“No.”

The word falls flat between them. Any other time, it would have stopped Jack in his tracks – he might have even been relieved. This time, he’s not so sure. For one, because he can see the guilt and other feelings darkening those ordinarily bright blue eyes, and the whole reason this is a thing is because Daniel absolutely sucks at dealing with those feelings himself. The second reason is a little more selfish – he’s mostly calm now, calm enough to be having this conversation anyway, but Jack is still absolutely furious and a little bit in disbelief, and he fully intends to make sure his wayward archeologist doesn’t ever even consider doing something like this again. 

“No?” he repeats incredulously, leaning in towards Daniel just a little, wishing that the younger man was ever intimidated by his body language the way other people are. A little healthy intimidation can be good for the soul. “Daniel, you got yourself beamed up to a spaceship you knew damn well we were about to blow to smithereens.” Jack’s gut clenches in residual fear and fury just thinking about it. “If there has ever been a time you needed your ass kicked, it’s today.”

Daniel looks away, arms crossed defensively over his chest, choosing to study the carpet instead of Jack’s face. He’s been running from Jack for hours, choosing increasingly desperate hiding places until Jack ran him to ground in his own base quarters – clearly he hadn’t thought that Jack would dare come in here, because he hadn’t even bothered to lock the door (though Jack had paused to lock it behind himself when he walked in, startling Danny into leaping up off his bed). In most situations, he would have gone home and waited for Daniel’s guilt to drive him to Jack’s doorstep. However, this time Jack isn’t willing to let this fester overnight, even if their 0700 debrief with the General is a mere six short hours away at this point. 

“You told me to give you another choice. I did,” comes the sullen response, and Jack would have sworn on his officer commission at this moment that he can actually feel his blood start to boil.  

He takes a step towards the younger man, who takes a couple of steps away around the end of the bed, watching Jack warily out of the corner of his averted gaze. 

“Some freakin’ choice, between blowing up my best friend or losing thousands of civilians we were responsible for.” Daniel opens his mouth, and Jack pulls his hands out of his pockets to make a sharp motion for silence, scrutinizing his archaeologist to see if he can figure out what’s going on in Danny’s head. “I don’t want to hear any excuses neither of us believes. Tell me why this is different from the hundred other times you’ve put yourself in danger and why you think I’m not spanking you for it.”

If the kid’s face gets any redder, he might as well turn into a fruit like that girl from Willy Wonka who turned into a blueberry. While Jack is watching, his arms slide down to his side and he clenches and unclenches his fists, slowly building up to some sort of response.

“Don’t act like you care all that much, Jack! This thing worked because I made some assumptions about how you felt about me. But you know what they say about assumptions, and I’ve been corrected, so I won’t make that mistake again!” Jack was expecting some sort of stammered excuse – when Daniel basically comes up swinging instead, lashing out in rage, he physically has to lean away while he tries to comprehend this outburst. Daniel wildly rushes at him and Jack dodges, thinking he’s going to actually take a swing, but he recovers fast when he realizes that it was actually Daniel making a try for the door. 

He thanks the powers that be that he’d locked them in, because it gives him the seconds of advantage he needs while Daniel struggles against the heavy door without unlocking it to lunge forward and grab his arm, swinging him away from the exit and giving him just a little shake. “What the hell are you talking about?!”

“You don’t have to keep acting like you want to deal with my issues. I’m an adult, I can take a hint. I thought we could work together anyway, but I can see now that I’m just in the way.” Danny’s temper has always burned hot and fast, and he’s already pulling back from it, shivering a little and looking lost and small instead of livid.  “I’ll transfer to another team and get out of your hair. Just…leave me alone!” He tries again to duck under Jack’s arm and escape, but now that Jack’s onto him there’s not a chance of that happening. He might be steadily gaining muscle and technique under the rest of SG-1’s relentless instruction, but he still has nothing on Jack’s special ops training. 

“Oh, no you don’t.” He can feel the disapproval of his dentist as he grinds the words out, teeth clenched. He puts both hands on Daniel’s shoulders to manhandle him backward and then shove him down onto his bed. “Sit. Neither of us is going anywhere until you explain…all of that.” He finds himself waving a hand expansively and grabs a chair from the small table in the corner, spinning it around and straddling it, so close to the edge of the bed that the linguist can’t move without Jack gabbing him. 

“Jack.”

“Daniel.” Jack responds, simply raising a single eyebrow a lá Teal’c. When Daniel plays dumb, tilting his head just a little, he expands on the topic with a growled, “Explain.”

For his trouble, he gets the fiercest glare Daniel Jackson can manage, but it’s really wasted on Jack. It’s better to wait this out – Daniel will get tired of the stand off well before Jack will. This is a familiar dance, after all, and Jack has played both sides to his advantage. When he’s willing to be talked around, he can throw an opening salvo, and then stand back and let the younger man talk in circles until Jack feigns giving in. When he’s going to stand his ground, it’s better to wait for Danny to start filling the silence. When he truly babbles, he often says the things he doesn’t mean to say.

“Like I said, I made some assumptions. Don’t worry, even I have to take a hint eventually.” Jack might believe the dry and dismissive tone Daniel’s using, if he wasn’t glaring into the deep, unguarded hurt in Daniel’s eyes. “I don’t know why you played along for so long, but you don’t have to anymore. You won’t have to find any more ways to try and make me understand, and I’ll ask Hammond to assign me to another team since it’s clearly affecting our working relationship too.”

It’s quite obvious that Daniel thinks that made perfect sense, but Jack feels kind of like he did when he had the ancient database in his head; sort of like he’s looking through a window and trying to see what’s on the other side, but now the glass is frosted and everything is indecipherable shapes. He rubs a hand across his face, the frustration settling low in his gut. Something is seriously wrong here, and he has absolutely no idea what it is or even where to start. “I’m going to need the dumb colonel version, Daniel, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The look he receives is one of near contempt, and a little bit of something else, like he’s forcing Daniel to explain himself just to be cruel. “I thought we were friends.” Daniel mutters, like that explains a single damn thing. 

“Funny,” Jack says in a tone that spells out the polar opposite, and he can’t help the little bit of bite that creeps into his voice, though he chokes it down to a minimum. “Me too. When did we stop being friends, exactly?”

“Friends as in…more than…” The blush is back, full power, and he has to lean in to catch the rest of the mumbled words. “As in…nobody’s asking….we’re not telling…but I was in the observation room when…Anise….with Sam…” Jack gets a sudden, bat-symbol-in-the-sky size clue, but Daniel’s still muttering. He’s not sure SG-1’s silver-tongued linguist has ever been this incoherent, and he needs every one of five years of working side by side to translate. It doesn’t help that Jack’s only catching every few words even straining to hear, but it’s enough to start to understand what is going on here.  “And team night…Teal’c said….time loop…kissed Sam.”

Jack remembers both of these events in vivid detail, and allows them to replay in his head now to see if he’d fucked up that badly, or if it’s Daniel who has gone ‘round the twist. 

Pushing through the memories of self-doubt and recrimination he still feels for allowing his team to be exposed to possible Zatarc programming, he clearly remembers Sam coming to him right before he allowed himself to be subjected to Anise’s potentially lethal mental reprogramming and insisting that if he was more truthful about his feelings, the machine would stop indicating that they were compromised. What words had he used, exactly? “Because I care about her. A lot more than I’m supposed to.” Ah.

Okay, so he assigns equal blame to both parties for this one. It had sounded…well, it had sounded a little bit like a romantic attachment, but for cryin’ out loud, Daniel should know better. Jack cares about all of SG-1 more than he’s ‘supposed to’, and those feelings are returned; the team is like a family, and he has been known to bend or break the rules for all of them. 

Now, the time loop…that’s a different story, and the memories are still a little raw. Jack is still ashamed of how many times he let Danny get bowled over by the SF in the hallway, and guilty that he never remembered what question his friend had asked at breakfast that Jack couldn’t answer because he hadn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention. After Daniel himself had suggested somewhere near the beginning that they “could do anything for as long as you want without having to worry about the consequences”, well he and T had gone a little crazy. 

Yes, in one loop Jack had resigned his commission and kissed Sam in front of the entire control room. What Teal’c had apparently failed to mention when he retold the charming little scene for Daniel (and when had he done that, anyway?! Jack must have been in the bathroom or at the grill, and where had Sam been? If Teal’c had told her, he’s sure she would have punched him by now) was that Teal’c had dared him to do it in revenge after Jack had resorted to a dare challenge to get the Jaffa onto a bicycle. 

What even Teal’c doesn’t know about are the innumerable loops where Jack had gone back to Daniel’s office, disabled the security cameras, and kissed a certain infuriating anthropologist instead. He had never intended for Daniel to know about that – no matter how enthusiastic a response he’d gotten, Jack had never let those interactions get beyond kissing and maybe a little cuddling; he hadn’t had the self-control to stay away, but each time he felt like he was violating their relationship a little more.

So, that one’s on him. He never should have kissed either of them, and as much as he doesn’t want to, he can see where Daniel has drawn the conclusions he has with the information available to him. 

Jack scrubs his hands over his face and wants to kick himself – because he knows where the rest of Daniel’s nonsense had come from too. After the time loops, after he’d allowed himself to go back to Danny again and again, reality had felt like a bucket of ice water. Every time Danny turned to him with trust in his gaze on a mission, or his eyes lit up with some discovery, or Jack sauntered into his office and he was bent over some text or tomb with ink staining his fingers, Jack wanted something he knew he couldn’t have. 

Like the emotionless ape Daniel sometimes accuses him of being, Jack had convinced himself that Daniel wouldn’t notice when he subtly pulled back from their friendship to try and get himself under control. Groaning internally, he remembers some of those instances and has to admit that Daniel was very, very aware of Jack retreating. And of course he was – Daniel is pretty used to be abandoned at this point in his life, and all of his personal relationships are with other Stargate personnel, but none so close as his friendships with Jack, Sam, and Teal’c. He was an utter moron for thinking he could pull away from this friendship without Danny noticing. 

And getting hurt.

There’d been a definite spark of illicit warmth when they’d had to jump out of the plane to go fix the Russian mess, and an uncertain Danny had looked back at him for reassurance. Jack’d basically shoved Teal’c out of the airplane, because the Jaffa was balking on principle, but he knew Daniel was afraid of heights. His hesitation had been real and laced with true fear. But he trusted Jack enough that all it took was a look, one into which Jack put his best I would never let you do this if it wasn’t 100% safe, and Dr. Jackson had stepped off the metal floor and out into freefall. 

How had Jack repaid that trust? By doing everything he could to avoid Daniel in that Russian base, up to and including sticking him into an untested submarine and letting him float off into enemy territory with a Russian woman whose entire team was already dead. If the water hadn’t wanted to give them back in exchange for its own particles, in what he’d sarcastically dubbed a ‘prisoner exchange’ in part to hide his own overwhelming relief, Daniel and Sam would both have been dead. And then going off on his own for their entire two days of time off after that, to avoid both of them. 

Almost immediately following that, he’d ceded Daniel to SG-11 for the excavation of P3X-888. Jack hadn’t even put up a token protest, where usually he would have fought tooth and nail against Daniel going out with a different team, no matter how important Daniel said the discoveries would be for the world. At the time, it had seemed like a relief – a few weeks to get his own head on straight, letting Daniel play in the Goa’uld-homeworld sandbox while Jack figured out how not to act like a hormonal lovestruck teenager around him every day. 

Then Rothman had come tumbling down the ramp and Jack’s world had come crashing down again. He called himself every nasty name in the book (and some he’d picked up in other languages from Dannyl) for thinking another team could protect Daniel; Daniel whom the universe is definitely set against. With each mile they trudged across the alien landscape he’d made promises to himself that he’d stop pushing Daniel away when they got him back. They couldn’t have anything else – he was quite sure at the time that Daniel didn’t want anything else – but he could keep himself in check and keep his best friend safe and happy on SG-1. 

Jack thought that was the end of it all. He should have known better when Danny went off on his own to lick his wounds and grieve Rothman, instead of coming to Jack. Rothman might have been a major geek and a pain in the ass, but he was one of Daniel’s few friends from before the Stargate program, and still quite devoted to his mentor. Jack could never had made a different decision, but he regrets that it had to have been him who shot Rothman – just like Daniel had not held Sha’re’s death against Teal’c, he wouldn’t hold Rothman’s against Jack…but that doesn’t mean it hadn’t killed a bit of his soul. If he’d had any idea what Daniel was still thinking and feeling, he would not have let him out of arms reach once he realized that it was going to be a decision between shooting down the Gadmere ship and allowing it to kill all of the Enkarans.

Not that it excuses even a little bit of Daniel’s total disregard for his own life…but. 

But.

“Oy.” Jack blinks against his sudden and piercing headache, and shakes himself out of memories and back to the present. Daniel hasn’t moved, trapped by Jack’s position, but he’s leaning away almost imperceptibly, arms wrapped around himself in that tell-tale self-hugging position, head down. Well, the easiest issue to deal with first is the misunderstanding around Sam.

“Danny, Sam is like my little sister. We are closer than the Air Force regs really allow for, because I’m her commanding officer, but I’m not attracted to her like that. And I kissed her in the time loop because Teal’c dared me to. We did a lot of stupid stuff in those three months.”

A glance is thrown up at him, but it slides away as fast as quicksilver slides through your fingers, and Daniel says nothing. He’s always at his quietest when it matters the most. If Jack hadn’t been so self-absorbed in his supposedly unrequited feelings, he would have caught this sooner, just by virtue of long practice in Daniel-watching. 

He doesn’t have the words he needs to explain the rest. Everything that comes to mind sounds trite, fabricated to smooth this over but insincere. Jack needs Daniel to believe him, and to believe him wholeheartedly. He needs to undo several months of damage to their relationship, and fast. 

An idea comes to him, and he hesitates a moment. If the base quarters are secretly bugged in some security measure that goes over even his head, they’re screwed. Oh, to hell with it; let NID or the white house goons try to hold this up against how many times they’ve saved the world, Jack will sit back and laugh. 

Moving slowly, taking his time because this matters more than anything he’s done since Charlie died, he reaches out and puts a hand under Daniel’s chin, turning his face up to force him to meet his eyes, and then he smiles, trying to put all of his feelings into it. “I kissed Sam in the time loop because T dared me to. With you, it was because I couldn’t help myself. After the first time, I couldn’t bear not to.”

“J-jack?”

He finally has Daniel’s full attention, wide blue eyes filled with questions locked on his.  

“I’m sorry I’ve been a bad friend since Euronda. That’s when I realized you were more than my best friend, but I’ve been trying to keep it from affecting us. I didn’t think you were interested, and even if you were, I wasn’t willing to risk either of our jobs for it.”

“Jack.”

“Well you have to admit your track record doesn’t let itself to thinking men were your jam, Danny. Sha’re, Shyla, Ke’ra….”

Daniel frowns at him a little, his eyebrows drawing down tightly.

“I know, that was an assumptions on my part. They’re not exclusively your department.”

“You’ve been…” Daniel bits his lip, something shadowed across his gaze, and all of the pain of how distant Jack has been is written there for him to read. Jack takes that barb directly to the heart and accepts it. 

“I felt like an out of control 15 year old half the time, and pulling away was my solution. I didn’t realize how much it was hurting you.” Something calm is coming over Daniel, his body relaxing by minute increments. Jack goes quiet and waits to see where Daniel’ll take them from here. He might be willing to grovel, at this point, but there’s the unfinished sense that something is still on Daniel’s mind, and he wants to hear it.

“Jack?”

“Daniel?”

“Kiss me again?”

Well, that’s an offer he can’t refuse. If they’re being watched, he’s already incriminated himself, but he’s fairly sure the permanent base quarters are not under surveillance on the inside. “Yeahsureyoubetcha.” The catchphrase earns him a glimmer of a laugh, though brief. Moving slowly so as not to spook either of them, Jack raises his hand again to lift Daniel’s chin again and then leans forward, capturing his lips in a warm, unhurried promise of more to come. He ends the kiss and draws back before it can turn into anything more, giving Daniel a slow and lazy smile. 

“Wow.” The younger man looks a little dazed, swaying where he’s sitting, and damn if that doesn’t make Jack a little smug. Maybe he can feel a little less guilty about all the time-loop practice he got, if he can put that expression on Daniel’s face. Still, as Danny leans in towards him again, hands grabbing, Jack summons up all of his own self-control and gently pushes him back onto the bed. 

“We should take this slow. And we should definitely take it off-base. There’s a million reasons it’s a terrible idea –“

“Jack!”

“Ahht, no, listen to me. There are a million reasons it’s a terrible idea, so if we’re going to do it anyway we can’t be stupid about it.”

“Um, good point.” Daniel licks his lips, slowly, as if he can taste Jack there, and looks quite content for a moment. Jack allows himself to relax as well, slumping down a little over his arms which he crosses across the back of the chair. 

Daniel is the first to remember why they are here in the first place – Jack knows the moment he does though, because his pliant body stiffens; where he was unconsciously curled towards Jack, he straightens and bites his lip again, shooting Jack a few furtive looks through his eyelashes that Jack fields with a quiet, questioning stare back. What is Daniel thinking of now?

“You know, I really was just following your order…”

Oh. That. 

It has less bite after this emotional interlude, but the anger sweeps through him anyway, and Jack scowls at Daniel as the entire Enkaran debacle is pulled back to front and center of the room.

“Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the very best plan-“

“Ya THINK?” Jack’s voice rises of its own accord, and he stands up and shoves the chair back over towards the table, out of his reach as he considers the very real possibility that he might start to pace. Or strangle his best friend. “WHAT was going on in your head, Daniel?”

“Ja-ack!” The archeologist’s voice starts to rise in clear and impassioned self-defense, as if there is some explanation that will make Jack accept this was a good idea. “I really thought I could talk him into finding a new solution. I wasn’t in any danger from him!” 

“Yeah until we set the bomb and you were still on the damn ship! Five seconds, Danny-boy, that was the countdown I was on when your little pal managed to vet the naquadah bomb. I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO WATCH YOU BLOW UP.” He loses the battle for volume at the end, shouting at Daniel and then pausing, taking a deep breath and a moment to be thankful these rooms are soundproofed. “It was stupid, impulsive, and manipulative.  You thought since you weren’t getting your way, you could make me listen your way. What if the bomb had already been armed, Daniel? What if it went off while he was transporting it? What if he wouldn’t transport you back planet-side because of the bomb? What if Sam’s calculations were wrong and it went off early, and took you and the ship with it?”

Daniel’s squirming under his snarl, but Jack decides he can’t afford to sugarcoat this. This is increasingly looking less like a case of “Daniel knows what he’s doing and it’s better” and more of a “Jack hurt me so I’m going to lash out for the last word” sort of mission mishap, and at some point Daniel Jackson is going to run out of lives. Jack watches him sit miserably for a minute before crouching down so they’re at eye level once more. 

“I think you need a spanking. And if ever there was a time, I think you’ve more than earned a spanking, because being upset with me is not even halfway a good reason for risking your own life. I don’t appreciate the manipulation either.” What he doesn’t have to say as he waits for a response is that it doesn’t matter what he thinks, if Daniel still says no he’s not going to force this issue right now.  If he eroded the trust between them beyond this being something Daniel is comfortable with, they’ll come up with some other way to lift the weight on his tender soul. 

Just as Jack’s knees start to seriously object to his crouching position, Daniel seems to surface from some very far-away thoughts and oh so slowly, but with almost no hesitation, he nods.  

“Okay.” Jack stands, his knees cracking in protest, and glances around. Deciding almost immediately that the chairs are too flimsy for this, he reaches down and lifts Daniel to his feet, smoothly changing their positions and taking the archeologist’s spot on the edge of the bed. Daniel is still wearing his BDUs pants and black tshirt– apparently the likelihood of being cornered by Jack had been too high to go into the locker room and change – but he shed his jacket and boots by the door. Nimbly, Jack unbuckles the webbed belt and unfastens Daniel’s pants, swatting his hands out of the way when he tries to interfere. 

“Wait!” Daniel squeaks the word, grabbing Jack’s wrists before he can tug the clothing down and out of his way. 

Jack pauses, looking up at him, brows raised in polite question. He’s pretty committed to giving this spanking at this point and meaning it, but perhaps Daniel has changed his mind. 

“You can’t…this…not here, Jack!” 

Not an objection to the punishment then, but to the location. Jack snorts, twisting both hands to free his wrists and yanking pants and underwear down to Daniel’s knees before maneuvering him over his left knee despite continued hurried protests. “Yes, here, Daniel. We could have been doing this at home, but you spent six hours hiding from me instead of facing up to it. It’s two in the morning for crying out loud, and we’re getting this over with and getting some sleep before our briefing with Hammond.”

It feels a little different than all of their discussions on Jack’s couch. Daniel’s upped body is stretched out behind him, rather than just on the couch beside him, and he’s just across Jack’s left knee and not his right. He’s still squirming in Jack’s grip, trying to convince him to wait, but Jack plays deaf and just manhandles him until he’s happy with their situation. He takes advantage of having a leg free and moves it to trap Daniel’s legs, using that and an arm wrapped around his middle to mostly immobilize him, and then lets his hand start falling in crisp, measured strokes that echo a little in the small room.

Daniel is usually quiet for the first couple of minutes, but tonight Jack is spanking with a purpose behind each swat, a little harder than usual, and the boy over his knee is quickly gasping and making small noises of protest with every swat. 

Around the fourth or fifth circuit of Jack covering his entire target in layers of heat, Daniel’s bottom is flushed a bright pink, starting to shade towards red. The gasps are turning into slightly wet yelps, the first hint of tears in the dissenting vocalizations. Jack starts to pay special attention to the lower half of Daniel’s bottom and after a couple of hard smacks there, his hand flies back to protect his burning butt. 

Jack quickly pulls the offending hand away, smacks the back of it once, and then intertwines their fingers and rests both of their hands at the small of Daniel’s back and continues spanking, aiming to bring the color to an allover even red. For a moment the man in his grasp is still quiet, kicking his free leg and drumming his toes into the carpet, but on a particularly low swat to where one sit-spot meets his thigh, he opens his mouth. “Ow! Ahh! O-ow! NoOO, J-Ack! I’m s-sorry, please s-stop! Jaaack, owww!” The tears are right there now, threatening in every little wobble of his pleading voice.

“Sorry for what?” He doesn’t stop spanking but he slows considerably and lightens the swats, making more noise than anything else, just to keep the miscreant over his lap focused on what’s going on.

“F-for risking my l-life on a plan nob-body approve of,” Comes the first stuttered response, pitifully limp over Jack’s lap and voice dripping sincere regret. “S-sorry, J’ck, really.”

“What else?”

He has to think about that one and Jack maintains the slower swats. He’s pretty sure Daniel doesn’t even realize he’s not spanking as hard, each loud but relatively light swat still makes his body jerk and his breath hitch like a full-strength one. He’s about to open his mouth and give Daniel a hint as the younger man goes increasingly tense and nearly vibrates uncertainty over his knee, but on a sudden gasp he goes limp again. “S-s-orry for manipulatin’ y-you instead of admitting I w-was upset w-with you.”

“Our job is risky enough as it is. You can’t go tempting death like that. One of these times it’s going to happen, for real, and my heart won’t be able to take that.” Jack ups the tempo and heart behind each smack again, covering Daniel’s bottom and thighs in hard swats that make his hand hurt as well. There’s a brief and sincere struggle from the body under his arm and then the tears start in earnest, little  sobs that tear at his heart, and Daniel goes totally boneless and unresisting in his grasp. Hardening his heart against the miserable sounds – this is far from the first time they’ve been in this situation – Jack moves his leg to free Daniel and hitches him just a little further up over the bed.

“You. Almost. Died. Daniel.” He punctuates each word with a swat to alternating sit-spots, the hardest four swats he’s ever dealt out to the precious being in his lap. The fear of those few moments washes over him yet again, the heart-stopping realization that there’s nothing he can do, and for a couple of harsh breaths he bends over Daniel and tries to catch his breath, while his charge weeps quietly. 

Utterly disregarding Daniel’s state of undress, he wraps his arms around him and one smooth motion scoots back against the headboard and drags the kid up against his chest. He locks his arms around the archaeologist as tightly as he can and buries his face in Daniel’s neck, rocking him like that for a minute until his own heartbeat steadies and his breathing evens out, and then loosening his grip inch by inch until he can lay back against the headboard and run a firm, soothing hand up and down Daniel’s long spine as he continues to sniffle and choke back tears.

“Don’t ever do that to me again.” When he finally speaks, his voice is dry and hoarse.

Daniel, who is also finally quiet, one hand tangled in Jack’s shirt and the other absently rubbing his butt because Jack’s own soothing touch stays resolutely above the waist, looks up at him, and smiles a little crookedly. “I’ll try, Jack, but I can’t make the promise. I know you hate that.”

God, this man. Only this man would be that honest with someone who just lit an inferno on his butt. “Yeah, damn right I do.” It draws a strangled, half-horrified laugh out of the colonel and he leans down to lay his forehead against Danny’s. “At least promise me you’ll always stop and think things through. Don’t die for some stupid reason. And that’s stupid by my standards, Doctor Jackson, not yours.”

“Okay, Jack. I promise.” Daniel stretches a little bit and squirms down until he’s laying on his stomach, head pillowed on Jack’s lap, and scrubs at the tears drying on his face even as he yawns hard enough to look like his jaw will crack. “Stay a while?”

“I’m not going anywhere, Danny.” Jack kneads at a particularly stiff spot in the center of Daniel’s back and he arches against the touch like a pleased cat, and makes a sleepy sound somewhere in the pleased-cat range to accompany it. With his other hand, Jack reaches down to drag a blanket over Daniel’s lower half and his own legs, and by the time he’s done that Daniel’s eyes are closed and his breathing is deep and even. 

For a minute he just stares at him, memorizing every detail down to each eyelash, and then takes Danny’s glasses off of his face and puts them on the nightstand, dims the light, and shifts into a more comfortable position himself, shoving some of Daniel’s pillows behind his back and head. Coming up with an excuse for why he spent the night in Daniel’s quarters instead of his own will have to be a task for the morning, because he’s not far behind Danny sliding into peaceful sleep.