It’s weird, trying to find a place amongst these people. He remembers language (so much language, and most of them languages these strangers don’t even speak) and he remembers things; he seems to have all the skills required of a fully-functioning adult, but he doesn’t know his own name. He doesn’t know how he got here, or why he was naked, or how he knows the few things he does. 

They’re a little wary at first, but they take him in anyway. They give him a place to live, productive tasks to contribute to their society, even a name (though he’s still not sure if they chose it because it was accurate or if it was supposed to be funny). 

Despite all of their kindnesses, he knows he doesn’t belong here. Unfortunately, without the ability to remember where he does belong, these people are all he has. He wanders around in a sort of confused fog, doing whatever tasks they find fitting for him during the day. At night, he retires to a lonely tent by himself and he dreams. He knows he dreams, but infuriatingly, he never remembers any of them.

The day that the Chappa’ai comes to life is the first time he thinks he almost remembered something. The big stone ring has always felt strangely familiar to him, ever since he arrived. It has been a covert interest, for the most part, sitting quietly alone and staring at the ring, because the people of Vis Uban are wary of his obsession. He’s foraging out in the forest on the day when he hears the sound and he quickly abandons his task, hurrying through the trees. 

Preoccupied, he comes face to face with the men in their strange green clothes before he’s even aware of them, and he freezes. Guns, his mind supplies, though since the Vis Ubans have nothing of the sort, he isn’t sure why he knows that. The young man closest to him is already lowering his weapon, his eyes wide. He tilts his head a little and licks his lips, saying, “Uh, hi.”

“Doctor Jackson?” The other young man sounds confused, but a little hopeful. 

“Uh...no,” he answers, but at the way their faces seem to fall, he rushes on to clarify. “I mean, uh, I don’t know. But I have some sort of amnesia, and I don’t know who I am, so…” he looks around, but if any of the other villagers heard the Chappa’ai, they haven’t come to investigate. “Do you know me?”

They exchange a look, and the one who was in closest to him says, “Can you wait here a second, sir?” The two of them beckon over some companions, whose eyes go just as wide at seeing him standing there, and they have a hushed but urgent conversation. Finally, one of them turns back to him. “I think you better come with us if you don’t mind?”

He’s bemused but uncertain of refusing this group of armed people. He feels like they aren’t a threat to him, but it makes him nervous that he doesn’t know why he feels like that. So he follows the young soldier back to the village, the rest of his unit meandering along with them. 

When they come down the stairs in the village proper and turn the corner, the first thing he notices is that there are more strangers dressed in the same green clothes huddled with some of the village leaders. This must be why nobody else had come to the Chappa’ai - the strangers had already come to the village. His young guide seems excited, calling out to the group, and he follows the boy’s gaze to an older man who steps forward ahead of the rest.

“Daniel?” the man says, and his voice wavers on the name like it means something truly special to him. Something in him shifts, his heart racing at the sound of the man’s voice, and he’s overcome with a rush of emotions he hasn’t felt since waking up in this strange forest. Safetyaffectionlovesadnessfear. Almost without thought, he walks closer, trying to get close enough to see the man’s features. 

“Arrom,” comes Khordib’s voice from behind the man, who whirls around. 

“Arrom?” The man demands, sounding incredulous. 

“It is what we call him,” Khordib supplies helpfully with a laugh in his voice, while Shamda adds, “It means naked one.” The man turns back to stare at him, and he looks away, uncomfortable. He’s not sure why their leader felt the need to add that part of the story, anyway.  Then Khor continues with, “That is how we found him in the forest, two moons ago.”

Has it really been that long? That short? It feels like forever and yet no time at all that he has been the strange, memoryless stranger amongst these people. “It seems he doesn’t remember who he is,” the young soldier from the Chappa’ai supplies, still sounding rather proud of himself. 

“Daniel?” It’s a woman’s voice this time, but he has to squint to make out that, yes, one of the company is a woman. It’s a little clearer when she tries to walk up and reaches out touch him, all smiles. “It’s okay, it’s me, Sa-” Startled, having not been touched since he woke up here, he shies away from her hand. He doesn’t think he likes to be touched. 

A traitorous part of his mind supplies that he wouldn’t mind if the older man’s hand came down on his shoulder, but he doesn’t want the woman to touch him. He holds up a hand, flinching, preventing her from making the contact. She looks terribly upset, and his stomach clenches painfully. Clearly, that was the wrong answer. He looks at her again, and something stirs in his head - there’s almost a memory, a hint of a bright smile below her blue eyes - but then a lancing pain.

“Do you not recognize us, DanielJackson?” asks the big dark man who has been silent until now, and something in him recognizes that voice too, with the same mix of conflicting feelings; trustloyaltybetrayalfearlove. 

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out. The feelings with no memories to back them up is overwhelming. His head starts to spin, the lancing pain of oncoming migraine threatening to send him to his knees, so he flees the scene, heading for his tent, and some privacy to freak out about everything that is happening. But before he can get out of earshot, the older man calls out.

“Not even me?” The tone of voice makes him shiver but also want to run back and beg the man to keep talking until he remembers everything. Not allowing himself to look back, he flees to the safety of his tent. His world has been so simple since he came here, nothing to worry about except quietly pulling his weight amongst the tribe, and now that peace is torn to shreds. It might be nice to remember if these indeed are his people. But what if he doesn’t remember them for a reason? 

He is afraid. He knows a little about amnesia, and it doesn’t usually happen because life’s been peachy.

Jack regrets the sarcastic demand of ‘not even me?’ as soon as it leaves his mouth - he doesn’t need Teal’c’s judgmental raised eyebrow for that. Daniel’s already fled, losing himself in the crowd, the older man following close behind. All he wants is to run after his partner, but Reynolds is nearly vibrating tension on the steps, and the two local men they’d been conversing with are staring intently at him. “What do you mean, you found him?” he demands.

The villager they’ve been dealing with so far tilts his head back and points at the sky. “There was a flash of light, and then there he was. Naked as the day he was born, lying in the forest.”

“He doesn’t know who he is?” Carter looks over at Reynolds, who shakes his head.

“No, ma’am. It seemed like he maybe recognized the uniforms. He wasn’t afraid of us or the P90s, but he didn’t respond to his name at all, or recognize any of us personally.”

“Arrom doesn’t remember anything,” says the young man who had greeted them, stepping towards Jack. “He knows many things - tasks and languages and stories - but it is as if he was created a full-grown man and abandoned here.”

Jack looks at Sam and Teal’c, who stare back at him. They’re all very much in shock, but their shock isn’t helping Daniel or getting their job done. He takes a deep breath and turns back to Reynolds and his company. “Go back to the Gate, and continue your tasks.” They salute and march off, and he turns back to his own team. “Carter, Jonas, Teal’c, go ahead and work on the original mission objectives here for a while. I’ll go…” he looks over towards where Daniel had disappeared, and helplessly shrugs a little, “...see if I can jog our boy’s memory.”

That’s not what he’s thinking at all. What he’s really thinking about is grabbing Daniel in a tight embrace and never letting go - the only thing that stops him, forcing him to take it slow, is that he just watched Daniel shy away from contact with a woman who might as well be his sister; whatever is going on here, it’s clear Danny is going to need some special handling. 

Khordib volunteers to show Jack to Daniel’s tent, and the colonel thanks and dismisses him once they’re close enough, so he can wander in alone. It’s a generously sized tent; it seems these people have been taking pretty good care of Daniel. Daniel who is, currently, sitting in the gloomiest corner of the tent, hunched over his legs. He looks up at the sound of Jack’s entrance and then looks away, holding up a hand as if he needs to physically keep Jack at bay. “Please leave me alone,” he says, but the tone doesn’t match the words. 

Danny is scared. Jack can hear it. But they’re not giving up without a fight, and they’re not going home without Daniel. “I’m Jack O’Neill,” Jack ignores the request and moves slowly over to the corner of the tent, lowering himself to sit. “And, barring some freakish similarity, you are Doctor Daniel Jackson.”

It’s a little hard to see in the dark of the tent, but the way the light shines on one side of his face from a narrow opening in the canvas above them makes it look like Daniel is barely holding back tears. “This tent is all I know,” he whispers, “and these people, they're all I know. Before I woke up in the forest, I don't remember anything. I've tried. I've tried to remember who I was before. Sometimes I think it's right there, floating in front of me, and all I have to do is reach out and grab it. I try—and it's gone.”

Jack takes a breath and leans forward. Keep it simple, he thinks to himself. Vaguely, he thinks he remembers reading about how you were supposed to let amnesia patients recover their memories naturally. “You were a member of my team, SG-1. You're a friend of mine. Last year, you died.”

“I'm dead?” Daniel asks, looking startled and concerned.

“Obviously not,” Jack looks up into uncomprehending blue eyes. “You just sort of died. Actually, you…ascended to a higher plane of existence. Last time I saw you, you were helping us fight Anubis.”

“Anubis?” 

“Yeah.” So much for keeping it simple. “Kind of an over-the-top, cliché bad guy. Black cloak, oily skin, kind of spooky. Anyway, obviously since then, you've retaken human form, somehow. I…” Jack pauses, gives a quick shake of his head to clear his thoughts and looks up at Daniel. The man is looking away, clearly more than a little skeptical of Jack’s tale. “Actually, I can how this might sound a bit unusual.”

“A bit?” Daniel rolls his eyes, and Jack has to bite back a grin at the familiar sarcastic attitude. “Why am I here?”

“Hey,” he spreads his hands in a wide, flat arc, “why are any of us here?” Daniel looks away, scowling, and Jack has to grimace as well. This isn’t going smoothly. He’s seen flickers of recognition in the man - any mention of the Stargate, the SG-1 uniforms, Anubis’ name; but he seems to have no memory of individual people. “Honestly, I don't know, but you've got to trust me. You are Daniel Jackson. Think of it this way: out of all the planets in the galaxy, why this one if not for us to find you?”

Jack points at him and watches closely as Daniel lifts his head to look at him. “So you're saying a higher power had a hand in putting me here?” the archaeologist asks skeptically. 

“I don't know.” What he does know, is that he needs to be as honest with Daniel as he can. There are enough things that he can’t tell him, he doesn’t need questions about the things he can muddying the waters if Daniel starts to remember. “That was generally your department.”

The frown on Daniel’s face only deepens, heavy shadows forming in the creases on his forehead, but it’s Daniel’s puzzle face, not the sadness from when Jack first walked in, so he feels a little calmer about it. Taking a chance, he reaches out and lays his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. He’d prefer to wrap it around the back of his partner’s neck, gently massage the pressure points there, but that would be pushing it. Daniel looks at his hand and then lifts his eyes to Jack’s, but doesn’t shrug the hand off, which feels like a great success. 

Jack squeezes Daniel’s shoulder, once, firmly, and then stands up. “I’ll leave you with your thoughts,” he pauses and then adds, “We’d like you to come home.”

As much as he doesn’t want to be, he is drawn to these people. Even without a single memory of them, he feels like he knows them. Sometimes, before they speak, he knows what they will say. It’s the most disorienting sense of deja vu. When their leader - Jack, not Jim - leaves the tent, it’s not very long before the woman - Sam - comes in to make her impassioned plea. When she’s describing him, it sounds like she’s describing a hero from a folk tale, not a person. 

Still, something about the way she’s looking at him is so intense. There’s a faint sense of affection, of recognition; but a comfortable one. The feeling he’d gotten off of Jack had been brighter, but less comfortable, his stomach clenching and heart racing under the older man’s dark eyes. Daniel believes he and Sam were friends, but he’s convinced he and Jack were. And he knows he’s not a fan of the military, so he’s hesitant to put himself in the hands of this military unit when he doesn’t remember them. 

Whatever else he’s thinking about, his feelings for these people have been stronger than anything he’s felt in the two moons he has been in Vis Uban. Perhaps that is what makes him ask Sam whether they’d been in a relationship, which is so disturbingly forward that he has to fight not to blush when she turns back, surprised. But it doesn’t clear anything up - as she ducks out of the tent, he turns the way she’d said “Us?” in that shocked tone over and over in his head. 

It was a tone of voice that said that while she may not have been his lover, she knew more about the subject than she was letting on. 

Had he left a partner behind in their world, as well as a team that claimed to miss him and a job that sounded (if he was being very honest with himself) utterly fascinating? 

If he had left a partner behind, didn’t they deserve for him to come home? Even if he never remembered them, wouldn’t the closure be better? 

In the end, that’s what decides him. Before he can change his mind, he gathers up what few personal things he has acquired in his time with the tribe here and shoves them into a leather satchel he’d been gifted to do his gathering. He has barely anything, a journal and a few odds and ends, but he refuses to think about how depressing that is. Everything else they have given him to live - the clothes, the kettle and pan, the bedding...Daniel leaves those behind. They can serve the next poor soul adopted into this kind tribe. If he is the strangers’ Doctor Daniel Jackson, hopefully, they have saved some of his clothing and other belongings for him. 

As he looks out of the flaps of his tent at the place he has called home for literally as long as he can remember, he spots them easily. Sam and Jack have been joined by the other two members of the four-man team, who seem to be giving an update on their finds in the ruins. The big dark man’s voice carries over the younger man’s all the way to Daniel.

“What of Daniel Jackson?”

“He's going home,” he steps out into the sunlight as they look over, giving a brisk nod when he can’t summon a smile and watching their reactions. Sam grins, and so does the young man (Joe? James? He doesn’t remember). The big man gives a quiet little smile and inclines his head, a solemn gesture but one that doesn’t lack any of his companion’s warmth. Daniel observes all of this, but his focus is on their leader. The man gives him a long, slow look, and then smiles as he turns away, frustratingly hiding the rest of his reaction.

The medical examination is disturbingly thorough, but he has no complaints about the bedside manner of the petite doctor who performs it. She notices right away that the stares and whispers of the nursing staff are getting to him, and she sends them away and takes him to a slightly more private corner to finish. She - Janet - keeps up a gentle running commentary while she works. He doesn’t have the information to comprehend half of what she says, but it’s nice to have someone treat him mostly as if everything was normal. He gets that strange disconnect again - if he zones out a little, everything about this feels completely normal, but when he tries to focus on remembering anything specific about her, the pounding headache threatens to resume. 

It’s easier, in the end, to just sort of float along half-aware of what’s going on around him. 

Jack walks in just as she’s wrapping up, and she addresses him in a way that makes it seem as if she’s always given him updates on Daniel’s health directly. Daniel supposes he was under the man’s command, but it feels more informal than that. It’s another piece of a puzzle that he can’t even begin to put together. When she hands him the pair of glasses, and he gets his first clear look at the man, and his first thought is, when did his hair get so gray? It comes out of his mouth before he thinks about what it will sound like. “Has your hair always been that way?”

“What way?” Jack looks clueless, and the moment of recognition passes.

“Nevermind,” Daniel shakes his head and looks back at the doctor. She smiles a little wistfully at him but clears him to go. He wonders if she, too, is a friend who is going to be bothered that he doesn’t remember, or if she’s just his doctor.

Jack takes him to a room filled with random things, supposedly that belong to Daniel. At first, he seems content to stand in the middle of the room, watching Daniel move around and look, picting things up and seting them back down, until Daniel zeros in on the framed picture on the nightstand and picks it up. “I know her.” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as a statement, more of a question, but he does feel like he recognizes the beautiful woman in the photo.

“Really?” The hopeful tone of Jack’s voice makes him realize his mistake, and he looks over at the man across the room. It was a small room when they walked in, but the distance suddenly feels enormous. 

“I mean, I must, right?” Jack had just said these were his personal things - why would he have a picture of a woman he didn’t know? But his brain doesn’t supply any information about her besides recognition and a very faint sense of melancholy. 

“Yeah…” Jack looks away while he responds, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. His open, cheerful body language is suddenly very closed off, and he turns slightly away from Daniel. The sense of loss takes his breath away. 

“Who is she?” He’s already tired of the ‘remembering will come in its own time’ advice that Janet had just given him. They all know - why can’t they just tell him about himself? Surely he has a length, detailed personal life history on file with the air force. Maybe he can get his hands on it. “What’s her name?”

The older man’s eyes are steady on his face, solemn, and with something else behind the solemnity. Is that sadness? Over Daniel? He doesn’t understand it. “You tell me,” he says quietly, and then leaves, closing the door behind himself before Daniel can object. 

He dreams of the woman in the photo. Little bits of this and that, overlaid with a deep sense of affection. He wakes, and he knows her name. The first thing he wants to do is tell Jack - but he has no idea why, and anyway, the airman outside his door tells him that ‘Colonel O’Neill’ has gone home for the night. Something of how lonely and adrift he feels as she finishes making that statement must show on his face because the young woman tells him that Teal’c’s in his rooms on the base, and how to get there. 

Teal’c confirms that he wasn’t imagining things about the woman in the picture, and then Daniel convinces him to tell him about things that are going on around them. The man stubbornly refuses to tell Daniel anything about Daniel, but he’s willing to share information that is purely non-personal. Which is ten steps ahead of where he was before they chatted. He also invites him to sit down and join him in meditation - and admits solemnly that it was something they have often done together. So Daniel settles across from him, watching the warm glow of the flickering candles on the man’s face, and lets himself accept the peace of the meditation.

It gives him the confidence to go to the briefing about the project, though he wasn’t invited. He’s still getting flashes of recognition as he walks the halls - a sign here, a face there. 

He sits down next to Sam, trying not to look up at Jack even though he can feel the other man’s eyes on him. There’s a sense of irrational hurt at the fact that the man had walked out of his room yesterday and not returned or sought him out; irrational because he knows nothing about this man. Maybe they’re not even friends. Daniel supposes that whatever glowing things Sam had said in the tent on Vis Uban, maybe working for the military comes with working under a commander who doesn’t like him. That doesn’t explain the feelings he’s been having, though - those would be better explained by a strong relationship with the man. For some reason he can’t even explain to himself, he chooses to needle Jack again in retaliation for the day before and pretends he doesn’t know his name. 

Jonas’ translations are wrong. Or, well, Daniel supposes it’s his fault, since the translations that the other man was working from are his own (he recognizes his handwriting, strangely enough), and they are wrong. He can read the ancient now, as easily as his other 20-odd languages, and it’s not right. He explains all of that to the group around the table, shuffling the papers around in front of him. 

“So,” Jack says, and Daniel finally looks up at him, “the lost city is still lost?”

“I’m pretty sure,” he agrees, glancing at Sam who has gone still and tense beside him. She looks a little worried, but it could just be surprise that he can suddenly read Ancient. If his own notes on the subject are correct, he was mostly guessing before.

“You know, you told me to give Anubis that eye.” Jack leans forward across the table, sounding irritated. 

“According to reports from our allies,” Sam interjects, in a conciliatory voice, “Anubis is quickly conquering the other system lords.”

“He will dominate the galaxy in a very short time,” Teal’c adds, gravely. Daniel’s glad they are offering explanations because he’s still a little lost. Whatever he might be remembering, the recent past is still a complete blank. 

“I only did it,” from across the table, Jack’s voice is starting to rise, “because you said we could whup his ass with what we’d find in this lost city.” It’s accusatory, and he can feel his heart start to race a little, faced down with the frown on the colonel’s face. 

“Well if I said that the-then I hope i-it’s true, but,” Daniel looks around at them, seeking a friendlier face, profoundly regretting coming down to this meeting. “L-look, all I know is that the place you’re searching right now is not it.” 

“Then where is, ‘it’?” Nobody else will quite meet his eyes, and Jack’s question forces him to look back over. 

Daniel’s frustrated, still tired, and lost. He resorts to the first response that comes to mind. “Did I just say, ‘all I know?’,” he wonders aloud, looking over at Sam whose eyes are a little wide and then across to Teal’c, who is smirking a little (he thinks that’s a memory, too - Teal’c’s face doesn’t look that much different than before, but Daniel just knows he’s holding back a laugh). 

“Everyone, turn away,” Jack says, and Daniel’s eyes jerk back over to him. He looks pissed, and his voice is dangerously flat. “I want no witnesses.” The threat in the man’s words is clear. 

He definitely shouldn’t have come. Maybe he should have just stayed on Vis Uban. The barbed words hurt, and he hates that this essential stranger can say a few words and make his stomach knot like that. Looking down, he sits back in his chair and falls silent. As the meeting progresses he contributes only the very most vital of information about translations and escapes as fast as he can when the meeting is over. 

The plan is insane, but it’s the only plan they have. They’ve spent several days on it. Jack hates it, expressing his disapproval quite vocally, but he doesn’t have any alternatives to offer, so they’re moving forward. In between hours of working with Jonas on their part of it, Daniel has been reading and reading and reading. He finally convinced the General to give him access to his own logs and files, arguing passionately that the fate of this planet is surely more important than his own recovery, and he’s catching up on most of a decade of serving with SG-1. Thankfully, that doesn’t backfire on him. With each night that he dreams, and each hour he sits in meditation with Teal’c, Daniel remembers more. 

He remembers things in reverse. Inconsequential things come quickly and easily, filling his head with places and foods and faces of people he only knows in passing. After that, he gets a pretty good handle on most of his team. He remembers how much Teal’c loves to watch Earth culture movies with them, his ironic humor, and all the times they saved each other. He knows the joy Sam finds in a puzzle solved that has been eluding everyone else, he remembers sitting in a workroom helping her with her bike, he knows how much she loves her dad. He remembers that Jacob calls him ‘Danny’. He can picture General Hammond’s granddaughters and remembers going to the amusement park with Janet and Cassie. 

The slowest things to come have been memories of Jack. Daniel’s gotten only the tiniest snippets, and most of them have been feelings and not memories. The problem is that they’re often conflicting - he’ll remember a bone-deep, jump out of a plane on your word trust, and then he’ll remember a wave of profound anger. He’ll remember a smile that inspired a soaring joy, but then he’ll wake up from dreams he only vaguely remembers with yawning, heavy grief. So he’s been avoiding the man, uncertain still what their relationship was before but quite sure they have the power to hurt each other. 

Janet is extremely unhappy about sending him into the field ‘in his current condition’, but the plan hinges upon Jonas and Daniel being able to find the location of the shaft, and Jonas won’t be able to do any translating of ancient Ancient efficiently by himself, and his physical health is exemplary, so Daniel gets to go. They bring him to the locker room, where he’s somehow not surprised to find his name is still taped to a locker, or that it’s right next to Jack’s. He moves through getting ready on autopilot, his body seemingly remembering more than his mind does, until he happens to glance over out of the corner of his eye as he’s shrugging into his jacket to look at his team leader, and catches a glimpse of a picture hanging on the inside of the door.

It’s accompanied by a deluge of memories - before he can think it through, he blurts out, “That’s your son.”

“Yeah.” Jack shoots him a hard look and keeps getting dressed. 

“Charlie, right?” It’s awful. He has the memory of what happened, of their entire first mission, of another time when Jack O’Neill was uncommunicative and short with him. It feels like a lifetime ago. “He's why I know you. You took that first mission to Abydos because you thought it'd be…suicide.” The thought of Jack suicidal hits him hard and he shuts up, feeling like someone punched him. 

He and Jack...were friends. More than friends. Until they weren’t. Jack is the partner he left behind when he ascended. But...they weren’t exactly partners, not at the time. Jack was...complicated. But the idea of him dead makes Daniel want to scream.

His sudden silence seems to get the colonel’s attention, and he looks over. “Things change.”

Daniel remembers why he Ascended. He remembers the pain they caused each other. He remembers when he decided he couldn’t go on being in a relationship with Jack, and the pain is as fresh as it was the day it happened. It’s terrible cliche to say it’s hard to breathe, but Daniel has to remind himself to do so. He also needs to choke out a response for Jack, who is still looking at him. “Yeah, sorry,” he mumbles, and looks down. 

“You sure you're ready for this?” Jack sits down to lace up his boots, and Daniel takes a deep breath while he’s facing his locker. It’s still coming in waves - he remembers Ba’als compound, and almost losing Jack forever. He remembers knowing, as an ascended being, that despite the rocky shores their relationship was on, that Jack loved him. 

“Yeah, well, despite what you say…” Daniel noticed even before he started to remember that Jack talks a big game about this mission, but that he doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would do anything he truly didn’t believe in. “I don't think you'd be doing this if it wasn't worth doing.”

“Well, you obviously don't remember everything,” the man says drily, brushing him off. “You never used to follow my lead.”

“I didn't?” Frowning a little, he questions this; he remembers following Jack’s lead a lot. Not blindly, like a good soldier, but certainly in some situations. Perhaps more in personal situations than professional. That thought makes him have to fight against a blush - something must still show in his face because Jack shoots him a strained little smile that’s more a grimace and gets to his feet, heading for the door. 

He can’t let it go at that. 

“Hey, um,” he calls as the colonel’s hand touches the door, and Jack pauses, looking back, his face set in grim lines. Daniel’s heart jumps in his chest - if he’s only remembering a fraction of what was between them, he suddenly can’t imagine being Jack, and sitting around waiting for himself to remember, wondering what will come of it. He can forgive him now wholeheartedly for his standoffishness since they brought him home from Vis Uban, and regrets teasing him about forgetting his name. “I may not remember everything, but…I remember enough.”

He tries to put his heart into it. Jack’s answering smile is much more subtle than before, much quieter, but also more true. “Good,” he nods, and leaves. Daniel feels better about heading into the field under his Jack’s command than when he was mostly a stranger.