Rounded with a Sleep
by Komos


"Suck me. Suck me. Harder."

He doesn't think he's saying the words out loud, but he can't tell, because it's a dream. They're not words he would ever say to anyone; he doesn't fuck verbally, he doesn't think in coherent articulations when he's getting off. But it's Daniel sucking him, and he's dreaming, and it's as much about the words as about what's happening to his body.

"Suck my cock, Daniel, suck me, suck me ... "

The word "cock" *is* his cock, becomes it, forms it full and throbbing inside the sweet wet heat of Daniel's mouth, which is longing and insistence and yearning and demand and god that tongue, that linguist's tongue, sex is the twenty-fourth language and "fluent" is a perfect, beautiful word.

Alone in his bed, in his empty rented house, Daniel wakes groaning, coming. He lies there for a long time, waiting for reality to realign. In a soft, vague slur, he says, "It's the twenty-fifth. If that counts, so does ASL."

He isn't sure what prompted that. Something in the dream. Third one like it in as many nights. He was shocked and deeply unsettled by what happened to Jack. He's frantic to get him unfrozen and cured and only just starting to understand that it might be a long time before they can do that, just starting to understand, a little bit, what it might have been like for the people he left behind when he Ascended. But he doesn't see why that should give him wet dreams about the guy every night.

Maybe it's metaphorical. Well, of course it's metaphorical. Symbol and association are the stuff dreams are made on. His days are spent in a bureaucratic morass. He and Sam and Teal'c aren't getting through it as well as they should. They need Jack -- headstrong, irreverent, cut-to-the-chase, take-no-shit Jack, seasoned military veteran Jack. Virile Jack. Masculine Jack. Powerful Jack. And so he dreams about the virile, masculine, powerful Jack he's longed for, in deepest secret, for almost nine years.

>>>>>>>

"Suck me. Suck me ... " It's an order. It's a plea, a sob. He's on his back, naked. He's arching up, trying to fuck the muscular throat. He's on his back, submissive, begging. The sheets in his fists feel intensely real, tearing under his dull, strong nails. His cock feels huge. In Daniel's mouth it feels powerful. Beautiful. Daniel's lips are satin, his tongue is drenched silk. He spreads his legs, inviting entry. He needs to be fucked. But there's only suction, friction, wet muscle working the head of him deeper and deeper, stroking him with every tight swallow, and it's good, it's so fucking good ...

"Jesus," Daniel gasps, waking, coming. Again. A whole week of this. He lies on his stomach, in the sticky dampness, cocooned in delicious postorgasmic warmth, but unmoored, no one to anchor in, keenly aware of his solitary body alone in the bed, the room, the house. The world, come down to it. He used to dream about Sha're this way -- dream that she was beside him, warm and luscious and alive, a few moments' respite from the horror of her loss, and then wake to the cold jolt of reality -- and he was never sure whether it was a gift or the cruelest torture. But those dreams were nothing like this. Nowhere near as real as this.

Nowhere near as hot as this. He has a pornographic imagination and no compunctions about using it to keep himself reasonably satisfied when he's not getting any, which is most of the time. But his dreams rarely cooperate. The subconscious has its own agenda, and the virtual realm of sleep has a flavor very different from conscious fantasy. This felt like both. Like the hottest daydream he could conjure to bring himself off in his own hand, but with the sense that it's happening to him, not willfully imagined. As though there's another will involved. Another sentience.

Another consciousness, desperately yearning. Deeply, hotly needy.

>>>>>>>

He arches on Daniel's fingers, begging with his body. Daniel kneels between his wide-spread legs, one shoulder dipped, the arm curled upward as though he's searching, reaching. Daniel's head is turned, face limned in shadow. Long fingers probe deep, tracing the contours of arousal. Daniel reads the Braille of desire with his fingertips. The pleading gland inside him swells into an aching throb. His anus mouths Daniel's fingers, trying to suck them deeper. He's so hungry for this. He's been hungry his whole life.

"Fuck me," he moans, in the words that aren't. "Put your cock in me. Daniel. Fuck me ... "

He almost sobs as he's turned, positioned, arranged, spread. Daniel strokes his hole with tender thumbs, squeezing and stretching, pushing into him, pulling him wide. Fingers knead the globes of his ass; thumbs press along the crack, spreading him, stretching the opening taut, exposing soft inner flesh. Daniel leans down to his upraised ass, bends down like someone at worship, and tastes him deeply, suckling and thrusting, hot and humid and straining. Saliva drips down and over his balls like slow tears. The broad wet flat of Daniel's tongue caresses him from perineum to tailbone as he lifts off, sensitizing tender, exposed skin, and it trembles at the first touch of velvet cockhead, the still surface of a silent pool shivering at the touch of a leaf.

In a slow, surging swell, he's breached, he's filled with blunt, rigid, throbbing flesh, more pressure than he can stand, more pain and sweetness than he can take, and Daniel is fucking him in long, slow, supple strokes, and virginity and buried longings are lost to him with all the days and moments of memory. Somewhere, in the frozen dark, stars burst and flare and die, a heat that he can almost touch, receding into unfathomable distance, and he's burning, melting, cleaved by fire, delved and plundered; he's full, almost full to bursting.

Daniel wakes still humping the sticky sheets. He groans and pulls the pillow over his head. "Please," he whispers. "No more."

He should be happy. He's getting off every night. Jack would tell him how lucky he was. But it's been weeks. He's exhausted. He doesn't understand what the hell is going on.

He's buried himself in work, clerical battles, the unending fight to keep the military from writing Jack off as a casualty of war, the brutal endless struggle to keep him a salient issue when all interest is centered on the international debate over the Antarctic outpost and gate operations are suspended again. He's worked back channels. He's got technical personnel, technically on stand-down, working long hours trying to figure out a safe way to revive Colonel O'Neill when they don't even have direct access to the stasis chamber. He gets almost no sleep, and when he does, he has these dreams.

He's done everything he can to keep from facing them. He's good at that. He's practiced at avoidance. "Denial" is an anagram of his name.

It isn't working anymore.

He had occasional erotic dreams about Jack for all the years they worked together, and sometimes, in his weaker, more desolate moments, masturbated to fantasies of him, sometimes even said Jack's name when he was coming. He's never kidded himself about what he wants or deluded himself that he could ever have it. He hasn't had a genuine wet dream since he was in junior high. If he's having them every single time he sleeps, it's only because he's exhausted and half-insane with the need to get Jack back.

Except it isn't. This is more than that.

He's been mindfucked six ways from Sunday. He's been trapped in virtual realities, put in thrall by a Goa'uld and raped, revived from cryonic suspension and told that eighty years have passed and his friends are dead. He's switched bodies with his teammates. Through Amaunet's ribbon device and Shifu's vision, he's experienced futures that never happened, lived weeks and years of alternative lives between one heartbeat and another. He's been corrupted by sarcophagus addiction and had an entire set of fabricated memories installed in his head to keep him docile and obedient in an underground power plant. He's drunk the hallucinogenic blood of Sokar. He was possessed by the uploaded personalities of an alien ship's crew and passengers. His dreams and memories were manipulated by Osiris. He's endured the schizophrenia induced by anti-Goa'uld nanites and the suicidal depression induced by an addictive alien light. He's gone into the hallucinatory, dreamlike shutdown induced by torture. And he's been Ascended, which was the greatest, strangest mindfuck of all.

He knows the difference between reality and dream, and he knows how it feels when they intersect and become, essentially, the same thing. For a year now, every time he wakes it's like descension all over again. That memoryless moment when the dream still fills the mind but can't be held, can't be kept. A wisp of overwhelming perception as impossible to grasp as smoke, or mist, or light.

There's something happening in these dreams. They're more than dreams.

They're more than his.

>>>>>>>

It's as if there are two Daniels. There's his past, behind him, and his future, in front of him, and he's the present, sandwiched between them.

What the one in front is doing hasn't happened yet. It's a promise of what could happen. It's potential incarnate. Maybe there's some of the conditional about it, too, and some of the subjunctive. Contrary-to-fact. He shouldn't comprehend grammatical concepts; Daniel will know, then, and he'll be outted. But Daniel has always known. Daniel played along with the dumb-colonel routine for years. Daniel knew him before he developed it. Daniel knows that it's a way of distancing himself from the intolerable crap that happens to them.

The past-Daniel knows it, the one behind him, the one fucking him. The one whose long hair falls forward, a liquid spill on the nape of his neck. The one whose cheek, pressed to the back of his head, is rounder, softer, younger. More open, which he knows though he can't see it; not yet chiseled by the years and the losses and the military rigor. The one whose body is slimmer, younger. More tentative, less sure that this is what he wants. Surprised to find him open. Surprised at the buttery ease with which his cock slid up Jack's ass, the tender heat it slides through now, the willingness.

He wants to tell him, It's a dream. Everything's easy in dreams. But that would be a lie. And he's too busy saying, "Yes, christ, yes Danny, fuck me." He doesn't really have a mouth, and if he did he wouldn't be making words with it, but he's not just thinking the words, either, because he doesn't have a mind anymore; there wasn't room for his. He was evicted. He's lost his mind, the way the dispossessed lose their homes.

"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me," he urges the past-Daniel, wishing and yearning for all the past they never had. Penetrate, he thinks; the word gets him intensely hot. "Deep. As deep as you can get." The past-Daniel is inside him, cock swelling huge, stretching his asshole as he circles with his hips, deep, intense anal stimulation. "Fuck me," he says, over and over again, "fuck me." The imperative is redundant; he's being deeply, beautifully fucked; but it is imperative, and there's sense in that. There's sense in the redundancy, too. Daniel has always been inside him. Daniel penetrated him nine years ago. He's only asking for what he already had, what he's already getting, because it feels so fucking fantastic to get it. He's never let anyone fuck him. Not even his wife, not even with her fingers, and that's a sad thing, because she was someone he should have let in. It wasn't a conscious choice. Daniel was in him before he knew it was happening. The entry a warm slide. So easy it took them both by surprise when they realized he was in.

The other Daniel is different. The Daniel that hasn't happened yet and never can. He can't reach for that Daniel in front of him. It's all he's wanted to do for years, but there are shackles on the hands he'd raise to grip the sturdy bones of those slim hips and impale that gorgeous ass on his weeping dick. They're old-fashioned shackles, medieval, barbaric, nothing the military has used for centuries; they're a dragging weight on his arms, and he knows he can't break them.

But that Daniel pushes down onto him, or will. That Daniel takes him in, clenching on him, grinding on him. It's good. It's so good. It's the best thing he's ever felt in his life, the hot inside of Daniel, all muscle and need, sweet asshole trembling around the base of his shaft.

He's a Jack sandwich. The past thrusts into him, smooth slick waves of pleasure and memory and love and pain. He thrusts into the future, trembling on the brink, never able to push over into the all-consuming now of climax. The present is eternal. It will always be like this, the past thrusting him up hot and aching into the future. The Daniel he's always had pushing him again and again and again into the Daniel he'll never have, the release he'll never know.

"I've gotta come," he moans, pleading. "Christ, fuck, please make me come ... "

"I'm trying," Daniel sobs into the pillow, pelvis thrusting into the bed. I'm trying, I'm trying. I don't know how ...

He clenches, and comes, dream waking into fantasy as he imagines that the pressure in his ass is Jack's cock; he comes with his hips bucking upward, trying to work Jack deeper inside him so that his orgasm will trigger Jack's. But the pressure is imaginary. There's nothing but his own muscle contracting on itself. Jack is gone; upon each waking he dissipates into a mist of memory and desire and deepest, steamiest dream, cooling and dispersing into nothing, into void. Daniel is alone. He can't bring Jack with him. He can't make Jack come.

>>>>>>>>

They get the go-ahead for Antarctica, he starts packing, and they pull the rug out from under him. Again. Inside, he's screaming in frustration. Outside, he's calm. He jumps at the chance to go to Hala, to petition the Asgard who've been stonewalling them, to talk to somebody who can do something, but they confine him and his bloody fucking expertise to Earth with the most manipulative, compelling argument they could possibly pull out of their hats: If their mission fails, he's Jack's last hope.

Some hope, he thinks, as the days push into a week. Fucking his brains out every night in my dreams and sitting on my highly educated ass all day.

He's worse than useless.

>>>>>>>>

Daniel's riding him, palms on his flanks, every thrust a liquid ecstasy, and it's not enough. Deeply, beautifully, thoroughly fucked isn't enough.

He doesn't want to know how Daniel got so good at this. He doesn't want to know what he knows about Daniel now, what it means about what he could never have had. He didn't know what he was missing. Now he does. Now he has it, and it's not enough.

He knows that Daniel's holding back. He knows that Daniel can push him closer than this.

"Harder," he gasps. "Faster. Deeper." Words he's never said in his life, never been in a position to say. When he thrusts his ass back, hard, onto Daniel's cock, his dream muscles are awkward, spastic. It's all backwards. He's driving in reverse. He isn't even doing the driving.

He's never had to beg for what he needs.

"God damn it, Daniel, fuck me. Fuck me raw, you son of a bitch."

Daniel's heavy, muscled body is a coiled spring, an explosion waiting to happen. He digs bruising fingers into the soft hollows of Jack's hips and jerks them back hard, jamming Jack's ass onto his dick. Three stuttering strokes followed by a hard shot home, three sharp jabs into the prostate and a jarring slam in to the hilt, and then he stops playing around, then he's fucking Jack in earnest, harder, deeper, faster, and it hurts, jesus fuck it hurts, but it's so good, so deep, so close ...

He can feel Daniel lose control of his thrusts, he can feel him shake into helpless overdrive. He's been there; he knows the moment when vicious, willful fucking kicks over into freefall, when orgasm shoves you into the back seat and all you can do is watch yourself spasm into climax. He knows because he's always been the one to do the fucking. He knows because he's been a passenger in his own body since his brain was commandeered. He knows because Daniel is inside him, ripping past barriers of flesh, raw scraped skin across raw scraped skin, burning and pumping and tearing and slamming him hard enough to jolt his bones apart. They're bonded by blood and pain, and Daniel is twisting his nipple and stripping his dick and biting straight down into his spine, and even agony isn't enough to push him over, and Daniel is losing it.

"Not yet, you fucker, don't you shoot before me, don't you fucking dare -- "

Daniel wakes yelling, teeth in the sopping pillow, pounding the mattress with his fist, still bucking so hard in orgasm that he can hear the twang of bedsprings, deep rusty metallic protest, like the sound coming out of his chest, from lungs and throat abraded by shouts. He slams his hands flat and pushes up, still spurting wildly, then collapses onto his face. It jams his still-hard cock at a bad angle and he bucks again as if he'd been kicked, then subsides into a twitching heap.

He moans Jack's name, a dry, painful rasp. His fluids soak the bed, tears and snot and sweat and come and spit; his body is an ache of dehydration. This has to stop, he thinks. I can't take this anymore. Then he thinks that it won't stop until they get Jack free, or one of them is dead. His subconscious won't let go of this. It's gone beyond his control.

After a while, he drags over to the edge of the mattress and gropes in slow motion for his water glass. He's afraid he'll knock it down, so he elbows up, peers at it, and dimly registers the luminous blue numbers in the clock radio behind it. 7:53. Shit. He never sleeps this late.

Shit. He's late. System lords. Message. Request for parley. Neutral location. Escort back. 0900. Weir can't handle them on her own.

He hauls himself up to shower and dress and go in to the mountain to do what he can.

>>>>>>>>

Let go, Daniel's body says. Easy. Shhh. Let go. Let me.

He only wants to be filled now. Spread, stretched, plugged, full. He wants to come, he needs to come, he's dying to come, and he's begging Daniel for it in long, sobbing moans ... but he has what he wanted, this was what he wanted, from Daniel and for years before him. Penetration. Pressure. A thick, meaty cock up his ass and a gentle sentience behind it, rocking it into the sweet spot, sliding it around inside him, stroking away the itch he's had so long he almost managed to forget what it was for.

He wants to feel Daniel unload into him. He wants to feel the heavy cock pulse against the hypersensitized insides of him, he wants his intestines bathed in come. He wants to climax on that orgasm, suck Daniel off with his ass. He wants to come so badly he's pleading for it, writhing under Daniel, squirming. He's wanted it for so long that he thinks it's a lock no key can ever turn.

He's starting to think that that might be OK. He's lived through a lot of kinds of torture. For torture, this is damned sweet. He can live through this. He's willing. And if he comes, it will all end.

He never, ever, ever wants this to end.

Daniel is starting to think he understands what's going on.

Jack's powers manifested much sooner the second time he took the Ancients' upload, and doubly strong. Before he went into stasis, he had supernatural healing powers. He also had, and has, Daniel believes, the potential for Ascension. He always had the human potential, but he rejected it, unable to release the burden of his sins. He always had the genetic potential. Now he has the knowledge -- but with his mind coopted by the repository, there isn't enough of him to realize it. He can't effect his own salvation. He can't Ascend. Probably he wouldn't if he could.

What he can do is receive. In the deep coma of stasis, his consciousness is free to be touched. In sleep, Daniel's touches it. Because some quality of Ascension still clings to him, exists within him; because he's not as fully moored to his body as he was, and in sleep the moorings slip free. Because every waking is like descension all over again, which means that each sleep is like a little Ascension.

Not full Ascension. Not much Ascension. But enough. Enough for his spirit and his consciousness and his self to touch Jack's across the gulf.

He doesn't always remember the dreams clearly. But the sense of them remains. The brush of Jack's touch. The need. For a while, while he sleeps, Jack isn't alone in his cold isolation. While he sleeps, he can keep Jack company. Maybe even keep him sane. Maybe even keep him alive. So that when the unflagging labors of his waking hours pay off, there will be a Jack to retrieve. A Jack still inhabiting the frozen body when they find a way to eject the Ancients' database from it.

He comes, and Jack can't, because his body is warm and alive in his bed, and Jack's is shut down in stasis. Orgasm is a symbol, and "coming" means "coming home," coming back to consciousness. In their dreams, he can't fuck Jack back to consciousness. In their dreams, when he comes, he wakes up. It's for the best: if Jack broke through the stasis back to consciousness, he'd die. But it's deeply frustrating to leave him like that. It's deeply painful to wake with that plea still ringing in his bones.

He'd like to lucid-dream, but he was never any good at that. He'd like to remember the dreams better. He'd like to enjoy having his heart's desire while it lasts. But if he can't do any of those things, it's only fair, because Jack can't come.

Jack wouldn't tell him how lucky he was to be getting so much in his sleep if he knew that it was Jack he was getting off on.

However subconsciously, however involuntarily, he's imposing his own longings on Jack. He hopes that when they get him back, if Jack remembers anything he'll remember the loving touch of a human soul. He'll be pretty pissed if he remembers all the fucking. Even if he did indulge in that kind of sex, he'd be a textbook top. Daniel doesn't think he'd appreciate even a dreamlike memory of penetration.

But in the dreams, he loves it. He begs for it. Daniel isn't above taking pleasure in that. Entering Jack is a profound expression of the connection he feels. But it's only a way to get closer to him. It matters more, to him, that in the dreams Jack loves it, and accepts it, because Daniel is the only person he's ever let in. The metaphor is more important to him than the virtual experience. Jack is more important to him than sex.

In his dreams, he remembers Sha're, the silky arch of her body, the dark spill of her hair, the wicked fullness of her smile, and he remembers her disappointment, her humiliation when they failed and failed to make a child in all that year of passionate nights. In the dreams, in the mind-meld intensity, he remembers Sara, Jack's Sara, rolling and laughing with him in bed, he remembers exhilarating happy lovemaking and athletic sex, he remembers the gulf that opened between them as the years passed and his soul charred and the words he'd use to cry to her for help were classified. In the dreams, their dreams, he remembers and then forgets again the torture of Ascended sharing -- the marvel, the ecstasy of it collapsing into futility because none of the other Ascended were Jack.

In the dreams, while they last, it is Jack.

If he could choose to, he thinks sometimes, he'd never wake up.

>>>>>>>

They lie wrapped around each other, a sublime blending of bare flesh that's more profound than fucking would be. He wants to come, but he wants this more. Coming would be good, but this is better. Orgasms end, but this is forever.

Or it can be. Or it should be. Or it should have been.

There are no clothes. No barriers. There's nothing between them, not even the mounting drive to climax -- after a while, not even flesh, because he can't tell his own from Daniel's.

He'd like to be safe. He isn't safe; they aren't safe; they'll never be safe; life isn't safe. Death might be safe, but life is better. This is better.

He says, "Daniel," and the name, the word, separates them just that little bit, so that he can feel all the sweet warm length of lithe muscle and skin. Remember life. Remember flesh, so that he won't drift loose and be lost on the void's motionless winds. There's danger out there. There's forgetfulness, dissipation, annihilation. From that, at least, he's safe, so long as Daniel is beside him.

"I love you," he says. "Daniel. I love you." Maybe he doesn't really say that; "love" is a weak word, a dilute shadow of his intent, not nearly enough, and he knows he's communicating what he means, he knows that Daniel gets it. If Daniel gets it, he must not be using words. Words are insufficient, and he's no good at them anyway, even though he's a lot better than he lets on, and even though Daniel knows that. He presses tight to the strong, beloved body, and feels Daniel slide inside him, effortlessly, because he's been inside him all along, and it isn't even fucking anymore. It's bliss. It's heaven. It's perfect union.

>>>>>>>>

When Sam and Teal'c force the Asgard ex machina, when fate cuts them the break they've been looking for, when Thor brings Jack out of stasis and says that he's "interfacing with the Daniel Jackson," for a moment Daniel is stunned speechless, because yeah, that's what's been happening.

Then he gets what Thor means -- an interface between Ancient Jack and the ship that Thor named after him -- and he bites down on pain, because it's over now. If Jack lives -- and he has to live, the same as Sam has to live, he won't accept any other outcome -- the Ancient powers will be gone and they'll both go back to dreaming in private. They'll both go back to dreaming alone.

He doesn't have time to wallow. There's a crisis. There's never time to wallow. There's always a crisis.

Jack doesn't remember anything after having his head sucked -- the phrasing stops Daniel's breath, but only for an eyeblink, it was a metaphor, a sexual metaphor in a dream, and then Jack is finishing with "by that danged Ancient headsucker," and then he's wondering if that was the origin of the metaphor, if it wasn't his own longing at all, if oh my god it was a fucking pun -- but the ordinary memories will come back once the shock wears off. He'll remember escaping the planet, he'll remember doing the crossword in Daniel's office and being a cranky pain in the ass, he'll remember the trip to Teonas. He won't remember the dreams. Daniel barely remembers the dreams; he barely remembered them moments after he woke up.

But he does pause in surprise when Jack looks up and says, "And something about ... twins?" Because he'd forgotten that one dream in which it had been Jack inside him. It hadn't been Jack's doing; he'd pushed himself onto Jack's erection. But just before he came, just before the dream ended, he'd twisted around, the surge of climax impelling him to try to look into Jack's eyes, and he'd seen a shadow behind him, like a glimpse into a mirror in low light. A shadow of himself, of who he used to be, young and earnest and stubborn and bereaved and eager and yearning ...

In the next eyeblink, the rest of it is gone. It's only a shred of memory of something that never happened. Jack's got that demented deadpan look, which means he's probably making it up on the spot; and if he isn't, he's probably remembering something he dreamed when Daniel wasn't there, during these last hours when they were fighting to save him, some ordinary Jack dream of fantasy sex with identical women.

He puts it out of his mind; they have to figure this weapon out, they have to go get Sam. And they do that, and for a moment, when they first get her back, there's no one in the universe but Jack and Sam, staring at each other. It's the stunned mutual recognition of two people who'd thought they'd lost each other for good. They're comrades, teammates, they're entitled to that. But Daniel feels a craven stab of envy. Possessiveness. He was the one Jack reached out to from his frozen isolation, but Sam is the one Jack looks at Like That.

He lets it go. It's juvenile. It's pointless. Jack reached out and Daniel was the only one capable of reaching back. It doesn't invalidate the bond between them. It only means what he already knows: that what he wants from that bond, for real, isn't something he can ever have.

They have him back. They have Sam back.

He haunts the infirmary while they recover. He brings games, treats; ribbing him is Jack's favorite entertainment, so really he brings games and treats for Sam, and it's his presence he offers for Jack's amusement. They're a team again, for a while. Two of them have been through hell. They do what they always do after trauma; they band together, and move on.

There's plenty to do in the mountain. Decisions are being made about the Antarctic outpost, the future of the SGC, oversight and mandates. A lot of Daniel's time is taken up with bureaucracy and diplomacy. He doesn't ask to be notified when Jack is cleared to go home, and so he doesn't know that Jack left until he drops by for a visit and finds Sam by herself. What Fifth did to her will take longer to heal than what the Ancient stasis chamber did to Jack. He hangs out with her for a while, then goes back to his office until quitting time.

At five o'clock, his phone rings.

"Jackson."

"You copied my phone messages to DAT so the buffer wouldn't overflow. You cleared out the stale food and stocked the place. You kept it aired. You kept the pipes from freezing. You trimmed the shrubs and mowed the lawn. You brought the mail in. You paid the bills."

"You're welcome." He hears his own voice, dry, warm, almost a gentle chastisement; it's the same way he said "I told Sam I wouldn't help you," the last time he talked to Jack on the phone, before all of this.

"I didn't thank you. I just said it was you."

"Yes." He hesitates, then adds, despite the weight of double meaning, "It was me."

"It's 1703. You're done for the day."

"I'd be gone right now if my phone hadn't, you know, rung."

"So leave. I'll see you here in half an hour."

"Uh ... " Did they make plans? Did Jack say something like when I get out of here and ballgame or barbecue, was he in a dreamworld, acknowledging by rote?

"Half an hour, Daniel."

The connection cuts out.

Jack opens the door as he pulls into the driveway beside the truck he's been starting every few days. This house has always felt like home to him, more than his own loft, certainly more than the house he's renting now. Jack built the house himself; it's an extension of him. Coming here to look after it made it familiar in a different way, a Jackless way. Seeing Jack in the doorway now is like seeing a ghost. He feels a moment's vertigo, as though this is a dream of his own longing. He stood sometimes imagining Jack on the sofa with his feet up flicking bottle caps across the room, imagining Jack on the deck incinerating shell steaks, imagining Jack standing rumpled at the door the way he always did when someone dropped by, not quite concealing his annoyance, reluctant to let them past the threshold. Jack is standing there now, and for a moment it's hard to trust that it's real, he's gotten so used to the visions that were only wishes.

Jack gestures him in, closes the door behind him. He has the sour look he gets when he's uncomfortable. He doesn't say a word. Not knowing what else to do, Daniel goes into the living room, as far as the chair by the fireplace, and turns.

"How much do you remember?" Jack says.

A dozen answers cross Daniel's mind. How tired he is of hearing that question. How he doesn't know what Jack's talking about.

He sighs, and sinks down into the chair, resting his elbows on his knees. "Enough," he says.

Jack nods. He doesn't sit down. "Do you remember anything I said to you?"

Daniel blinks, frowns slightly. "You never said anything."

A stillness comes on Jack. "You don't remember me saying anything," he says, a wary prompting.

"No," Daniel says, slowly. "You never said anything." He can't force his eyes up to Jack. He looks down at the area rug, through his dangling hands. "There weren't any words. Which was sort of weird, since I'm kind of a, you know, kind of a wordy person." He frowns again, curiosity driving him to look up, although he can't quite make eye contact. "You thought you said things?"

"Yeah." Jack sits down at the far end of the sofa. Leans forward a little, almost mirroring Daniel's position. "Listen, Daniel ... I don't think I'd have made it. Without that. I, ah ... " He winces, swears softly. "You want a beer or something? Coffee? Pop?"

"That's OK." Daniel doesn't say I won't be here long enough to drink it. He doesn't say You're welcome.

Jack looks to the side. His rugged profile is chiseled, hard. "I know it wasn't just a dream. I'm not gonna say something stupid like it was just a dream, it didn't mean anything." He sighs harshly, cocks his jaw. The "but" is so loud he doesn't need to say it. Too cliched even for him.

Daniel becomes aware of how they're positioned in the room. The same places they sat the first night he was back on Earth. When he came here after Jack went undercover to bust the rogue NID operation, they switched places, him on the couch, Jack in the chair. The last time they were both in this room, it had been him on the couch and Jack in the other chair. It runs through his head like a chess game, the configuration of pieces shifting, all his previous visits here, all the conversations and non-conversations. He can rarely beat Jack at cards; he's too cautious, too cerebral, and Jack's too lucky. He's never had to let Jack beat him at chess. Jack is a consummate tactician, born to it, trained to it. He pretends he's hopeless against Daniel's genius, but he wins as often as Daniel does, and most often it ends in a draw. They've had each other in check for years. The pieces can move only in the ways they're allowed to move. It's always the same board.

He tries to say We're OK, Jack. Because this is the we're OK conversation. But they're not OK. Jack winces deeply, rubs his face, and Daniel's belly goes cold. Maybe he did save Jack's life, or Jack's sanity, or Jack's awareness. Maybe he massaged and turned and stimulated Jack's consciousness the way you would a comatose body. Maybe Jack's mind, or self, would have atrophied if not for the dream. But the bottom line is that there was fucking, and Jack remembers it, and the comfort isn't going to matter.

Jack is taking a deep breath. Daniel's chest fills in reflexive sympathy.

"I didn't know," Jack says. "About you. Me, since I was fourteen, fifteen. Nothing I could do about it then. Nothing I can do about it now."

Daniel's lowered gaze snaps up. He doesn't raise his head. He stares at the hallway steps for a long time. Then he looks at Jack. Jack's eyes turn to him on a blink, hard and sharp. Bird-of-prey similes drift across Daniel's mental skyscape. He wonders if he'll dream of raptors tonight, hooked and taloned. Cruel, rapacious eagles sent by the gods he's toppled, beaks smeared with his viscera, the unyielding rock under his back, no Chiron to redeem him because he was Chiron, too, and he failed to make the trade.

All I ever wanted to do was fly, Jack told him once. Another time, he said, The Air Force had the planes I wanted to fly. Those two sentences form the entirety of what Daniel knows about Jack's childhood and adolescence. He's built a construct around it, vaguely connected images of a scrappy, tousle-headed, sandy-haired boy staring out a schoolroom window at the sky, listening to the faraway drone of crop-dusters, itchy to be away at the local airfield soaking up whatever the old-timers will show him, or down in the back meadow remote-controlling little doped balsa-wood biplanes; lying in his bed with the history of aviation suspended above him, swaying gently in the shadows, World War I and World War II aircraft he modeled lovingly and painstakingly after encyclopedia pictures, or ordered from some catalogue, the hours on his bike delivering papers to save enough, the weeks of waiting for the package to arrive, the silent, private rapture as he parted the brown paper to reveal the fierce, garish illustrations on the box. With scant exception, Jack has flown nothing but a simulator in all the years that Daniel has known him. They paid him more to jump out of planes than they did to fly them.

Or maybe he wasn't as good a pilot as he was a soldier, and they deployed him according to his aptitude, because it didn't matter what he loved.

"I understand," Daniel says, although he didn't until now. He doesn't berate himself for not seeing it. He doesn't feel surprise, or feign it. A deep relief passes through him, the word rape articulating itself only in its passing, the concept he never let himself touch directly, moot now. If it was more than comfort for Jack, if it was virtual consummation he would never permit himself in reality, then ... good. Good. Two birds with one nonexistent stone.

"You can, though." Jack's looking away again, but Daniel feels the focus of peripheral vision on him, the focus you keep on a grisly wreck as you drive by -- cringing reluctance and irresistible fascination. "You do."

"I have," Daniel allows, quietly, carefully.

Jack nods, as if he'd reached to stroke the razor edge of that wreck as he passed, because it was the only way to find out whether it was as sharp as it looked, as if he had only himself to test it on. "Yeah," he says. "OK."

Daniel bites down on a hot, surging flood of words. What kind of sadomasochistic jerkoff is this, Jack? Yeah, I've fucked a lot of guys in my life. I've done a lot of things you don't know about. Whole veins of activity those data miners in Intelligence never hit, things you won't find in any dossier, they should hire an archeologist for those background checks sometime, we know how to dig stuff up. I've fucked a lot of guys, and Sam's the one you want, and we've been tearing each other's livers out every day for most of a decade and why should this be any different? Ranting isn't surveillance-safe. Venting is pointless. To live is to suffer, and the only solution to the problem of life is to suffer with courage. The Norse didn't need the Asgard to teach them that. The Norse were human.

"So we done?" he says, just shy of getting up. They're so far from done that the distance defies measure, but it doesn't matter, it will never matter, there is nowhere they can speak freely about this and they wouldn't if there were. They'll never be done. What you love doesn't matter.

"Looks that way," Jack says.

Daniel rises from the chair. Jack pushes off his knees to rise from the sofa. The last time Daniel was here, he moved the coffee table away from the sofa so that he could sit with his legs stretched out. Jack hasn't moved it back, and so both it and Jack block his path to the door.

Jack's face is impassive, but his eyes are wide and wild. He looks the way he did when the organism from 353 had control of him and was saying "He wishes to live" with Jack's mouth and Jack's breath while Jack's eyes were staring straight at Daniel. As though he's still locked in the control of something older and stronger than he is, something he can't fight -- or chooses not to.

The intensity of Jack, the intense physicality of real Jack back in the real world, is almost more than Daniel can stand. The room pulses with Jack's heartbeat, whispers with Jack's breath; the heat of Jack's skin is like a sound carried to him by molecular displacement, washing over him like surf.

The world is only as real as his perceptions of it, a construct of the senses; the dream was no less real than the world, time is infinite and malleable and only perceptually linear, and the dream exists inside him, concurrent, never-ending. In the dream, Jack writhes and pleads and arches underneath him; in the dream, desire and adoration are as tangible as touch, love and longing are scent and flavor. He knows how Jack would taste if he stepped up to him, took his mouth; he knows how Jack would smell if he sank to his knees and pushed his face into Jack's crotch.

He's so hard that his dick throbs with every surge of his pulse. He may erupt down the leg of his pants just from the rub of walking from here to the door.

"I can't," Jack says. His voice is a raspy whisper. "I can't, Daniel." Daniel slips, lets some of the pain show on his face, or in his eyes; or maybe he looks like he's going to argue, or maybe it's just because he inhales, he doesn't know, but Jack is saying, "It's not open to debate."

"Afraid I might talk you into it?" Daniel says, in his dry, customary voice, as the world collapses into the dead familiar dullness of can-never-be, and the dream recedes like a tide, leaving him on the dry shore of Jack's living room, next to the chessboard, where nothing changes.

Jack's eyes are agonized, because he's not afraid. "Yeah."

Daniel shifts forward and drags the coffee table back to its usual position, out of his way, because it's what he can move. Then he steps around it, and up to the door, and leaves Jack in the house that Jack built.

>>>>>>>>

"Daniel?"

"Jack?"

"Daniel?"

"Jack."

"You're talking."

"I do that a lot."

"Not here."

Daniel looks around, in that sudden way he has, as if someone had called his name from somewhere back over his right shoulder. "I don't?"

There's nothing to see. There's no sofa, no chair, no table, nothing but them. "I'm dreaming this. It's the dream again."

"It can't be. You're not in stasis anymore." Before Jack can answer, Daniel gives a yeah, yeah nod and adds "Toto" to show that he gets it.

Indignant, Jack says, "It really happened, y'know."

"It did not. Some flying piece of tornado debris hit her on the head and it was a dream she had while she was knocked out."

"It did too! She really went to Oz, Daniel."

Daniel is looking down at himself, smoothing hands over his thighs, giving a squeeze. In a weak whisper, he says, "Did not ... "

Daniel jolts awake. His heart is pounding so hard there's a roar in his ears. His bedroom is silent and dark. His arms are flung over his head, knuckles brushing the pillowcase. He can still feel his own thighs under his hands, solid flesh and muscle and bone, the friction of denim.

He looks over at the phone. One call will tell him. He won't even have to ask. Jack will see his name on Caller ID. If it's yes, the ringing phone will ask the question for him, and Jack won't even say hello, he won't even wait for Daniel to say "Did you...?" -- he'll pick up and say "Yes." If it's no, he'll snatch up the phone and bark "What?" or "This better be good" or "For cryin' out loud."

He keeps looking at the phone. He doesn't sit up. When it rings, his whole body jerks, as if the sound waves were a blow.

He whispers, "Yes," and reaches for the receiver.

>>>>>>>>
end


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