![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: With Benefits
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kellifer_fic
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 3,824
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Notes: Thanks to my betalyore. Written for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sd_ficathon. **backup duty agogo**
Recipient:paian
Prompt: Cravings, stormy weather, cryptography - Friendship with romance around the edges
“So, you think he’s coming back for us?”
Daniel watches Sam wading absently at the shore, water brushing over the tops of her feet. She’s rolled her BDU pants up and is looking much calmer than she was about twenty minutes earlier, when she’d sworn more than Daniel thought he’d ever heard in the entire time they had known each other.
“I think he’s going to need to sleep with one eye open for years,’” Sam says, and there is a level thread of fury just under her calm tone that Daniel is very glad is not aimed at him.
“I mean, he has to, right?” he asks, skipping a stone across the water’s surface, but because there is a gentle wave the stone doesn’t even skip once, just disappears under with a dull thok.
000
“Walter, just open the damn iris,” Sam snaps. She’s hunkered down with her eyes level with the camera. Daniel thinks that Walter is a braver man than him to stand up to the poisonous look Sam is aiming his way.
“I can’t, General O’Neill’s orders,” Walter says, looking nervous, perhaps envisioning his own inability to sleep anywhere in the vicinity of one Samantha Carter ever again.
“He can’t just leave us here,” Sam says, crossing her arms over her chest in frustration and Walter looks halfway apologetic and halfway terrified.
“He’s not leaving you there,” he protests. “It’s just forced… vacation.”
“Get him down here now,” Sam grits and Daniel hides a smirk behind his fingers. He’s pretty annoyed himself, but watching Sam slowly melt-down is too much fun to hold onto his own inconvenience for very long.
“He said he’ll talk to you at your scheduled check-in, in three days. He said to stop wasting resources by calling us every ten minutes. He also said you should remember that you’re not the only person who uses the ‘gate,” Walter finished the last in a rush and Daniel suspects that it might not have come from Jack at all, that Sam has actually hit a mystical place where she’s pissed off Walter.
“This is unbelievable!” Sam spits, kicking the MALP with a booted foot. Daniel retreats to their accommodations that were loaded on the MALP, the kind of tent that has a patio and some brightly coloured inflatable furniture that Jack must have snickered himself silly picking out. There is also a mini bar fridge, a generator and fresh food as well as the standard MREs.
“There’s not enough here for very long,” Daniel observes, poking through the provisions. “No matter how stressed he thinks we are he’s not going to leave… OH MY GOD!”
“What?” Sam cries, jogging over when Daniel holds something aloft with a look of pure unadulterated horror on his face.
“This is decaffeinated!” Daniel groans and sits down hard, tin of faux coffee falling from his fingers.
“Maybe now you’ll help me scare Walter into letting us back through early?” Sam prods, nudging Daniel’s leg with her toes.
“Show me the camera.”
000
Two days later, Daniel has a caffeine withdrawal migraine and Sam has ripped the packaging off their perishables to have something to make notes on. He’s not really sure whether she’s working or listing ways to kill Jack. Daniel waits until the painkillers Jack thoughtfully sent through are dulling the edge off the pain before humping out of his sleeping bag and squinting at Sam who is sitting on a rock just outside their tent.
“Don’t kill me, but maybe we should look around,” Daniel proposes.
“I don’t want to leave the ‘gate. Jack might come to his senses.”
“In all the years we’ve known him, has Jack ever come to his senses?” Daniel asks, grinning and he sees Sam fighting a grin of her own, comically knitting her brows so it’s a lopsided frown.
“I’m not enjoying this,” she snaps. “You can’t make me enjoy this because then he’s won.”
“Hey, we can act miserable when he calls but we don’t have to be miserable. That’s all I’m saying.”
Sam looks up, one wary eyebrow raised. “I’m expecting Academy Award calibre misery from you when we talk to him tomorrow,” she says and Daniel smiles and puts a hand to his heart.
“I swear. I may even be able to squeeze out a tear.”
“Okay, fine,” Sam huffs. “I guess the river is kind of pretty and there might be something beyond that tree line.”
Daniel grins and rolls to his feet. “Jack put fishing gear in the pack. Who does he think we are? Him?”
000
When they spot ruins an hour into their hike, Daniel makes an embarrassingly high-pitched noise of excitement that he knows he will be hearing about later as he walk-stumbles down the hill leading to the jumble of stones and fallen archways they’ve discovered.
Sam unpacks the picnic lunch she’d thrown together as Daniel darts around the stonework, looking for anything of interest. When he finds semi-fresh boot prints that look suspiciously like standard-issue SGC footwear, he comes to sit dejectedly with Sam as she finishes setting out the food.
“Now that was just mean. He must’ve known this was here and already worked over. Is he torturing us on purpose?”
“I don’t know. Have you done anything to piss him off lately?” Sam asks with her mouth full of cheese and bread.
“Define lately,” Daniel sniffs and Sam laughs through her full mouth. Daniel levels a finger at her and grins. “Stop enjoying yourself, remember?”
“Stop being… entertaining,” Sam retorts. She picks at her nails as Daniel tries the decaffeinated coffee she’d brought in a thermos and grimaces. “So were we both really that bad?” Sam asks, biting at her lip. “That he felt compelled to strand us offworld just to get us to relax?”
Daniel is about to deny it, but then he remembers how he hadn’t seen daylight in days and how Sam had pretty much been the same. How Jack had actually given them ample opportunity to leave the mountain and take the mandatory rest period he seemed to think they needed. How he’d looked increasingly more concerned as Daniel had deflected and Sam had dodged his attempts to dislodge them from their work.
Daniel realises that it is completely their fault that they are now far away from home with a few mod cons but nothing that they could even attempt to use for work. He looks at Sam and knows she isn’t ready to admit defeat or that Jack was in any way, shape or form… right.
“He’s just being Jack,” Daniel says instead, knowing it’s not much of an answer and definitely not the one Sam would have wanted to hear but it’s all he’s got.
000
“Morning campers!”
Jack’s cheerful voice echoes through the morning air and Daniel knows that if it were at all possible to reach through an incoming wormhole and strangle someone, then Sam would’ve done just that.
“Okay,” she says in a carefully measure tone. “You’ve had your little joke, now let us back through.”
“No can do,” Jack says and even though they don’t have the benefit of a live feed, Daniel can just about picture the grin Jack is wearing. “You both put yourselves there. I’m not letting you back through the ‘gate until I can hear some rest in your voices.”
A sharp elbow to the ribs has Daniel squeaking, “But we are rested!”
“Very convincing, Daniel,” Jack says, chuckling. “Nah, I think another check-in in three days is in order.”
“Don’t you-“ Sam watches the wormhole close down and grinds her teeth. “I’m going to kill him.”
“He knows that. I think he’s waiting until he can’t hear murder in your voice anymore.”
“That’s it!” Sam huffs, getting up from the MALP and making her way over to the DHD. “We’re gating to the Land of Light and making them dial for us.”
“Jack probably knows we’d try that,” Daniel warns, watching Sam angrily push chevrons. She gets stuck on the fifth one and looks around at Daniel with her eyebrows raised.
“You think he’d really go to the trouble of letting all our allies know not to accept our call?” Sam asks, waving her hands over the DHD. “Now get your butt over here and finish this.”
“Please,” Daniel says, knowing he’s testing Sam’s ire but he figures he must have been Jack’s friend for too long.
“Please Daniel for the love of all that’s holy,” Sam says, wringing her hands overdramatically. “I need my computer, a shower and to get out of the countryside.”
Daniel makes his way over and completes the address. They both watch the ‘gate grind to a halt and make a heavy clunk that is never good. Sam’s eyes widen and then narrow and her face flushes in fury.
“Oh he thinks he can do that to me!” she snorts, hunkering down and pulling the panel off the DHD with the control crystals nestled inside.
Daniel contemplates asking Sam to let him know when she is going to be less insane but decides silence is the better part of valour. He moves over to the MALP and digs deeper into their home-away-from-home kit, letting out a bark of relief to find books. His relief is short-lived however as he realises he’s looking at pretty much every trashy airport-fiction novel that has been released in the last few months. Jack had made very sure not to even include so much as an autobiography.
“Do you think we could get Teal’c mad enough to just rip Jack’s head right off?” Daniel asks absently.
000
The sky opens on the fourth day.
Daniel stops Sam from making a dash across to the DHD to continue working. She had explained over a quick evening meal the night before that some of the control crystals had been removed, the DHD somehow jerry-rigged so that it could only dial Earth. She had been marvelling at how the modifications had been done so badly that she was having trouble finding a point to even start fixing it.
“I mean, it looks like someone did it that had instructions written down in crayon who had never seen a DHD before.”
Daniel had agreed that it looked like Jack had done the work himself. After all, he’d seen Jack’s attempts to fix numerous video machines and how they would inevitably lie abandoned with their guts still hanging out all over his house.
They both watch the storm passing, snuggled down in their sleeping bags and with nothing to do but wait it out.
“How do people do this?” Sam asks, rolling over and pressing into Daniel’s space. Daniel doesn’t mind, even though the tent they have would normally be a ten-person. They are so used to sleeping huddled together while offworld that they just naturally drift together.
“Do what?”
“Nothing, for days on end. Jack can do it. Why can’t I?”
“You’re just out of practice,” Daniel says. He shrugs but belatedly realises that up to his neck in a sleeping bag means the gesture is lost. Sam pokes her feet out of the open end of her sleeping bag and insinuates them into Daniel’s, pressing cold toes into Daniel’s calves. He rolls over so she can put them behind his knees and she sighs in contentment.
000
The fifth day dawns bright and sunny and Daniel knows he’s avoided having an actual proper wash for as long as he’s able to. Despite the warmth of the day, the river has proven freezing and Daniel suspects somewhere up the line it feeds off a glacier.
“You braving it?” Sam asks, poking her head out of the innards of the DHD long enough to notice he’s grabbed a towel out of his pack and is shrugging off his jacket. “I mean, I could try rigging up a kind of shower arrangement.”
“You think you can tear yourself away from the DHD long enough?” Daniel asks. Sam pokes out her tongue and stands, dusting her hands off.
The rest of the day is spent creating a fairly impressive-looking shower given the primitive materials at hand. The tarp from the MALP is even staked between three long poles of straight wood to provide a screen. Daniel sets a large container of water over a fire they build together, and sits back, lacing his fingers behind his head.
“You wanna go first?” he invites when the water is warm enough to stand under.
“You sayin’ I smell, Jackson?” Sam retorts. She’s back elbow deep in the MALP and she looks over her shoulder at him. There’s a smudge of dirt across her cheek and another down her neck, disappearing under her shirt.
“Absolutely,” Daniel grins and ducks as something small and sharp wings past his head. “Oh hey, I hope we didn’t need that,” he says with a laugh.
000
“Okay, you’re getting there but I’m not hearing enough… zen,” Jack says on the sixth day.
“General-“ Sam starts to protest but Daniel knows Jack has an exact number of days in mind he’s planned to strand them and they aren’t going back home until that time is up.
There’s a squawk of protest and then another voice comes through the line. “Are you both well?”
“Teal’c! Put Jack in a headlock and open the iris,” Daniel says, not holding out much hope.
“I agreed that you both needed some… down time. I had not thought O’Neill would go to such extremes but it seems it was required.”
“Not you too,” Sam sighs. “Now I really feel betrayed.”
“At least send some coffee through,” Daniel says in his most wheedling tone.
“No stimulants. The whole point is to relax, Danny-boy,” Jack says. “I’m not heartless though, I’ll send through pizza for you guys tonight.”
Sam rolls her eyes and drags herself back to the DHD, looking defeated.
000
There’s pizza and a bottle of red pushed through the next time the ‘gate activates and Daniel has to admit that it’s a pretty pleasant thing to be dining under the stars. Being offworld, his instinctual wariness is hard to dismiss but he knows that Jack would have been very careful vetting the worlds for their banishment.
Sam puts away a whole pizza by herself and then sits back, hands on her stomach and looking a little green. “I’m never eating again,” she moans.
Daniel doesn’t remember them drinking the whole bottle of red but when he tips it over his plastic cup, only a few errant drops hit the bottom. He’s pleasantly buzzed and by the way Sam is slumping sideways, he figures Sam is too.
“I liked Pete,” he says out of the blue and that gets Sam snapping up straight again, blinking at him.
“Yes, Daniel, so did I,” she says, her tone careful.
“What happened there?”
“He wanted to marry me,” Sam says, suddenly finding her boots fascinating. Daniel realises that once upon a time, he probably would’ve known all this already but the last few years there’d been an unintentional drift between them all. He didn’t enjoy seeing it happen but was at a loss how to repair it.
“Oh no,” he chuckles. “What a bastard.”
“Hilarious,” Sam snorts. “You should go on the road with your act.”
“Sorry, it’s just… you seemed happy with him.”
“I was,” Sam admits and now he can hear real sadness in her voice. “I’m not sure when I stopped… being happy but I did. I’m not sure how else to explain it.”
“Huh,” Daniel murmurs, at a loss really as to anything else to say.
“When did you stop?”
“What?”
“Being happy.”
“I didn’t realise I had,” Daniel says with a frown.
“Oh no, you have,” Sam says, nodding and then putting a hand to her temple as if deciding nodding is not the best idea in her state. “After Sha’re you were sad for so long that I thought you wouldn’t see the other side of it, but you did. I just… I noticed that the last little while…”
Sam trails off and Daniel looks over to see she has curled onto her side on top of her sleeping bag and her eyes are closed. Daniel gets up and kicks dirt over the fire, making sure it’s out and then drags Sam, bag and all, over to the tent and inside.
She doesn’t stir and her words hang heavy in Daniel’s mind as he lays awake.
000
Sam has a hangover in the morning. Daniel doesn’t, but Sam seems to decide that is universally unfair, and appears determined on ensuring he suffers with her.
It starts with her switching his nicely warmed water for a shower to water straight out of the river. It continues with finding that all of his clothes are slightly damp and he’s not even sure how she managed that one.
It ends with the chocolate, Daniel’s one saving grace because he doesn’t have any coffee, going missing.
“Are you trying to get out of this whole vacation thing by making me murder you?” he asks, shifting uncomfortably in damp pants. He didn’t even bother with the shirt, hanging it and the rest of his clothes over rocks to dry.
“Just hurt me enough to get us back home,” Sam says, grinning and dangling one of Daniel’s socks over the soup he had just put on. “Just a little break. A wrist. A finger even.”
“No,” Daniel snaps, snatching his sock back and thwapping her in the head with it. “You know, this whole isolation thing is bad for you. It’s turning you into Jack.”
“Maybe if it did I would know what he’s done to this damn DHD!” she cries, flinging herself dramatically over it in a heap and then moaning and holding her head when the sudden movement seems to remind her of the monumentally bad hangover she is currently experiencing. Daniel grabs Sam around the middle and frog-marches her towards the river. When she realises where they’re going she starts to weakly put up a fight but he’s got momentum and weight on his side and Sam ends up going in the water with a wail of protest.
“Daniel,” she says, emerging from the water and pushing her hair out of her face. “That was very, very stupid.” There is real menace in her voice and Daniel rolls his shoulders and crosses his arms over his chest.
“Do your worst,” he challenges.
000
Daniel wakes up the next morning with his hands and feet tied. The sleeping bag he’s in is zipped up all the way and the tent flap is also closed with the zipper. There is tape over his mouth so he can’t even do anything with his teeth.
Later, when she’s released him and after he pees like a racehorse for ten minutes, Daniel asks just how she managed to do it without waking him.
Sam just raises an eyebrow.
000
They’re lying on top of a makeshift table Sam had put together out of logs and Sam digs her chin into Daniel’s shoulder.
“We don’t talk like we used to,” she says.
“I know,” he agrees, still staring at the sky. The silence after Sam’s words speaks better than either of them could about their inability to fix whatever has happened.
000
Daniel maps out the entire area of their camp and extends it to the small pile of ruins when their next call-in has Jack claiming that if anything, they both sound more tense.
“Might as well do something useful,” Daniel muses when Sam asks what he’s doing.
“It’s probably been mapped by an aerial MALP,” Sam says and Daniel grunts and turns away from her.
“And you’re never going to get that DHD to work, so how about we both do our own useless things and leave it at that?”
Daniel is expecting the balled up sock to the head but not the half a tomato when he turns around to grin after he’s successfully ducked.
000
“We never talked about it,” Sam says after Jack’s fourth call. He’d graciously sent through fresh fruit and vegetables and Chinese food, still warm in the container. Daniel digs egg rolls out of the container steadily and is eyeing Sam’s lemon chicken when she speaks.
“About…?”
Sam raises an eyebrow, handing over the lemon chicken with a don’t play dumb grunt that is usually reserved for Jack.
“Did we need to?” Daniel asks. He’d never really thought about it. Of course, he’d thought about it, but it wasn’t something that worried him.
“No, just… “ Sam shrugs, a gentle half-lift of her shoulder. “That wasn’t why we stopped talking was it?”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel says but he can’t say for sure. There was distance but if he was honest, he would’ve said that it had started before… before.
“So you think we could ever… again?” Sam asks and Daniel notices there is a flush staining her cheeks.
“Do you want to?”
“It wouldn’t be terrible,” she says.
“Just to be clear, we’re talking about watching Star Wars with Teal’c, right?” Daniel prods, grinning.
He’s getting excellent at ducking flying projectiles.
000
Daniel hadn’t realised Sam was talking about right away but when he finds their sleeping bags zipped together later that evening, he doesn’t object.
“I’m not sure this is what Jack meant by relaxing,” Daniel says with a dry laugh and Sam rolls her eyes. She has hands on his belt and it feels familiar and at the same time just plain odd. Daniel knows that the oddness is probably the lack of complication - they’re both comfortable with this, and neither expects anything more than what it is. Everything else in his life is so complicated that he’s not sure how to respond when something isn’t.
“How long’s it been?” Daniel asks.
“Since us, or since?” Sam says.
Daniel groans when Sam’s fingers find that exact place at the dip in his spine that sets his nerves alight. “Forget I said anything,” he says.
000
“What happened?” Jack demands when they next receive his call.
“Nothing Jack. We’re just not fighting it anymore,” Sam says and she sounds so serene that Daniel almost laughs. They don’t ask to go home in that call and Daniel knows that is exactly why Jack opens the iris.
“We could use a couple more days.” Sam can’t help herself and Jack huffs and grumbles and says something about an emergency. They pack in companionable silence, and when Sam dials and sends her IDC through they get the go-ahead transmission.
“I’m thinking we should do this,” Sam says, looking at Daniel with her eyes bright. “This whole… holiday thing. I see your point about practicing doing nothing.”
“Don’t give me that.” Daniel rolls his eyes with a chuckle. “Another day and you would’ve gone completely round the bend.”
“God, yes,” Sam laughs.
Author:
kellifer_ficRating: PG13
Word Count: 3,824
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Notes: Thanks to my beta
lyore. Written for sd_ficathon. **backup duty agogo**Recipient:
paianPrompt: Cravings, stormy weather, cryptography - Friendship with romance around the edges
“So, you think he’s coming back for us?”
Daniel watches Sam wading absently at the shore, water brushing over the tops of her feet. She’s rolled her BDU pants up and is looking much calmer than she was about twenty minutes earlier, when she’d sworn more than Daniel thought he’d ever heard in the entire time they had known each other.
“I think he’s going to need to sleep with one eye open for years,’” Sam says, and there is a level thread of fury just under her calm tone that Daniel is very glad is not aimed at him.
“I mean, he has to, right?” he asks, skipping a stone across the water’s surface, but because there is a gentle wave the stone doesn’t even skip once, just disappears under with a dull thok.
“Walter, just open the damn iris,” Sam snaps. She’s hunkered down with her eyes level with the camera. Daniel thinks that Walter is a braver man than him to stand up to the poisonous look Sam is aiming his way.
“I can’t, General O’Neill’s orders,” Walter says, looking nervous, perhaps envisioning his own inability to sleep anywhere in the vicinity of one Samantha Carter ever again.
“He can’t just leave us here,” Sam says, crossing her arms over her chest in frustration and Walter looks halfway apologetic and halfway terrified.
“He’s not leaving you there,” he protests. “It’s just forced… vacation.”
“Get him down here now,” Sam grits and Daniel hides a smirk behind his fingers. He’s pretty annoyed himself, but watching Sam slowly melt-down is too much fun to hold onto his own inconvenience for very long.
“He said he’ll talk to you at your scheduled check-in, in three days. He said to stop wasting resources by calling us every ten minutes. He also said you should remember that you’re not the only person who uses the ‘gate,” Walter finished the last in a rush and Daniel suspects that it might not have come from Jack at all, that Sam has actually hit a mystical place where she’s pissed off Walter.
“This is unbelievable!” Sam spits, kicking the MALP with a booted foot. Daniel retreats to their accommodations that were loaded on the MALP, the kind of tent that has a patio and some brightly coloured inflatable furniture that Jack must have snickered himself silly picking out. There is also a mini bar fridge, a generator and fresh food as well as the standard MREs.
“There’s not enough here for very long,” Daniel observes, poking through the provisions. “No matter how stressed he thinks we are he’s not going to leave… OH MY GOD!”
“What?” Sam cries, jogging over when Daniel holds something aloft with a look of pure unadulterated horror on his face.
“This is decaffeinated!” Daniel groans and sits down hard, tin of faux coffee falling from his fingers.
“Maybe now you’ll help me scare Walter into letting us back through early?” Sam prods, nudging Daniel’s leg with her toes.
“Show me the camera.”
Two days later, Daniel has a caffeine withdrawal migraine and Sam has ripped the packaging off their perishables to have something to make notes on. He’s not really sure whether she’s working or listing ways to kill Jack. Daniel waits until the painkillers Jack thoughtfully sent through are dulling the edge off the pain before humping out of his sleeping bag and squinting at Sam who is sitting on a rock just outside their tent.
“Don’t kill me, but maybe we should look around,” Daniel proposes.
“I don’t want to leave the ‘gate. Jack might come to his senses.”
“In all the years we’ve known him, has Jack ever come to his senses?” Daniel asks, grinning and he sees Sam fighting a grin of her own, comically knitting her brows so it’s a lopsided frown.
“I’m not enjoying this,” she snaps. “You can’t make me enjoy this because then he’s won.”
“Hey, we can act miserable when he calls but we don’t have to be miserable. That’s all I’m saying.”
Sam looks up, one wary eyebrow raised. “I’m expecting Academy Award calibre misery from you when we talk to him tomorrow,” she says and Daniel smiles and puts a hand to his heart.
“I swear. I may even be able to squeeze out a tear.”
“Okay, fine,” Sam huffs. “I guess the river is kind of pretty and there might be something beyond that tree line.”
Daniel grins and rolls to his feet. “Jack put fishing gear in the pack. Who does he think we are? Him?”
When they spot ruins an hour into their hike, Daniel makes an embarrassingly high-pitched noise of excitement that he knows he will be hearing about later as he walk-stumbles down the hill leading to the jumble of stones and fallen archways they’ve discovered.
Sam unpacks the picnic lunch she’d thrown together as Daniel darts around the stonework, looking for anything of interest. When he finds semi-fresh boot prints that look suspiciously like standard-issue SGC footwear, he comes to sit dejectedly with Sam as she finishes setting out the food.
“Now that was just mean. He must’ve known this was here and already worked over. Is he torturing us on purpose?”
“I don’t know. Have you done anything to piss him off lately?” Sam asks with her mouth full of cheese and bread.
“Define lately,” Daniel sniffs and Sam laughs through her full mouth. Daniel levels a finger at her and grins. “Stop enjoying yourself, remember?”
“Stop being… entertaining,” Sam retorts. She picks at her nails as Daniel tries the decaffeinated coffee she’d brought in a thermos and grimaces. “So were we both really that bad?” Sam asks, biting at her lip. “That he felt compelled to strand us offworld just to get us to relax?”
Daniel is about to deny it, but then he remembers how he hadn’t seen daylight in days and how Sam had pretty much been the same. How Jack had actually given them ample opportunity to leave the mountain and take the mandatory rest period he seemed to think they needed. How he’d looked increasingly more concerned as Daniel had deflected and Sam had dodged his attempts to dislodge them from their work.
Daniel realises that it is completely their fault that they are now far away from home with a few mod cons but nothing that they could even attempt to use for work. He looks at Sam and knows she isn’t ready to admit defeat or that Jack was in any way, shape or form… right.
“He’s just being Jack,” Daniel says instead, knowing it’s not much of an answer and definitely not the one Sam would have wanted to hear but it’s all he’s got.
“Morning campers!”
Jack’s cheerful voice echoes through the morning air and Daniel knows that if it were at all possible to reach through an incoming wormhole and strangle someone, then Sam would’ve done just that.
“Okay,” she says in a carefully measure tone. “You’ve had your little joke, now let us back through.”
“No can do,” Jack says and even though they don’t have the benefit of a live feed, Daniel can just about picture the grin Jack is wearing. “You both put yourselves there. I’m not letting you back through the ‘gate until I can hear some rest in your voices.”
A sharp elbow to the ribs has Daniel squeaking, “But we are rested!”
“Very convincing, Daniel,” Jack says, chuckling. “Nah, I think another check-in in three days is in order.”
“Don’t you-“ Sam watches the wormhole close down and grinds her teeth. “I’m going to kill him.”
“He knows that. I think he’s waiting until he can’t hear murder in your voice anymore.”
“That’s it!” Sam huffs, getting up from the MALP and making her way over to the DHD. “We’re gating to the Land of Light and making them dial for us.”
“Jack probably knows we’d try that,” Daniel warns, watching Sam angrily push chevrons. She gets stuck on the fifth one and looks around at Daniel with her eyebrows raised.
“You think he’d really go to the trouble of letting all our allies know not to accept our call?” Sam asks, waving her hands over the DHD. “Now get your butt over here and finish this.”
“Please,” Daniel says, knowing he’s testing Sam’s ire but he figures he must have been Jack’s friend for too long.
“Please Daniel for the love of all that’s holy,” Sam says, wringing her hands overdramatically. “I need my computer, a shower and to get out of the countryside.”
Daniel makes his way over and completes the address. They both watch the ‘gate grind to a halt and make a heavy clunk that is never good. Sam’s eyes widen and then narrow and her face flushes in fury.
“Oh he thinks he can do that to me!” she snorts, hunkering down and pulling the panel off the DHD with the control crystals nestled inside.
Daniel contemplates asking Sam to let him know when she is going to be less insane but decides silence is the better part of valour. He moves over to the MALP and digs deeper into their home-away-from-home kit, letting out a bark of relief to find books. His relief is short-lived however as he realises he’s looking at pretty much every trashy airport-fiction novel that has been released in the last few months. Jack had made very sure not to even include so much as an autobiography.
“Do you think we could get Teal’c mad enough to just rip Jack’s head right off?” Daniel asks absently.
The sky opens on the fourth day.
Daniel stops Sam from making a dash across to the DHD to continue working. She had explained over a quick evening meal the night before that some of the control crystals had been removed, the DHD somehow jerry-rigged so that it could only dial Earth. She had been marvelling at how the modifications had been done so badly that she was having trouble finding a point to even start fixing it.
“I mean, it looks like someone did it that had instructions written down in crayon who had never seen a DHD before.”
Daniel had agreed that it looked like Jack had done the work himself. After all, he’d seen Jack’s attempts to fix numerous video machines and how they would inevitably lie abandoned with their guts still hanging out all over his house.
They both watch the storm passing, snuggled down in their sleeping bags and with nothing to do but wait it out.
“How do people do this?” Sam asks, rolling over and pressing into Daniel’s space. Daniel doesn’t mind, even though the tent they have would normally be a ten-person. They are so used to sleeping huddled together while offworld that they just naturally drift together.
“Do what?”
“Nothing, for days on end. Jack can do it. Why can’t I?”
“You’re just out of practice,” Daniel says. He shrugs but belatedly realises that up to his neck in a sleeping bag means the gesture is lost. Sam pokes her feet out of the open end of her sleeping bag and insinuates them into Daniel’s, pressing cold toes into Daniel’s calves. He rolls over so she can put them behind his knees and she sighs in contentment.
The fifth day dawns bright and sunny and Daniel knows he’s avoided having an actual proper wash for as long as he’s able to. Despite the warmth of the day, the river has proven freezing and Daniel suspects somewhere up the line it feeds off a glacier.
“You braving it?” Sam asks, poking her head out of the innards of the DHD long enough to notice he’s grabbed a towel out of his pack and is shrugging off his jacket. “I mean, I could try rigging up a kind of shower arrangement.”
“You think you can tear yourself away from the DHD long enough?” Daniel asks. Sam pokes out her tongue and stands, dusting her hands off.
The rest of the day is spent creating a fairly impressive-looking shower given the primitive materials at hand. The tarp from the MALP is even staked between three long poles of straight wood to provide a screen. Daniel sets a large container of water over a fire they build together, and sits back, lacing his fingers behind his head.
“You wanna go first?” he invites when the water is warm enough to stand under.
“You sayin’ I smell, Jackson?” Sam retorts. She’s back elbow deep in the MALP and she looks over her shoulder at him. There’s a smudge of dirt across her cheek and another down her neck, disappearing under her shirt.
“Absolutely,” Daniel grins and ducks as something small and sharp wings past his head. “Oh hey, I hope we didn’t need that,” he says with a laugh.
“Okay, you’re getting there but I’m not hearing enough… zen,” Jack says on the sixth day.
“General-“ Sam starts to protest but Daniel knows Jack has an exact number of days in mind he’s planned to strand them and they aren’t going back home until that time is up.
There’s a squawk of protest and then another voice comes through the line. “Are you both well?”
“Teal’c! Put Jack in a headlock and open the iris,” Daniel says, not holding out much hope.
“I agreed that you both needed some… down time. I had not thought O’Neill would go to such extremes but it seems it was required.”
“Not you too,” Sam sighs. “Now I really feel betrayed.”
“At least send some coffee through,” Daniel says in his most wheedling tone.
“No stimulants. The whole point is to relax, Danny-boy,” Jack says. “I’m not heartless though, I’ll send through pizza for you guys tonight.”
Sam rolls her eyes and drags herself back to the DHD, looking defeated.
There’s pizza and a bottle of red pushed through the next time the ‘gate activates and Daniel has to admit that it’s a pretty pleasant thing to be dining under the stars. Being offworld, his instinctual wariness is hard to dismiss but he knows that Jack would have been very careful vetting the worlds for their banishment.
Sam puts away a whole pizza by herself and then sits back, hands on her stomach and looking a little green. “I’m never eating again,” she moans.
Daniel doesn’t remember them drinking the whole bottle of red but when he tips it over his plastic cup, only a few errant drops hit the bottom. He’s pleasantly buzzed and by the way Sam is slumping sideways, he figures Sam is too.
“I liked Pete,” he says out of the blue and that gets Sam snapping up straight again, blinking at him.
“Yes, Daniel, so did I,” she says, her tone careful.
“What happened there?”
“He wanted to marry me,” Sam says, suddenly finding her boots fascinating. Daniel realises that once upon a time, he probably would’ve known all this already but the last few years there’d been an unintentional drift between them all. He didn’t enjoy seeing it happen but was at a loss how to repair it.
“Oh no,” he chuckles. “What a bastard.”
“Hilarious,” Sam snorts. “You should go on the road with your act.”
“Sorry, it’s just… you seemed happy with him.”
“I was,” Sam admits and now he can hear real sadness in her voice. “I’m not sure when I stopped… being happy but I did. I’m not sure how else to explain it.”
“Huh,” Daniel murmurs, at a loss really as to anything else to say.
“When did you stop?”
“What?”
“Being happy.”
“I didn’t realise I had,” Daniel says with a frown.
“Oh no, you have,” Sam says, nodding and then putting a hand to her temple as if deciding nodding is not the best idea in her state. “After Sha’re you were sad for so long that I thought you wouldn’t see the other side of it, but you did. I just… I noticed that the last little while…”
Sam trails off and Daniel looks over to see she has curled onto her side on top of her sleeping bag and her eyes are closed. Daniel gets up and kicks dirt over the fire, making sure it’s out and then drags Sam, bag and all, over to the tent and inside.
She doesn’t stir and her words hang heavy in Daniel’s mind as he lays awake.
Sam has a hangover in the morning. Daniel doesn’t, but Sam seems to decide that is universally unfair, and appears determined on ensuring he suffers with her.
It starts with her switching his nicely warmed water for a shower to water straight out of the river. It continues with finding that all of his clothes are slightly damp and he’s not even sure how she managed that one.
It ends with the chocolate, Daniel’s one saving grace because he doesn’t have any coffee, going missing.
“Are you trying to get out of this whole vacation thing by making me murder you?” he asks, shifting uncomfortably in damp pants. He didn’t even bother with the shirt, hanging it and the rest of his clothes over rocks to dry.
“Just hurt me enough to get us back home,” Sam says, grinning and dangling one of Daniel’s socks over the soup he had just put on. “Just a little break. A wrist. A finger even.”
“No,” Daniel snaps, snatching his sock back and thwapping her in the head with it. “You know, this whole isolation thing is bad for you. It’s turning you into Jack.”
“Maybe if it did I would know what he’s done to this damn DHD!” she cries, flinging herself dramatically over it in a heap and then moaning and holding her head when the sudden movement seems to remind her of the monumentally bad hangover she is currently experiencing. Daniel grabs Sam around the middle and frog-marches her towards the river. When she realises where they’re going she starts to weakly put up a fight but he’s got momentum and weight on his side and Sam ends up going in the water with a wail of protest.
“Daniel,” she says, emerging from the water and pushing her hair out of her face. “That was very, very stupid.” There is real menace in her voice and Daniel rolls his shoulders and crosses his arms over his chest.
“Do your worst,” he challenges.
Daniel wakes up the next morning with his hands and feet tied. The sleeping bag he’s in is zipped up all the way and the tent flap is also closed with the zipper. There is tape over his mouth so he can’t even do anything with his teeth.
Later, when she’s released him and after he pees like a racehorse for ten minutes, Daniel asks just how she managed to do it without waking him.
Sam just raises an eyebrow.
They’re lying on top of a makeshift table Sam had put together out of logs and Sam digs her chin into Daniel’s shoulder.
“We don’t talk like we used to,” she says.
“I know,” he agrees, still staring at the sky. The silence after Sam’s words speaks better than either of them could about their inability to fix whatever has happened.
Daniel maps out the entire area of their camp and extends it to the small pile of ruins when their next call-in has Jack claiming that if anything, they both sound more tense.
“Might as well do something useful,” Daniel muses when Sam asks what he’s doing.
“It’s probably been mapped by an aerial MALP,” Sam says and Daniel grunts and turns away from her.
“And you’re never going to get that DHD to work, so how about we both do our own useless things and leave it at that?”
Daniel is expecting the balled up sock to the head but not the half a tomato when he turns around to grin after he’s successfully ducked.
“We never talked about it,” Sam says after Jack’s fourth call. He’d graciously sent through fresh fruit and vegetables and Chinese food, still warm in the container. Daniel digs egg rolls out of the container steadily and is eyeing Sam’s lemon chicken when she speaks.
“About…?”
Sam raises an eyebrow, handing over the lemon chicken with a don’t play dumb grunt that is usually reserved for Jack.
“Did we need to?” Daniel asks. He’d never really thought about it. Of course, he’d thought about it, but it wasn’t something that worried him.
“No, just… “ Sam shrugs, a gentle half-lift of her shoulder. “That wasn’t why we stopped talking was it?”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel says but he can’t say for sure. There was distance but if he was honest, he would’ve said that it had started before… before.
“So you think we could ever… again?” Sam asks and Daniel notices there is a flush staining her cheeks.
“Do you want to?”
“It wouldn’t be terrible,” she says.
“Just to be clear, we’re talking about watching Star Wars with Teal’c, right?” Daniel prods, grinning.
He’s getting excellent at ducking flying projectiles.
Daniel hadn’t realised Sam was talking about right away but when he finds their sleeping bags zipped together later that evening, he doesn’t object.
“I’m not sure this is what Jack meant by relaxing,” Daniel says with a dry laugh and Sam rolls her eyes. She has hands on his belt and it feels familiar and at the same time just plain odd. Daniel knows that the oddness is probably the lack of complication - they’re both comfortable with this, and neither expects anything more than what it is. Everything else in his life is so complicated that he’s not sure how to respond when something isn’t.
“How long’s it been?” Daniel asks.
“Since us, or since?” Sam says.
Daniel groans when Sam’s fingers find that exact place at the dip in his spine that sets his nerves alight. “Forget I said anything,” he says.
“What happened?” Jack demands when they next receive his call.
“Nothing Jack. We’re just not fighting it anymore,” Sam says and she sounds so serene that Daniel almost laughs. They don’t ask to go home in that call and Daniel knows that is exactly why Jack opens the iris.
“We could use a couple more days.” Sam can’t help herself and Jack huffs and grumbles and says something about an emergency. They pack in companionable silence, and when Sam dials and sends her IDC through they get the go-ahead transmission.
“I’m thinking we should do this,” Sam says, looking at Daniel with her eyes bright. “This whole… holiday thing. I see your point about practicing doing nothing.”
“Don’t give me that.” Daniel rolls his eyes with a chuckle. “Another day and you would’ve gone completely round the bend.”
“God, yes,” Sam laughs.