "It's not enough," he said.

"Actually it is," Daniel said. Pain lifted from him, pain he hadn't let himself acknowledge enough to deny, pain he'd endured without examining it because that way lay only despair. "It really is, Jack. Thank you."

"Sure," Jack said, dropping his hands away at last, stepping back. He looked uncertain, covering it. "It's just ... you know. For the duration."

"I know," Daniel said. Because he did now.

It was a promise. It was a pledge. Wherever the next few years took them, however far they had to go, however much remained for them to do, eventually it would come time to hang the jacket up. In some other bedroom, no telling where -- what country, what planet, what galaxy -- beside Daniel's field gear and Jack's dress blues.

He believed in that day, suddenly, fervently. "Just tell me. When it's time. OK? Because I do, Jack. I always did." His words had no antecedent; they referenced nothing he or Jack had said aloud. What they answered had never been spoken, a question posed in gesture whose response had already been given in kind -- the tacit, tremulous query that had permeated the insubstantial atmosphere across galaxies and dimensions and years, collapsed at last into the tactile, tangible affirmative. But he smiled, and said them again: "I do."

^^^^^^^

end

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