It takes a couple of days to satisfy the medical personnel that neither Jack nor Sam will suffer long-term health consequences from their respective ordeals, but Daniel doesn’t have a lot of time to stop and think about it. Now that he’s got his head back on straight - got Jack back - he throws himself into helping get the program back on track. People take him more seriously now about his thoughts on the Antarctica site and the technology therein when they don’t have to factor in whether he just wanted access to the stasis pod and the SG-1’s frozen commander.
Elizabeth has been assigned to supervise the research at the Ancient Outpost, and she invited Daniel to come down and work for however long he liked before he even had to ask. Daniel is glad she’s being transferred there - mostly gad he’s not going to have to fight tooth and nail for access to the site - but he can’t help but be worried about where that leaves the SGC. He may have agreed with the others in the first few days of her tenure that she wasn’t the right person to lead the SGC, but he’d also been in agreement that they’d had worse.
“Hey, Daniel,” he looks up at Sam and Teal’c in the doorway of his lab, and after blinking for a moment pushes away the papers he wasn’t working on anyway.
“Hey guys,” he chirps with a little smile, “uh - am I late for something?”
“No, the colonel asked me to meet him here,” Sam explains, “I met up with Teal’c on the way, same story. I was hoping you knew.”
“Ah, nope,” he eyes his office and huffs out a resigned breath. It would have been nice to have been consulted about a team meeting in his office, but some things will never change. Hauling himself to his feet, he starts moving piles of books and papers and artifacts to uncover a chair for Sam, leaving the one in front of his desk clear for Jack. She smiles her thanks, and Teal’c settles in turn on the edge of one of the bookcases, a spot that has become his over time. The first few times this happened, they’d tried to use the couch but it was too far away and made conversation with whoever was relegated there awkward. So - that perch had become Teal’c’s, and Daniel’s subconscious had simply stopped keeping things close to the edge there.
“Good, you’re here,” Jack swings around the doorframe and shuts it behind himself, dropping unceremoniously into ‘his’ chair. Rolling his eyes, Daniel goes back behind the desk, resisting the urge to respond with something snarky.
“Sir, is everything okay?” Sam rescues him, leaning forward earnestly in her chair.
“No!” Jack pronounces, making Daniel’s eyebrows shoot up, but then he waves a hand in the air. “Yes. I don’t know.”
The rest of them share a puzzled look. “Perhaps it would help if you explained to us what is the matter, O’Neill,” Teal’c offered.
“For crying out loud, I’m getting there,” Jack snarled, but he wasn’t angry, he was frustrated, and none of them took it personally. Instead, they waited with varying degrees of patience, watching him scowl and consider his words. Just as Daniel was about to gently prompt him again, he sighed heavily. “They want to promote me, and put me in charge of the SGC.”
Silence. It takes them all a minute to process, and then they all speak at once.
“There is no one more worthy.” Teal’c, solemnly.
“Congratulations, Sir. That’s great news!” Sam, warmly.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Daniel, concerned because if Jack was happy about this, he would have mentioned it in passing like it wasn’t a big deal and then expected them all to move on like it really wasn’t.
Jack, still frowning, looks directly at him and then away. It’s a glance that means something; Jack had probably considered making this a private conversation, but for what it’s worth, Daniel thinks he’s right for it to be a team thing. It will affect the two of them in other ways they’ll have to work through, most notably making Jack actually his boss in a way he really never has considered him, but this feels right. “I don’t know,” Jack admits, picking up a statuette off of the desk and turning it over, before absently bumping it up against its counterpart on the edge of Daniel’s desk. “I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t know if I want it.”
“Maybe you should break it down to the pros and the cons,” Daniel suggests, because it seems Jack’s reluctance has left Sam and Teal’c momentarily speechless. He takes the second statuette into his own lap, because Jack seems at risk of damaging one or both of them.
“I've spent my whole life sticking it to the man,” Jack complains, and it’s that moment that Daniel realizes that it’s not that Jack doesn’t want the promotion, it’s that he’s worried he won’t do a good job. It takes a lot to dent the colonel’s ego, but Hammond’s shoes will be hard to fill. “If I do this, I'll be the man. I don't think I can be the man.”
The three of them exchange looks again - Daniel relaxing when he realizes they’re all on the same page. It...sucks, the sudden realization that their time as SG-1 will be coming to a real and abrupt end, but none of them think Jack isn’t the best person for this job if Hammond isn’t going to do it. “You'll be inheriting a pretty big can of worms with the state of affairs out there,” Sam offers a ‘con’, but it’s a pro disguised as a con - Jack can never resist a challenge.
“If Ba'al truly is on the verge of dominance of the System Lords,” Teal’c picks up the game, “we face a formidable challenge ahead.”
“Plus,” Sam adds, “who knows where and when Fifth and the other replicators will turn up.”
“Here on Earth, we've never been under so much scrutiny as we will be, now that so many governments know about the Stargate,” Daniel muses, thinking someone should offer Jack at least one real con - dealing with diplomats and ‘paper-pushers’.
“I've never had a desk,” his partner bemoans, staring absently at the artifact he’s still holding.
Is this supposed to be on the list of pros and cons? “That's a…a…?” Daniel squints at the older man, wondering briefly if this is some state of shock.
“Con,” Jack asserts mildly.
“Con.” Daniel nods as if he understands, thinking that’s just about the least important item he can think of to put on either side.
“For the record, sir,” Sam sounds uncertain, but also as if many years of headaches are suddenly making sense to her. Daniel wonders if she’s never had the dubious pleasure of seeing Jack attempt to work in ‘his’ office; certainly, he never chooses to invite them there, instead going to their spaces like today. Daniel has tracked him down there before, but rarely and never because Jack invited him there. Come to think of it, he’s never seen another living soul in that office except for Jack. “You do have a desk.”
“I do?” Jack plays dumb.
“On the flip side of the coin,” Daniel interrupts quickly, not wanting to derail the entire conversation this way. Across the room, he catches Teal’c smirking. “There is the fact that nobody knows how this place should be run better than you.”
“Why, thank you, Daniel.” Their eyes meet again, and some of the strange shock-like quality has definitely gone out of Jack’s gaze. Daniel feels a little tremor work it’s way up his spine and he is suddenly looking forward to wrapping this meeting up and going home. And not by himself. Still, hard on the heels of whatever was charged in that look just for Daniel is a return of Jack’s peculiar humor, and so he hastens to qualify his statement.
“With a little guidance from your good friends and advisors, of course.”
“If you don't take the job, we could end up with someone much worse,” Sam offers earnestly, which they’ve all been worried about, but the phrasing could use some work. Jack says nothing, and after a quick glance at Teal’c, who is heroically not laughing or rolling his eyes at any of them though there is clear humor in his dark eyes, she backtracks. “Okay, that didn't come out right.”
“I, for one will miss you accompanying us on our missions, O'Neill,” the Jaffa says seriously. Another thing they’ve all been thinking, but nobody had wanted to venture.
“Yeah, now see. I'm not sure I'm ready to give that up, either. Sitting back, watching you guys go off and have all the fun.”
Thinking of the past month or two, that seems like an untruthful characterization of their jobs. Yes, sure, they wouldn’t be doing it if they hated it, but ‘all the fun’? “Risking our lives in the face of grave danger…” Daniel lets his words hang in the air.
“Yeah, that,” Jack glances at him again, but doesn’t seem as perturbed by the idea of himself in danger as he always is about Daniel in danger.
“Well, I'm sure there'll be situations in which you can accompany us in the field, sir,” Sam tries to reassure him. Hammond had very rarely gone off-world, but there were lots of reasons for that. He’d been ‘flying a desk’, so to speak, for a lot longer than Jack; he was older; he chose to do most of his own paperwork instead of delegating to subordinates in a way that Jack most certainly would not; he had children and grandchildren who expected him to be home and part of their family lives on nights and weekends.
That last was a bit depressing. Jack made time, it was true, for Cassie and occasionally his family, but he certainly didn’t have the ties to the world outside the mountain that George had. None of SG-1 does - something Daniel doesn’t like to dwell on, which is the only explanation he can come up with later for the next thing he says without really thinking it through. “You'll be in charge, you can do whatever you want.”
“I'll be able to do whatever I want,” Jack repeats, considering, and his tone makes Daniel straighten instantaneously with regret. Sam and Teal’c seem to experience similar feelings of alarm.
“Within reason…sir,” Sam tries to qualify, but they all know it’s too little too late. They’ll never hear the end of that unfortunate statement.
For Daniel, experiencing the deep regret of having uttered the words comes much sooner than for the rest of the team. That very night, in fact.
He’d allowed Jack to coax him into the bed relatively early on in the evening, and hadn’t particularly objected when his lover tied his hands above his head to the headboard. This was a game they explored sometimes, and giving control of their bedroom activities over to Jack wasn’t something he had ever regretted, exactly. But now his Colonel - scratch that, his General! - is knelt straddling him, his expert hands teasing. No amount of wriggling or squirming on Daniel’s part gains him any relief or leverage, and he’s well beyond hot and bothered.
“Jack,” he groans, jerking his arms against the soft restraints when his partner pulls his hands away again.
Above him, Jack only smiles. It’s not a threatening expression, but it certainly has some hard edges. It would be thrilling if Daniel wasn’t so damn frustrated already. “What was it you said?” he muses, putting his hands on Daniel’s hips. “I think it was ‘you can do whatever you want’. Remember that, Daniel?”
The archaeologist squirms again, but he can’t get any traction to move between Jack’s hands pushing him into the mattress and his own fettered position. Collapsing back onto the sheets, he looks up into his partner’s face. “I also said ‘with a little guidance’,” he growls breathlessly, “from your friends and advisors.”
Jack hmm’s in speculation, moving just his thumbs in warm, sure movements just too soft to be anything but taunting. “I think I’m doing okay right now,” he says thoughtfully.
“I’m going to hurt you if you don’t do something,” Daniel tries to sound menacing, but Jack’s smirk tells him he was probably unsuccessful.
“Are you threatening a superior officer, Doctor Jackson?”
“I’m not,” he makes a final attempt to force Jack’s hand, throwing his whole body against Jack’s and against his bound wrists, “military, Jack!”
“Maybe not,” his lover agrees, “but you’re mine anyway.” Jack leans in close, putting his mouth near Daniel’s ear. “Right Danny?”
Later, when Jack is laughing about it, he’ll plead temporary insanity - new-General-induced - but right now all he can think about is making an impression. To that end, he takes advantage of Jack getting so close in a way he hadn’t before.
He bites him.
Not hard enough to break skin, more of a nip really, but sinking his teeth hard enough into the tender place where neck meets shoulder that Jack rears back with a surprised yelp, and then shakes his head in feigned disappointment. “Really, Doctor Jackson, all of your talk about using our words, and when push comes to shove, you still choose violence.”
Jack’s hands leave his hips, sliding up his sides and then back down his chest, and down, and down, and then he stops again the utter bastard. Daniel gives up - he knows how to get Jack to stop, or rather how to go and it’s never been making threats, as hot as it is to rile him up. He arches into Jack’s hands and pleads. “Please. Jack, please please please please.”
Kissing him again, Jack acquiesces.
