Fic: Tilting at Windmills
Jun. 12th, 2003 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galaxysoupFANDOM: Stargate SG-1
RATING: PG-13
CATEGORY: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
SUMMARY: A little character study on Jack and Daniel. Could be seen as pre-slash but was not originally intended as such.
SPOILERS: Crystal Skull, Serpent's Lair
TILTING AT WINDMILLS
He loved to watch Jack sleep.
Daniel didn't sleep much; he never had. His brain moved too quickly, was always too busy to just rest. So he'd wake up at odd hours of the night/morning and lie there and think until his brain slowed enough to let him sleep again.
They were offworld now. It was Sam's watch. If he squinted, he could make out Sam's silhouette against the nylon wall of the tent, outlined by the tiny flickering campfire. Every so often, she got up and walked the perimeter, and Daniel would close his eyes and try to place her by the tiny indistinct sounds she made as she walked: a crunch of leaves here, a jingle of metal there. And then she would come back to the fire to sit.
Some nights he got up and joined her, or Jack or Teal'c or whoever was on watch. But they tended to worry when he didn't sleep, and gave him disapproving looks when he inquired after coffee at 3 am, so mostly he just stayed in the tent and pretended.
Now he was watching Jack sleep.
Jack's face was transformed when he slept. He looked peaceful, and still - two things he almost never was while awake. His face evened out. He didn't look younger, exactly... but he didn't look as old, either.
Daniel watched the diffused firelight play across Jack's face. Jack was on his side, facing Daniel, so all he could see was the curve of Jack's cheek, the subtle ridge of his cheekbone, the irregular tufts of his hair, the strong line of his jaw. One of Jack's hands stuck out of the sleeping bag in Daniel's direction, palm up, fingers curled.
Daniel watched Jack, memorizing every detail of his form, ingraining every nuance into his memory. Jack was warmth and strength, solid and real. It might be a memory Daniel would have to hold onto later when Jack was gone and so he concentrated hard.
He had to be careful when he watched. Sometimes the need to touch and be touched rose in him, so strongly it made his hands shake and his breath falter. The urge to reach over and touch Jack, Jack who was so full of life and action and so unlike Daniel whose mind was more real to him than his body. Sometimes he started to doubt he could be solid at all, not with Jack so close and so full of life. He felt like a pale shadow, wispy and ethereal, only held to Earth by a tenuous grasp on the physical world. At night sometimes he could feel that tether start to slip and he was afraid of losing hold. He'd spent several days in the SGC as a ghost, and knew what it was like to be pure thought. He had no desire to do that again.
He'd actually touched Jack, once; reached out before he could stop himself and rested his fingers on Jack's wrist above the pulse point, just for a minute. He'd felt the thrum of Jack's blood, the warmth of his skin, and something had risen in him, almost choking him with its intensity. He'd drawn his hand back, scared of feeling that much all at once, and Jack had woken up, whispering "Daniel? You okay?" into the darkness. Daniel had lain still, scarcely daring to breathe, and after a moment Jack had rolled over and gone back to sleep. Daniel had spent the rest of the night shaking in his sleeping bag, staring at Jack's back. He had wrapped his arms around his stomach and curled up, as if that would keep him from exploding into millions of tiny bits all over the tent.
It was nights like that when his mental scrapbook came in handy. He could close his eyes and pull out all his specially constructed memories: Jack sleeping, Jack looking through his telescope, that wonderful/infamous Spacemonkey hug. He remembered the feel of Jack's arms around him, the heat of Jack's body pressed against his, the strength of Jack's arms that he'd been so tempted to sink into, because he knew those arms would never let him come loose from the world.
He wondered, sometimes, what Jack would do if Daniel just turned to him one day and asked for a hug. He'd come close, more than once, usually during the darker parts of his life when it would have been an acceptable request, although sometimes the need came upon him for no reason. They'd be standing at the base of the ramp maybe, waiting for the Gate to dial up, and Daniel would remember that it had been here that Jack had hugged him. Or on an alien planet he'd look to one side and see Jack, his strong face bathed in sunlight, and yearn for the warmth.
But something always held him back. He supposed it was the stubborn independence he'd had to cultivate after the death of his parents, because once he knew Jack would hold him here he'd maybe stop being able to hold himself.
He couldn't depend. Not like that. Not again.
The need rose suddenly in him, swelling like a viscous tide, cutting off his air supply. He hugged himself hard and grasped at his memories, drawing them tightly around him. He knew he was shaking. He could feel Jack's presence like a bonfire, calling him like a moth to a flame but he couldn't give in, not now and not ever.
He heard Jack stir and he clutched himself even more tightly, trying to keep from making any noise that would wake Jack up but he couldn't seem to stop shaking. He could hear a miniscule swish swish of nylon, and knew he was trembling.
"Daniel? You okay?"
He concentrated on breathing, even breaths that sounded okay but he couldn't fill his lungs for some reason. He could hear a weird sort of harsh panting in the tent and wondered where it was coming from.
"Daniel?"
He heard Jack's sleeping bag move and felt Jack's hand on his shoulder, the touch startling him so much his whole body jerked involuntarily away from the warmth. He could feel the fire on his shoulder, a single patch of skin that was suddenly more real than any other place on his body. He dug his fingers into his ribcage, trying to replace that sensation with another, any other, as long as it was of his own making.
"Shit, Danny..."
He heard Jack move again, and the hand returned to his shoulder, tracing a path across his shoulder blades until he was held in an awkward sort of half-embrace. There was a little tug, and Jack was pulling him close, wrapping him in an hug that was home and love and safety and strength and reality and it was too much, he couldn't handle it, and he felt something hot and wet trailing down his cheeks and nearly died of embarrassment when he realized he was crying.
"Sorry," he gasped. "Sorry."
Jack's hands were soothing, rubbing patterns against his skin. His head was tucked under Jack's chin and he could hear Jack's heartbeat, feel Jack's breath whispering through his hair.
"It's okay," Jack soothed. "It's okay. It was just a nightmare."
Daniel tried to tell Jack no, it wasn't a nightmare, it was just him thinking too much again, but no sounds would come out that resembled words. Just strange choked noises that made Jack hug him tighter, tying him to the physical world. And Daniel wanted to thank him, push him away and pull himself back together, but he couldn't because Jack would never let him fall.
They were tied together, in some way Daniel didn't understand and doubted Jack was even aware of. And Daniel was afraid, because he knew one day all he'd have would be his memories and they wouldn't be enough. They weren't even enough now.
He could feel himself relaxing into Jack's hold, letting himself sink into the embrace, becoming boneless against Jack's body. He tried to fight it but it was so right, so much everything he'd ever wanted. Jack's hands were still now, his arms hugging Daniel tight, keeping him from flying apart.
"It's okay," Jack whispered. "I'm here, Danny. I'm here."
* * * * * * * * * * * *
You just couldn't define Daniel. There was no box he fit in, no label that applied to him. He was brilliant and frustrating and stubborn and scared and sad and passionate, and somehow he managed to do it all at once. That was half of the reason Jack pushed him so much; he loved to see that stubborn spark light in Daniel's eyes, loved to watch him struggle and fight.
Daniel tilted at windmills. It was one of the things you just had to accept about him. Daniel tilted at windmills while everyone else stood safely on a far-away hillside shaking their heads, and then the windmills turned to monsters and while the audience was picking their jaws up off the floor the monster was smacking Daniel all to hell. And so Jack had decided that whatever windmill Daniel tilted at, Jack would be right behind him; a sarcastic, graying, crotchety shadow who gave Daniel more lip than Sancho Panza ever gave Don Quixote.
There was a part of Jack that was terrified, scared absolutely fucking stiff that one day Daniel would get tired of fighting the same battles every day and just give up. He would never admit it to anyone, barely even admitted it to himself, but Jack relied on Daniel to fight because Daniel fought the battles the rest of them could only watch. Half the time they didn't even realize the battle was there to be fought but whoops, there goes Daniel leveling his lance at a phantom, and Jack was left panting in the dust trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
He loved the way Daniel got that gleam in his eye, the stubborn never-say-die, fight the break of dawn leave no stone unturned and no artifact untouched mentality that seemed to drive him. To be honest, he relied on that grit of Daniel's to keep them going, trusted Daniel to see the battles that needed to be fought. He didn't even mind that Daniel fought Jack as much as he fought anyone, because he really loved needling Daniel. He'd stand there being more and more dense, and Daniel would get more and more sarcastic, paring down all his explanations to words of two syllables or less until Jack almost thought Daniel really did believe that he had the intelligence of a potato, and then he'd catch sight of a light in Daniel's eye that told him Daniel was just humoring him, playing his game. It was like their own secret language. It was Jack and Daniel.
And then sometimes he'd catch Daniel unawares, and see desolation in his eyes. That scared him more than anything else, the thought that Daniel didn't see himself the way everyone else did, that maybe Daniel thought he was unappreciated and ignored, that no one listened to him or cared what he was saying. It was times like that when Jack had to fight the urge to just grab Daniel and head for the hills, to stand between Daniel and the world that had treated him so badly.
It was a Catch-22. He wanted more than anything else to give Daniel a sanctuary, to let him rest from his relentless drive to save everyone from themselves. But he knew that as soon as Daniel took a break they'd run up against some evil no one else could see and it would all be over, and so all Jack could do was stand by the sidelines and hope Daniel didn't burn up in his own inner fire, watching with trepidation and, if he was being scrupulously honest with himself, a tiny smudge of something that might even be awe.
Jack was a soldier. It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to realize that Daniel was a soldier too.
Daniel's war was never brought home more harshly to Jack than at times like these, when he woke up at night and found Daniel shaking and trembling in his sleeping bag from all the nasty stuff in his head. Sometimes Jack would imagine he could feel the ghost of Daniel's touch on his wrist, that maybe Daniel had tried to reach out and ask for help. He never doubted that Daniel knew Jack was there for him, that Jack would protect him if he could. He just wasn't sure if Daniel had it in him to ask.
And suddenly he was tired of it all. Tired of watching Daniel kill himself to save people who didn't want to be saved. Sick of beating himself up because his best friend was hurting and he couldn't do anything to help. Let the rest of the world screw itself. If Daniel needed a shoulder to cry on and someplace warm and safe to hide until morning, well then Jack was that place.
"Daniel? You okay?" he asked, and immediately winced. Of course Daniel wasn't fucking okay. Daniel was all wrapped up in his most protective self-hug, gasping like a landed fish.
"Shit, Danny..." he said, and he didn't just mean a friend having nightmares. He meant the sick twisted world they lived in where they couldn't comfort each other for fear of what might happen, where a man as good as Daniel had to get through this much shit on his own. Where a man like Jack, who most days thought he was an okay human being in the long run, had to play Devil's Advocate just so Daniel wouldn't feel like he could relax for just one fucking minute. He reached out and touched Daniel's shoulder and Daniel jerked away, maybe from the surprise of Jack actually catching him as he fell headlong into his own dark thoughts, or maybe just from the shock of realizing that there was someone else in his little shell of misery. Jack pulled Daniel in close, tucking him up as safely as he could, wrapping himself around Daniel as if he could hide him from the world with his own body. He could feel Daniel's tears soaking his shirt, could hear Daniel whimpering something that sounded an awful lot like an apology.
"It's okay," Jack said, giving them both a way out. "It's just a nightmare." It was, too. The whole fucking thing.
"It's okay," he whispered. "I'm here, Danny. I'm here."
FINIS
RATING: PG-13
CATEGORY: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
SUMMARY: A little character study on Jack and Daniel. Could be seen as pre-slash but was not originally intended as such.
SPOILERS: Crystal Skull, Serpent's Lair
TILTING AT WINDMILLS
He loved to watch Jack sleep.
Daniel didn't sleep much; he never had. His brain moved too quickly, was always too busy to just rest. So he'd wake up at odd hours of the night/morning and lie there and think until his brain slowed enough to let him sleep again.
They were offworld now. It was Sam's watch. If he squinted, he could make out Sam's silhouette against the nylon wall of the tent, outlined by the tiny flickering campfire. Every so often, she got up and walked the perimeter, and Daniel would close his eyes and try to place her by the tiny indistinct sounds she made as she walked: a crunch of leaves here, a jingle of metal there. And then she would come back to the fire to sit.
Some nights he got up and joined her, or Jack or Teal'c or whoever was on watch. But they tended to worry when he didn't sleep, and gave him disapproving looks when he inquired after coffee at 3 am, so mostly he just stayed in the tent and pretended.
Now he was watching Jack sleep.
Jack's face was transformed when he slept. He looked peaceful, and still - two things he almost never was while awake. His face evened out. He didn't look younger, exactly... but he didn't look as old, either.
Daniel watched the diffused firelight play across Jack's face. Jack was on his side, facing Daniel, so all he could see was the curve of Jack's cheek, the subtle ridge of his cheekbone, the irregular tufts of his hair, the strong line of his jaw. One of Jack's hands stuck out of the sleeping bag in Daniel's direction, palm up, fingers curled.
Daniel watched Jack, memorizing every detail of his form, ingraining every nuance into his memory. Jack was warmth and strength, solid and real. It might be a memory Daniel would have to hold onto later when Jack was gone and so he concentrated hard.
He had to be careful when he watched. Sometimes the need to touch and be touched rose in him, so strongly it made his hands shake and his breath falter. The urge to reach over and touch Jack, Jack who was so full of life and action and so unlike Daniel whose mind was more real to him than his body. Sometimes he started to doubt he could be solid at all, not with Jack so close and so full of life. He felt like a pale shadow, wispy and ethereal, only held to Earth by a tenuous grasp on the physical world. At night sometimes he could feel that tether start to slip and he was afraid of losing hold. He'd spent several days in the SGC as a ghost, and knew what it was like to be pure thought. He had no desire to do that again.
He'd actually touched Jack, once; reached out before he could stop himself and rested his fingers on Jack's wrist above the pulse point, just for a minute. He'd felt the thrum of Jack's blood, the warmth of his skin, and something had risen in him, almost choking him with its intensity. He'd drawn his hand back, scared of feeling that much all at once, and Jack had woken up, whispering "Daniel? You okay?" into the darkness. Daniel had lain still, scarcely daring to breathe, and after a moment Jack had rolled over and gone back to sleep. Daniel had spent the rest of the night shaking in his sleeping bag, staring at Jack's back. He had wrapped his arms around his stomach and curled up, as if that would keep him from exploding into millions of tiny bits all over the tent.
It was nights like that when his mental scrapbook came in handy. He could close his eyes and pull out all his specially constructed memories: Jack sleeping, Jack looking through his telescope, that wonderful/infamous Spacemonkey hug. He remembered the feel of Jack's arms around him, the heat of Jack's body pressed against his, the strength of Jack's arms that he'd been so tempted to sink into, because he knew those arms would never let him come loose from the world.
He wondered, sometimes, what Jack would do if Daniel just turned to him one day and asked for a hug. He'd come close, more than once, usually during the darker parts of his life when it would have been an acceptable request, although sometimes the need came upon him for no reason. They'd be standing at the base of the ramp maybe, waiting for the Gate to dial up, and Daniel would remember that it had been here that Jack had hugged him. Or on an alien planet he'd look to one side and see Jack, his strong face bathed in sunlight, and yearn for the warmth.
But something always held him back. He supposed it was the stubborn independence he'd had to cultivate after the death of his parents, because once he knew Jack would hold him here he'd maybe stop being able to hold himself.
He couldn't depend. Not like that. Not again.
The need rose suddenly in him, swelling like a viscous tide, cutting off his air supply. He hugged himself hard and grasped at his memories, drawing them tightly around him. He knew he was shaking. He could feel Jack's presence like a bonfire, calling him like a moth to a flame but he couldn't give in, not now and not ever.
He heard Jack stir and he clutched himself even more tightly, trying to keep from making any noise that would wake Jack up but he couldn't seem to stop shaking. He could hear a miniscule swish swish of nylon, and knew he was trembling.
"Daniel? You okay?"
He concentrated on breathing, even breaths that sounded okay but he couldn't fill his lungs for some reason. He could hear a weird sort of harsh panting in the tent and wondered where it was coming from.
"Daniel?"
He heard Jack's sleeping bag move and felt Jack's hand on his shoulder, the touch startling him so much his whole body jerked involuntarily away from the warmth. He could feel the fire on his shoulder, a single patch of skin that was suddenly more real than any other place on his body. He dug his fingers into his ribcage, trying to replace that sensation with another, any other, as long as it was of his own making.
"Shit, Danny..."
He heard Jack move again, and the hand returned to his shoulder, tracing a path across his shoulder blades until he was held in an awkward sort of half-embrace. There was a little tug, and Jack was pulling him close, wrapping him in an hug that was home and love and safety and strength and reality and it was too much, he couldn't handle it, and he felt something hot and wet trailing down his cheeks and nearly died of embarrassment when he realized he was crying.
"Sorry," he gasped. "Sorry."
Jack's hands were soothing, rubbing patterns against his skin. His head was tucked under Jack's chin and he could hear Jack's heartbeat, feel Jack's breath whispering through his hair.
"It's okay," Jack soothed. "It's okay. It was just a nightmare."
Daniel tried to tell Jack no, it wasn't a nightmare, it was just him thinking too much again, but no sounds would come out that resembled words. Just strange choked noises that made Jack hug him tighter, tying him to the physical world. And Daniel wanted to thank him, push him away and pull himself back together, but he couldn't because Jack would never let him fall.
They were tied together, in some way Daniel didn't understand and doubted Jack was even aware of. And Daniel was afraid, because he knew one day all he'd have would be his memories and they wouldn't be enough. They weren't even enough now.
He could feel himself relaxing into Jack's hold, letting himself sink into the embrace, becoming boneless against Jack's body. He tried to fight it but it was so right, so much everything he'd ever wanted. Jack's hands were still now, his arms hugging Daniel tight, keeping him from flying apart.
"It's okay," Jack whispered. "I'm here, Danny. I'm here."
You just couldn't define Daniel. There was no box he fit in, no label that applied to him. He was brilliant and frustrating and stubborn and scared and sad and passionate, and somehow he managed to do it all at once. That was half of the reason Jack pushed him so much; he loved to see that stubborn spark light in Daniel's eyes, loved to watch him struggle and fight.
Daniel tilted at windmills. It was one of the things you just had to accept about him. Daniel tilted at windmills while everyone else stood safely on a far-away hillside shaking their heads, and then the windmills turned to monsters and while the audience was picking their jaws up off the floor the monster was smacking Daniel all to hell. And so Jack had decided that whatever windmill Daniel tilted at, Jack would be right behind him; a sarcastic, graying, crotchety shadow who gave Daniel more lip than Sancho Panza ever gave Don Quixote.
There was a part of Jack that was terrified, scared absolutely fucking stiff that one day Daniel would get tired of fighting the same battles every day and just give up. He would never admit it to anyone, barely even admitted it to himself, but Jack relied on Daniel to fight because Daniel fought the battles the rest of them could only watch. Half the time they didn't even realize the battle was there to be fought but whoops, there goes Daniel leveling his lance at a phantom, and Jack was left panting in the dust trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
He loved the way Daniel got that gleam in his eye, the stubborn never-say-die, fight the break of dawn leave no stone unturned and no artifact untouched mentality that seemed to drive him. To be honest, he relied on that grit of Daniel's to keep them going, trusted Daniel to see the battles that needed to be fought. He didn't even mind that Daniel fought Jack as much as he fought anyone, because he really loved needling Daniel. He'd stand there being more and more dense, and Daniel would get more and more sarcastic, paring down all his explanations to words of two syllables or less until Jack almost thought Daniel really did believe that he had the intelligence of a potato, and then he'd catch sight of a light in Daniel's eye that told him Daniel was just humoring him, playing his game. It was like their own secret language. It was Jack and Daniel.
And then sometimes he'd catch Daniel unawares, and see desolation in his eyes. That scared him more than anything else, the thought that Daniel didn't see himself the way everyone else did, that maybe Daniel thought he was unappreciated and ignored, that no one listened to him or cared what he was saying. It was times like that when Jack had to fight the urge to just grab Daniel and head for the hills, to stand between Daniel and the world that had treated him so badly.
It was a Catch-22. He wanted more than anything else to give Daniel a sanctuary, to let him rest from his relentless drive to save everyone from themselves. But he knew that as soon as Daniel took a break they'd run up against some evil no one else could see and it would all be over, and so all Jack could do was stand by the sidelines and hope Daniel didn't burn up in his own inner fire, watching with trepidation and, if he was being scrupulously honest with himself, a tiny smudge of something that might even be awe.
Jack was a soldier. It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to realize that Daniel was a soldier too.
Daniel's war was never brought home more harshly to Jack than at times like these, when he woke up at night and found Daniel shaking and trembling in his sleeping bag from all the nasty stuff in his head. Sometimes Jack would imagine he could feel the ghost of Daniel's touch on his wrist, that maybe Daniel had tried to reach out and ask for help. He never doubted that Daniel knew Jack was there for him, that Jack would protect him if he could. He just wasn't sure if Daniel had it in him to ask.
And suddenly he was tired of it all. Tired of watching Daniel kill himself to save people who didn't want to be saved. Sick of beating himself up because his best friend was hurting and he couldn't do anything to help. Let the rest of the world screw itself. If Daniel needed a shoulder to cry on and someplace warm and safe to hide until morning, well then Jack was that place.
"Daniel? You okay?" he asked, and immediately winced. Of course Daniel wasn't fucking okay. Daniel was all wrapped up in his most protective self-hug, gasping like a landed fish.
"Shit, Danny..." he said, and he didn't just mean a friend having nightmares. He meant the sick twisted world they lived in where they couldn't comfort each other for fear of what might happen, where a man as good as Daniel had to get through this much shit on his own. Where a man like Jack, who most days thought he was an okay human being in the long run, had to play Devil's Advocate just so Daniel wouldn't feel like he could relax for just one fucking minute. He reached out and touched Daniel's shoulder and Daniel jerked away, maybe from the surprise of Jack actually catching him as he fell headlong into his own dark thoughts, or maybe just from the shock of realizing that there was someone else in his little shell of misery. Jack pulled Daniel in close, tucking him up as safely as he could, wrapping himself around Daniel as if he could hide him from the world with his own body. He could feel Daniel's tears soaking his shirt, could hear Daniel whimpering something that sounded an awful lot like an apology.
"It's okay," Jack said, giving them both a way out. "It's just a nightmare." It was, too. The whole fucking thing.
"It's okay," he whispered. "I'm here, Danny. I'm here."
FINIS
