fanfic, at long last!
So I'm in MA for the weekend and thus have yay internet, so I can finally post my sg1flashfic2 fic here. It is...
Daniel/Jonas. Eep?
"Pragmatic"
Rating: PG-13/R for sexual situations
Pairing: Daniel/Jonas
Spoilers: FiaD, DYK, Meridian, Redemption, Fallen
Season/Ep: 7/Fallen
Warnings: None
Summary: An idealist, a pragmatist, two scholars, and an amnesiac meet in an empty room.
Notes: for angelic_mexx
Daniel's first night back at the SGC, Jonas stayed in his quarters and read. He read Dr. Jackson's journal from the year that Sha're died. It was his favorite. Not because of the discoveries that they'd made, because of the naquadah reactors or Apophis's (third) death, but because... they were real. For a few months there were entries that seemed as real as Daniel talking earnestly in the museum in Kelowna, as real as the quirk of his smile that one night (long ago) when they'd eaten and drunk and Colonel O'Neill had been happy. Daniel as Jonas remembered him, Daniel writing formal, careful reports but unable to avoid words of longing and grief slipping into his prose. So while Daniel prowled the SGC and remembered all on his own, Jonas read.
At three in the morning, Jonas turned off his alarm (he'd forgotten to do that once, and the VIP who'd been staying in the room next to his had complained loudly. It had been the president), dressed in BDUs, and wandered into the hallways. He rarely did this anymore; he'd started sleeping normally again once he'd been given a place on SG-1. But tonight it seemed right. The world seemed to hang in jeopardy and so did Jonas's heart. It was an awkward feeling and no amount of careful thinking or desperate leap of speculation would remedy the situation. So he found the room where they'd stowed Dr. Jackson.
"Come in." Daniel sounded tired. His voice hadn't changed at all.
"Hey... Jonas?"
"Yeah. Jonas. Can I call you Daniel?"
"Uh, I don't see why not. So what do you want?"
"Me? Want? Oh, nothing much. A steady job. Lots of food. People to meet, places to go, a family, a nice girl, a nice guy, whatever."
"Must be nice."
Jonas didn't know what to say to that. He didn't think Daniel was being self-pitying, though he had a tendency towards that. Daniel went on. "To know what you want, I mean. I have no idea what I want out of life, you know. Am I going to go on doing this forever? Or was I planning on settling down someday? I don't even remember if I was in love." And it was tempting, it was so tempting. Jonas had spent a year proving to himself that he was a good man, and if he was totally honest, sometimes he still didn't believe it. Daniel was a good man, though. The best he'd ever met, the best Colonel O'Neill knew -- he'd said that once.
"I don't think you were," he said, and Daniel patted a spot on his bed. Jonas sat, stared at his hands, wished that he'd taken Teal'c up on that offer to teach him to knit. He wanted something to do with his hands. Daniel didn't say anything. Jonas realized that at this moment, he knew this man better than Daniel knew himself. Because this wasn't really Daniel, wasn't really Dr. Jackson. No one here meant anything to him. For once, they were all on even ground. He could tell Daniel anything and be believed.
"You liked cookies," he said. It was the most inane thing he could possibly have said, but there it was. Cookies. Chocolate cookies left in his stash. Can I eat them? Go ahead. He won't be around. They'd go to waste. It's your office now. "I kept your cookie jar full. We could have some now if you wanted."
"I don't think that - thanks, though. Just not hungry right now. And I'm not sure what cookies even taste like."
"Good. They taste good. Chocolate. You really liked chocolate. I brought some of your journals. They really helped me, to get to know you. I mean, I think. I might have this totally mistaken idea, but I think they might help."
"Ji -- Jack thought it would be better if I remembered myself."
He was too late. God, the man had been back for exactly eleven hours and already they'd gotten to him, initiated him into the secret cult of SG-1 as it was, with their thoughts of better and worse and moral dilemmas that simply didn't exist and their ways of looking at things as if they were battles to be won and natives to be converted. He hated it. He loved them and he hated the way they'd trained him tainted him.
"Well, if you change your mind. They're an interesting read, anyhow. And you'll want them if you recover your memories anyhow. There'll be patches, probably. I have an exceptional memory and even I find that they're useful once in awhile." He was babbling. It was ridiculous. Daniel wasn't looking at him funny though, just with an air of natural curiosity. Daniel didn't know this wasn't normal.
"Are you okay? You seem - I don't know. I would say you're acting strange onlyÃ- I don't really have any basis for comparison. You know?"
"I'm fine. Super. Keen. Do you want a book to read? Some tea maybe? Coffee? I don't want you to feel like you aren't welcome here. Everyone's really glad to have you back, Dr. Jackson."
"Almost like I was never gone, huh?"
"Yeah. Except for the gaps in your memory. Those are kinda noticeable. And I think you've put on a few pounds. Not that you don't look, gosh, you look great. Just different."
"You look great, yourself." That was when Jonas knew this wasn't Daniel. He'd understood it, before, because amnesia wasn't a difficult concept to grasp and he'd read about amnesiacs before, in the same notebook he'd been reading an hour ago. But he'd felt like it was really Daniel, somewhere beneath the really terrible jokes and the really hideous hair and the extra musculature. But Daniel wouldn't compliment another guy on his appearance. Even though he'd known him for only a few days, he knew, knew that Daniel wasn't that kind of man. So this wasn't Daniel.
"Thanks."
"Earlier, you said something about settling down, um, settling down with a nice guy."
"Yeah. They have a word for it here--bisexuality."
"What about on your world?"
"They call it inversion. Used to here, too. I'm an invert." A brief pause. "Do you remember anything?" Perhaps that segue was just slightly too obvious, but too late now.
"It doesn't happen like that. It's more gradual. I think and think and then finally there's a wisp of an image, or a word, and if I tease at it and try not to think about it for awhile, eventually I'll remember. Sometimes."
"Oh."
There was silence for awhile. What do you talk about with the man you replaced when he's about to take the place back, when you're slightly afraid of him and don't understand him and have no idea what's happening to him and he has even less idea who you are? Jonas thought about food and music and furniture and dirty books. "I like it here," he said.
"It's different," said Daniel to the ceiling. Well, Jonas had to give him that. It smelled antiseptic and people wore BDUs or scrubs and there weren't any goats. So yeah. Different. But that wasn't really the question.
"I bet."
Jonas had been bisexual--an invert--before he came to Earth. He knew that, because he remembered wet dreams that had unsettled him for weeks afterwards, and then the awkward admiration of a young man for his teachers. He'd had his share of girls, too. His share had been one, a silly, thin-lipped student even unluckier than he in getting dates. They'd slept together once or twice and he'd enjoyed it and thought he'd even loved her, but they'd drifted apart and he hadn't noticed or missed her when one day, he just hadn't seen her in a month and didn't care.
He'd never really been in love until Daniel.
At first he thought it was just that Daniel was Earth and Earth was enthralling. Daniel was secret cookie stashes and ancient alien artifacts and this wonderful collection of recorded TV specials that had aired on PBS about wildebeests and Pharaohs and Dizzy Gillespie, none of which Jonas had been familiar with. But when he read the journals, when he found a note written in the same marginally legible handwriting he'd become so familiar with, he felt a strange queasy feeling that was a mixture of guilt and admiration and desire that he had finally had to identify as love.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Daniel, and although it was a very personal question, Jonas didn't think Daniel meant to offend him, but was simply unfamiliar with proper social boundaries. Jonas understood that, as it had taken him a long time to learn those things when he was young. Things out of books and languages and math, he learned quickly, but things like body space and intonation, he never quite mastered.
So he responded to Daniel's obtrusive question with an over-revealing answer and said, "You."
"Ah." And after a pause, "So am I."
"About me?" said Jonas.
"Oh, no. I meant about me. Or about Daniel Jackson."
"Same thing?" said Jonas with just a hint of a question in his voice.
"I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out. The woman--Sam--she said I had a lot to learn about myself if I thought I'd ever take the easy answer, and that staying on that planet would have been the easy way out. She said coming with you was the most in character thing I'd done all day."
"Oh," said Jonas, and then for good measure, "oh," again.
"Though to be fair, it should be noted that the not-so-in-character things I did today--yesterday--included hitting on Sam and slaughtering a goose."
"You slaughtered a goose?"
"Yes, in the forest, before they found me. Reading its entrails was supposed to help me find out who I was."
"Did it work?"
"I didn't have time to find out before I was escorted back to the village by your friends."
"They aren't my friends. Just a bunch of jarheads."
"Yours more than mine, anyhow. Emphasis on your, not on friends. You, yours, belonging to you, to -- what was your name again?"
"Jonas. Jonas Quinn."
Daniel Jackson. Sam, Jack, Teal'c. We're explorers from the planet earth. Are you in any sort of position of authority on your world?
I'm just an academic. I do research, write papers. Interested in studying our history in recording our present. Sorry.
That's okay. I'm an academic too. I've got a book you might like to readÃ-
"Right. Sorry. I've had to learn a lot of new names today. And some old ones. Actually, I guess they're probably mostly old ones."
"No problem. Sure you don't want something? Candy? Chocolate? Flowers?" His little joke.
"Jonas, Jonas Quinn, I'm confused enough already and I think you've just made it worse. You're trying to flirt with me, aren't you?"
Shoot. "Well, trying being the operative word. Generally if the other person realizes you're flirting and calls you on it, it's not flirting anymore and is instead an Awkward Conversation. Not that that's really changing things between us, right now, but just for future reference. You might want to know."
"Is there anything else you wanted to tell me? For future reference? Like maybe there's a reason that I should know as to why you might be flirting with me?"
"Oh, no. Absolutely not. Nothing. Just me, being playful, that's all."
"I don't think I'd sleep with you, regularly."
"No, I highly doubt it."
"It wouldn't be right, for one thing, and for another, you aren't usually here, and for a third thing, I--"
"Let's just leave it at you wouldn't and spare my feelings, huh?"
"What? Oh. Sure. Sorry. I wasn't even really talking to you, just thinking aloud, trying to work things out."
"Ah."
"But I think I would sleep with you right now."
"You would?"
"I don't think Daniel Jackson would."
"Of course not."
"But tonight, you're my friend, and you're the only person who's offered me cookies, and so long as I'm not Daniel, there's nothing bad about it."
Jonas was idealistic, but he was also a pragmatic man, and he wasn't too proud to say "Sure," and he wasn't too callous to pretend he didn't enjoy it. But he wasn't so hard-hearted that he didn't regret it in the morning.
Additionally, I'm going to see Sumita tomorrow.
Daniel/Jonas. Eep?
"Pragmatic"
Rating: PG-13/R for sexual situations
Pairing: Daniel/Jonas
Spoilers: FiaD, DYK, Meridian, Redemption, Fallen
Season/Ep: 7/Fallen
Warnings: None
Summary: An idealist, a pragmatist, two scholars, and an amnesiac meet in an empty room.
Notes: for angelic_mexx
Daniel's first night back at the SGC, Jonas stayed in his quarters and read. He read Dr. Jackson's journal from the year that Sha're died. It was his favorite. Not because of the discoveries that they'd made, because of the naquadah reactors or Apophis's (third) death, but because... they were real. For a few months there were entries that seemed as real as Daniel talking earnestly in the museum in Kelowna, as real as the quirk of his smile that one night (long ago) when they'd eaten and drunk and Colonel O'Neill had been happy. Daniel as Jonas remembered him, Daniel writing formal, careful reports but unable to avoid words of longing and grief slipping into his prose. So while Daniel prowled the SGC and remembered all on his own, Jonas read.
At three in the morning, Jonas turned off his alarm (he'd forgotten to do that once, and the VIP who'd been staying in the room next to his had complained loudly. It had been the president), dressed in BDUs, and wandered into the hallways. He rarely did this anymore; he'd started sleeping normally again once he'd been given a place on SG-1. But tonight it seemed right. The world seemed to hang in jeopardy and so did Jonas's heart. It was an awkward feeling and no amount of careful thinking or desperate leap of speculation would remedy the situation. So he found the room where they'd stowed Dr. Jackson.
"Come in." Daniel sounded tired. His voice hadn't changed at all.
"Hey... Jonas?"
"Yeah. Jonas. Can I call you Daniel?"
"Uh, I don't see why not. So what do you want?"
"Me? Want? Oh, nothing much. A steady job. Lots of food. People to meet, places to go, a family, a nice girl, a nice guy, whatever."
"Must be nice."
Jonas didn't know what to say to that. He didn't think Daniel was being self-pitying, though he had a tendency towards that. Daniel went on. "To know what you want, I mean. I have no idea what I want out of life, you know. Am I going to go on doing this forever? Or was I planning on settling down someday? I don't even remember if I was in love." And it was tempting, it was so tempting. Jonas had spent a year proving to himself that he was a good man, and if he was totally honest, sometimes he still didn't believe it. Daniel was a good man, though. The best he'd ever met, the best Colonel O'Neill knew -- he'd said that once.
"I don't think you were," he said, and Daniel patted a spot on his bed. Jonas sat, stared at his hands, wished that he'd taken Teal'c up on that offer to teach him to knit. He wanted something to do with his hands. Daniel didn't say anything. Jonas realized that at this moment, he knew this man better than Daniel knew himself. Because this wasn't really Daniel, wasn't really Dr. Jackson. No one here meant anything to him. For once, they were all on even ground. He could tell Daniel anything and be believed.
"You liked cookies," he said. It was the most inane thing he could possibly have said, but there it was. Cookies. Chocolate cookies left in his stash. Can I eat them? Go ahead. He won't be around. They'd go to waste. It's your office now. "I kept your cookie jar full. We could have some now if you wanted."
"I don't think that - thanks, though. Just not hungry right now. And I'm not sure what cookies even taste like."
"Good. They taste good. Chocolate. You really liked chocolate. I brought some of your journals. They really helped me, to get to know you. I mean, I think. I might have this totally mistaken idea, but I think they might help."
"Ji -- Jack thought it would be better if I remembered myself."
He was too late. God, the man had been back for exactly eleven hours and already they'd gotten to him, initiated him into the secret cult of SG-1 as it was, with their thoughts of better and worse and moral dilemmas that simply didn't exist and their ways of looking at things as if they were battles to be won and natives to be converted. He hated it. He loved them and he hated the way they'd trained him tainted him.
"Well, if you change your mind. They're an interesting read, anyhow. And you'll want them if you recover your memories anyhow. There'll be patches, probably. I have an exceptional memory and even I find that they're useful once in awhile." He was babbling. It was ridiculous. Daniel wasn't looking at him funny though, just with an air of natural curiosity. Daniel didn't know this wasn't normal.
"Are you okay? You seem - I don't know. I would say you're acting strange onlyÃ- I don't really have any basis for comparison. You know?"
"I'm fine. Super. Keen. Do you want a book to read? Some tea maybe? Coffee? I don't want you to feel like you aren't welcome here. Everyone's really glad to have you back, Dr. Jackson."
"Almost like I was never gone, huh?"
"Yeah. Except for the gaps in your memory. Those are kinda noticeable. And I think you've put on a few pounds. Not that you don't look, gosh, you look great. Just different."
"You look great, yourself." That was when Jonas knew this wasn't Daniel. He'd understood it, before, because amnesia wasn't a difficult concept to grasp and he'd read about amnesiacs before, in the same notebook he'd been reading an hour ago. But he'd felt like it was really Daniel, somewhere beneath the really terrible jokes and the really hideous hair and the extra musculature. But Daniel wouldn't compliment another guy on his appearance. Even though he'd known him for only a few days, he knew, knew that Daniel wasn't that kind of man. So this wasn't Daniel.
"Thanks."
"Earlier, you said something about settling down, um, settling down with a nice guy."
"Yeah. They have a word for it here--bisexuality."
"What about on your world?"
"They call it inversion. Used to here, too. I'm an invert." A brief pause. "Do you remember anything?" Perhaps that segue was just slightly too obvious, but too late now.
"It doesn't happen like that. It's more gradual. I think and think and then finally there's a wisp of an image, or a word, and if I tease at it and try not to think about it for awhile, eventually I'll remember. Sometimes."
"Oh."
There was silence for awhile. What do you talk about with the man you replaced when he's about to take the place back, when you're slightly afraid of him and don't understand him and have no idea what's happening to him and he has even less idea who you are? Jonas thought about food and music and furniture and dirty books. "I like it here," he said.
"It's different," said Daniel to the ceiling. Well, Jonas had to give him that. It smelled antiseptic and people wore BDUs or scrubs and there weren't any goats. So yeah. Different. But that wasn't really the question.
"I bet."
Jonas had been bisexual--an invert--before he came to Earth. He knew that, because he remembered wet dreams that had unsettled him for weeks afterwards, and then the awkward admiration of a young man for his teachers. He'd had his share of girls, too. His share had been one, a silly, thin-lipped student even unluckier than he in getting dates. They'd slept together once or twice and he'd enjoyed it and thought he'd even loved her, but they'd drifted apart and he hadn't noticed or missed her when one day, he just hadn't seen her in a month and didn't care.
He'd never really been in love until Daniel.
At first he thought it was just that Daniel was Earth and Earth was enthralling. Daniel was secret cookie stashes and ancient alien artifacts and this wonderful collection of recorded TV specials that had aired on PBS about wildebeests and Pharaohs and Dizzy Gillespie, none of which Jonas had been familiar with. But when he read the journals, when he found a note written in the same marginally legible handwriting he'd become so familiar with, he felt a strange queasy feeling that was a mixture of guilt and admiration and desire that he had finally had to identify as love.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Daniel, and although it was a very personal question, Jonas didn't think Daniel meant to offend him, but was simply unfamiliar with proper social boundaries. Jonas understood that, as it had taken him a long time to learn those things when he was young. Things out of books and languages and math, he learned quickly, but things like body space and intonation, he never quite mastered.
So he responded to Daniel's obtrusive question with an over-revealing answer and said, "You."
"Ah." And after a pause, "So am I."
"About me?" said Jonas.
"Oh, no. I meant about me. Or about Daniel Jackson."
"Same thing?" said Jonas with just a hint of a question in his voice.
"I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out. The woman--Sam--she said I had a lot to learn about myself if I thought I'd ever take the easy answer, and that staying on that planet would have been the easy way out. She said coming with you was the most in character thing I'd done all day."
"Oh," said Jonas, and then for good measure, "oh," again.
"Though to be fair, it should be noted that the not-so-in-character things I did today--yesterday--included hitting on Sam and slaughtering a goose."
"You slaughtered a goose?"
"Yes, in the forest, before they found me. Reading its entrails was supposed to help me find out who I was."
"Did it work?"
"I didn't have time to find out before I was escorted back to the village by your friends."
"They aren't my friends. Just a bunch of jarheads."
"Yours more than mine, anyhow. Emphasis on your, not on friends. You, yours, belonging to you, to -- what was your name again?"
"Jonas. Jonas Quinn."
Daniel Jackson. Sam, Jack, Teal'c. We're explorers from the planet earth. Are you in any sort of position of authority on your world?
I'm just an academic. I do research, write papers. Interested in studying our history in recording our present. Sorry.
That's okay. I'm an academic too. I've got a book you might like to readÃ-
"Right. Sorry. I've had to learn a lot of new names today. And some old ones. Actually, I guess they're probably mostly old ones."
"No problem. Sure you don't want something? Candy? Chocolate? Flowers?" His little joke.
"Jonas, Jonas Quinn, I'm confused enough already and I think you've just made it worse. You're trying to flirt with me, aren't you?"
Shoot. "Well, trying being the operative word. Generally if the other person realizes you're flirting and calls you on it, it's not flirting anymore and is instead an Awkward Conversation. Not that that's really changing things between us, right now, but just for future reference. You might want to know."
"Is there anything else you wanted to tell me? For future reference? Like maybe there's a reason that I should know as to why you might be flirting with me?"
"Oh, no. Absolutely not. Nothing. Just me, being playful, that's all."
"I don't think I'd sleep with you, regularly."
"No, I highly doubt it."
"It wouldn't be right, for one thing, and for another, you aren't usually here, and for a third thing, I--"
"Let's just leave it at you wouldn't and spare my feelings, huh?"
"What? Oh. Sure. Sorry. I wasn't even really talking to you, just thinking aloud, trying to work things out."
"Ah."
"But I think I would sleep with you right now."
"You would?"
"I don't think Daniel Jackson would."
"Of course not."
"But tonight, you're my friend, and you're the only person who's offered me cookies, and so long as I'm not Daniel, there's nothing bad about it."
Jonas was idealistic, but he was also a pragmatic man, and he wasn't too proud to say "Sure," and he wasn't too callous to pretend he didn't enjoy it. But he wasn't so hard-hearted that he didn't regret it in the morning.
Additionally, I'm going to see Sumita tomorrow.