He couldn't stop himself from smiling.
Might as well stop himself from breathing. From living. Not that he'd been living for the last couple of days. Existing, yes. Everything locked up tight behind a Colonel Jack O'Neill shaped façade. But not living. No reason to.
Now…
He smiled at the airman on duty at the gate. Smiled at his own reflection as he checked his rearview mirror to see that Carter and Teal'c were still behind him. Smiled at Jenn, their usual waitress who showed him and Teal'c to their usual booth while Carter hit the ladies.
Was glad Carter wasn't there, actually, when Jenn asked, "So, will Dr. Jackson be joining you later?"
He kept smiling and lied and ignored Teal'c's interrogating eyebrow with the ease of long practice.
Carter caught him smiling during dinner. Carter -- her eyes pink and puffy, her sorrow at the lose of a beloved friend worn proudly -- had glanced up from pushing mustard around her plate with the tip of fry and looked lost. "What are you smiling about, sir?"
He watched a bead of water run down the side of his beer bottle and skitter wildly across the table, writing impossible patterns against the polished wood, and decided the truth would do as well as a lie. "I was thinking about Daniel. Remembering…"
"What?" Needing to know.
He softened the smile for her. "'You know, I would have asked him but I was too busy being unconscious after being shot with the zat you gave him.' "
Carter's lips quivered. "'The Phoenicians didn't use zeros.'"
"'What happens when you dial your own phone?'" When Carter looked as confused as he felt, Teal'c shrugged. "You were in Antarctica when he inquired."
That was going back a bit, he acknowledged as Carter smiled and said, "Anthropologists do it all the time."
And simultaneously, "Tastes like chicken."
Teal'c raised an imperious brow. "Indeed."
They were all smiling now.
And then Carter stopped. "How can the general think of replacing him?"
"He's not being replaced, Carter. We'll accept whoever they assign on their own merits. They won't be replacing Daniel because Daniel can't be replaced. He was..."
"Special."
"Unique."
He lifted his beer. "Ours."
Carter and Teal'c lifted their bottles. "Ours," they chorused.
He was smiling again as he added, "Always."
He carried two cups of coffee up to the rooftop deck, set one down on the small table, cupped the other between both hands as he sat and watched the stars.
After a minute, he came back to earth and smiled. The steam rising from the second cup of coffee was twisting in on itself.
"I'll talk to Carter tomorrow," he said softly. "She'll figure it out herself once she stops grieving but I don't like the thought of her grieving any longer than she has to. I'd have said something tonight but I wanted to talk to you first.
"Teal'c, well, he knows something's up. Couple hours of kel no reem and he'll likely have that whole Eureka thing going."
He took a swallow of coffee and stretched out his legs. "Look, I'm sorry about that stupid speech, that whole, come to respect you line of crap I was spilling. I was just… because what I felt… I mean, I couldn't… Oh, hell, you know…"
Impatience.
He couldn't blow this. Try again. Talk about him first, if that makes it easier.
"I know why you left -- you left because it was killing you to stay. I could see it on your face after Reese It was the way it had to go down. It's the way it's had to go down for the last five years. Over and over and over. And every time a little bit more of the things that made you who you are, the stuff that kept you on your feet and fighting injustice, and prejudice, and hatred, and aggression, and short sightedness, and me… some of that died. You were in so much pain -- not from the radiation, that pain you could have dealt with -- and you were so tired of it hurting.
"In the end, the only thing I could do was know that and let you go."
The mug was warm between his hands. He missed warmth. "I miss touching you." So quiet an admission he almost couldn't hear himself make it. But he knew he was heard. "Touching would have lead to holding would have lead to holding on. I wouldn't have been strong enough to stop. Not in that white and sparkly and oh so symbolic gate room. Not at any time during the last few years. And trust me, the way I hold onto things would have destroyed us.
"The way I *held* onto things. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks." He shook his head. "I can't believe that fucking t-shirt philosophy got it right."
He could feel the smug amusement.
"Yeah, yeah. *You* were right. *Again*. So… I've got five years at the absolute outside left on these knees -- then I'm flying a desk. You might remember my reaction to Doc Fraiser laying that particular bit of medical data on me. As I recall, it involved a lot of stomping around your apartment and a little bit too much pissy archeologist afraid I was going to break something."
They were smiling together now. He didn't know how he knew, but he'd never been so certain of anything in his life.
"Okay. Here's the deal.
"You've got five years to go wafting around the universe doing good deeds. Knock yourself out. God knows the place could use someone like you giving it a hand. It'll be a better place with you out there. " A long swallow of coffee. "I know I'm a better man because of you."
The other coffee had stopped steaming but he felt a gentle breeze against the back of his neck.
"Five years," he repeated. "And then you haul that sparkly white ass back here and we go on together. You and me. Because I am exactly selfish enough to think that you and me being together is one fuck of a lot more important than all the good you can do out there alone.
"Love has to count for something, Daniel."
He uncrossed his ankles, drew his feet in, and sat forward in the chair, staring down at his reflection in the last inch of coffee.
"Maybe I should've said something before but I always figured that since you knew… You knew while I was stupid and blind. You knew while I was running away. You knew while I found my way back to you. You knew when that was the way it had to go down. You knew and you waited.
"My turn to wait now.
"And I will wait for you because that is the least of what I owe you."
A glance up into the darkness and part two of what he was pledging.
"But Daniel, if you don't come back to me -- I don't give a crap about what the t-shirt says, I *will* come after you. I will go through that gate and I will spend my declining years searching the universe for you. I will follow every cockamamie story of a little white cloud who shows up in the nick of time to save the innocent, to help the helpless, to throw in a not very brief lecture on the cultural habits and mythological beliefs of people who've been dead for a couple of thousand years."
The only sounds in a Colorado night -- distant traffic, the wind in the trees, a dog barking…
*Don't be an ass, Jack.*
He smiled and stretched out a hand to touch… nothing. Everything. Promises. He could do five years standing on his head if it meant Daniel was waiting for him at the end of it.
"Te vas con mi corazon, querido."High school Spanish. How to impress the ascended linguist. The symbolic last swallow of coffee. "And just so we're on the same page, Daniel; count down started two days ago…"
--end--