Work Text:
There is a tendency in the better examples of knotwork to achieve a single endless path, rather than a series of several separate strands in the entire composition. --Stephen Walker, Celtic Interlace
After he got into bed, Daniel curled on his side and closed his eyes and lay still, basking in Jack's body heat and rhythmic breathing, the comfortable, familiar bedding, the private darkness where no threats lurked. But the sprockets in his head wouldn't stop turning, projecting one glaring, vignetted scene after another on the backs of his eyelids.
"Can't sleep?" Jack said, from his face-in-the-pillow muffle.
"Thinking too loud. Sorry."
"Need to talk?"
"I just need to stop that mission looping in my head."
"Want a blowjob?"
Daniel got a hand free from the covers and reached up to give Jack's hair a fond scrunch. No greater love had any man than to offer oral sex when he was wiped out from nineteen straight hours of fighting to get his flagship team back in one piece. "I'll go work in the dining room 'til I'm sleepy enough to actually sleep."
"Enough with the work. Read a novel. Do a puzzle for fun for a change. The light won't bother me." Jack groped around until he found skin. "Rather have you here."
Daniel sat up and pulled the cord on the bedside lamp. Jack shifted under his blanket mound to press up close, and melted heavily back into sleep against him, content that Daniel had accepted the compromise. Daniel looked over and down at the nightstand.
Usually he could find something remotely interesting in Jack's bedside reading, in among the magazines devoted to hobbies he didn't share and professional disciplines he couldn't fathom. He liked some of the historical fiction Jack liked to read and some of the crosswords Jack liked to do, and if all else failed the latest National Geographic was usually somewhere in the mix. Getting Jack the whole run on disk before it had been officially released had been one of his better birthday-gift ideas, but Jack still preferred to read the new issues in hardcopy.
The stack was higher and wobblier than usual, and from this angle he couldn't make out the spines of anything but the John Ringo paperback on top, so he stuck the paperback behind the lamp -- the Mike Harmon books were Jack's porn du jour, and they stayed out of each other's stashes -- and hefted the whole pile into his lap over the covers. Aerospace America, no. In-Fisherman, double no. Sporting News no, non-swimsuit-issue Sports Illustrated no, Pottery Making Illustrated only in extremis. Games magazine maybe, depending on what was in the issue. Ultimate Sudoku, Nasty Sudoku, Fiendish Sudoku, no no no; stuff like that was what computers were for. National Geographic was last month's issue, which he'd already read; unusual for Jack to fall behind, yet another example of how the duties of bridgadier general were impinging on the rest of his life. They'd maintained their domestic arrangement in spite of it, and a little lag in reading was minor, but it did signify enough to make him sigh. Airman he probably should have been keeping up with all these years, but he had to draw the line between archaeology and Air Force somewhere. London Times crosswords, possibly ...
Under the crossword book were a couple of catalogues, Land's End with The Territory Ahead turned on an angle under it, and under those the trade paperback that had made the stack so wobbly, probably the novel Jack had meant, and under that more glossy saddle-stapled publications. But between the crossword book and the top catalogue was a personal letter, written with what appeared to be fountain-pen ink in an old-fashioned European hand on A10 paper. Air-mail paper, tissue-thin to begin with, and old now -- years old, dry and fragile, discolored along the creases where it had been folded to fit in an envelope the wrong width for it. It had been opened to read, and weighted flat again by the stuff piled on top of it. The green-striped border of the envelope showed through like a shadow from underneath, and he could make out the dark green print of PAR AVION and AER PHOST.
Confronted with what his brain instantly categorized as a piece of primary source of indeterminate age, he went very still. He wouldn't move, he'd barely breathe until he had a handle on what he was looking at and had mapped out action by action how he would move it out of harm's way. Move the rejected materials that were tipped up against his chest back to the nightstand, pick the letter up with the catalogue under it, slip himself out from under the rest of the pile without dumping it onto Jack or the floor, then bring the letter and its impromptu backing out to the dining room to place safely in the breakfront 'til morning, when he would ask Jack what the fuck was wrong with him, shoving something this precious into a haphazard stack of bedstand entertainment. Next to the perennially smeary bottle of lube ... in tipping distance of the water glass ...
His frozen stillness itself stirred Jack, who cracked an eye open and said, "Oh. Wondered where that went."
Suspicious of the casual tone, Daniel scowled down at him. "Did you leave this for me to find?"
Jack pulled a why-would-I-do-that? face. "Not even you can read that thing. There's a whole box of 'em in the storeroom, just -- "
"'O darling, my pulse, my heart,'" Daniel said. "'This letter will be the last I write you.'"
It was Jack's turn to go completely still within the quiet stillness of their bed.
"That's all I saw," Daniel promised, contrition somewhat dampening his outrage. "That's what my eye took in before I realized. It's obviously personal. Now I feel like I've been snooping, and if you wanted me to try translating it all you had to do was put it somewhere safe and ask me."
"Irish Gaelic isn't one of the twenty-five thousand languages you speak."
"I'm passably fluent in twenty-three Terran languages, twenty-four if you count American Sign Language, twenty-five if you count Jack O'Neill. I can read a lot more than that."
"Seriously?"
"Linguistic prodigy here. I'm a freak of nature. Deal with it."
"I've been sleeping with you for five years and working with you for almost nine. How did I not know this?"
"It's never come up on the job, and for some reason you've never asked me to read you the Táin Bó Cúailgne in bed."
For a long moment Jack didn't speak. He was looking at the letter, held reverently on its Land's End backing in both of Daniel's hands, with the flat expression that his face composed itself into when he was deliberately blanking all sign of emotion. Then he said, "Hold still," slid an arm carefully out from under the covers, cupped the hand around the pile of stuff in Daniel's lap to steady it, and pushed up sitting. The care in the gesture put Daniel more off balance than Concealment Face did. Sleeping with Jack meant getting used to frequent bedquakes; asleep or awake, Jack tossed and turned with abandon, and the only thing he was ever careful about in bed was sex.
"So you could translate that," Jack said.
"Well, not on the spot," Daniel said. "Not without a dictionary. Not thoroughly and accurately. But yeah."
More slowly, still double-checking, confirming, clarifying, Jack said, "You could ... read it to me."
Daniel had spent time with more than a few completely illiterate people over the years. A homeless woman who'd befriended him one of the times he'd run away from foster care when he was a kid; some adults he'd tutored as a literacy volunteer when he was in school; various people offworld. Every one of them had looked at letters on paper or wood or stone the way Jack was looking at the letter in his hands. The same caution and longing. The same stoic expectation of being disappointed, being unable or unworthy to decode the secret cipher, being promised knowledge and power that would not be delivered. The same hope that something hidden, something they'd given up on as forever inaccessible, might open to them after all -- become knowable. Become known. Become as readable as Jack's expressionless expression was to him, everything legible under the surface opaquing.
"Not without understanding some of it," he said gently. "Possibly enough to violate privacy and confidences. And with very poor pronunciation. But yes. I can read it to you."
There was a pause about as long as the beat of a sleeper's heart, and then Jack looked up, wordless yearning in his dark-amber eyes: Please.
Daniel took the stuff leaning against his chest and moved it back under the lamp, then read the letter aloud.
His delivery was halting. Irish Gaelic was rigorously phonetic, but what he'd picked up of the spoken tongue over the years had come from several different native speakers. His pronunciation was a regional mash-up, soft rolling Connacht mixed with lilting Munster over a base of broad, guttural Ulster, and sometimes he faltered in choosing among two or three ways to pronounce the same word. The writer had excellent penmanship but used the pre-reform spelling with its burden of silent consonants. More than once, he had to mentally hash-mark syllables, the way you hash-marked the beats of a complicated passage on a sheet of music, to break a long word down into sounds he could say. It had been a while since he tackled any Celtic language, and the Brythonic had always felt more intuitive to him than the Goidelic. He should have read through it to himself before trying to read it aloud to Jack, he thought. He itched for a quick refresher on common idioms. He had to work to suppress his reflex to paraphrase in English after every sentence, he was so conditioned to interpret for teammates and colleagues.
He couldn't suppress comprehension. Swaths of the text were inaccessible to him without reference materials, but he got the sense of most of it. The news that a visit to the doctor, apparently mentioned with some scorn in a previous letter, had confirmed what the writer had already known, that it would not be long now. The decision to end this correspondence before it bogged down in the tedious details of dying or cut off without conclusion. An explanation and summation of all the letters over all the years, written by choice in a language of Jack's ancestry, composed and sent in full awareness that Jack wouldn't understand them if he even received them at all. The writer's diction had the formality of a latecomer to the written word taking great care to employ it properly, but a sharp wit cut through the stilted correctness, and a poetic romanticism softened the pull-no-punches bluntness. The writer had Daniel thoroughly charmed by the time he got to the bottom of the page. As he carefully turned the sheet to read the continuation on the other side, he was almost startled by the intensity with which Jack was watching him. At some point giving voice to the words for Jack had turned into giving voice to the personality that had slept soundlessly on these pages all these years, giving life to the thoughts that had lain dormant in this ink, uncommunicated, silent. The vitality of that mind had filled his awareness; reading the words addressed to Jack, he'd half forgotten that Jack was there.
Abruptly and unaccountably self-conscious, as though he'd been caught falling under a spell, he hesitated. With no change of expression, Jack nodded for him to go on.
He kept reading. It came easier now. The Western pronunciation had won out, probably owing to syntactical cues he hadn't had the mental space to analyze while he was focused on phonetics. If it went on for a few more pages, he thought, he might achieve a level of detachment where he could read without understanding, the way he used to read Jack the sports and business sections of the newspapers when he was laid up in the infirmary. Partway through the last paragraph he realized that he was nearing that level, enjoying the music of the language and the quirks of the writer's prose, not thinking much about the content. Then it came to him with a jolt that he was reading about Jack's son. And Abydos. And himself.
"What?" Jack said, squinting hard at him.
"That's, that's it. That's the end." He read out the closing: "'Is mise, do mháthair mhor, Eithne Críonna.'" He looked up at Jack. "'Old Ina.' Your grandmother."
"That's some kind of nickname," Jack said. "Her surname was Connor. What stopped you there at the end?"
"Um ... the letter ending?"
"Daniel."
"I misread something and it confused me. This is your father's mother? Married to the grandfather who built the cabin?"
"They weren't married."
"She went back to Ireland?"
"She never left. Gramps got work in Chicago with his brothers, and when Pop was sixteen he joined him. She wouldn't go." Jack's gaze dropped briefly and then came back up, hard, almost challenging. "She was a Traveller."
The word brought some things in the letter into stark relief. Jack's discomfort was even starker. "Are you ... embarrassed about that?"
"My family was. Some of them. Dirty laundry. Skeletons in the closet are one thing. Knackers are another."
"But they wanted her to come. Your father and your grandfather."
Jack shrugged. "Kind of ironic, doncha think? A Traveller who wouldn't travel?"
"It wasn't necessarily about that. It might have been cultural. Maybe she didn't want to leave her homeland. Maybe she didn't want to leave the life."
"It was a crappy life."
"It can be a very hard life, but you don't know that it was -- "
"She could have had a fresh start."
"Which is great if you're unhappy or ashamed of who you are. Not so great if you like your people just fine, thanks, and are proud to be one of them and want to stay in the world you know. Jack, this is remarkable. I mean, the level of literacy here -- and she must have lived into, what, her seventies? That's -- "
"Daniel -- "
"I'm sorry. That was inappropriate. This is your family -- "
"I'm not objecting to the anthropologygasm. I want to know what you read at the end."
Daniel knew that. He'd been redirecting, trying to buy time or avoid the question entirely, and Jack probably knew that. He was intrigued, as ethnographer and philologist, but there was heartbreak in this history, tragedy lurking in these lines, too many parallels -- having to choose between her way of life and the people she loved -- it was too much like his own story, and Jack's, and their story -- and what she'd said, if he'd understood even half of it, what she'd seemed to know, or ... see ... He took a breath and released it, then drew the envelope out from under the letter to check the postmark.
Stamped at Béal Átha na Sluaighe -- Ballinasloe, in County Galway -- the day after the letter was dated. June 10, 1995.
Not Old Ina, he thought. Shrewd Ina. Wise Ina.
"Something I thought it couldn't possibly have said," he replied, one more attempt to answer Jack's question without having to really answer it.
"Something about me."
"No, actually ... Well, yes. But more ... something about me."
Jack didn't startle easily, but he snapped tense enough for Daniel to feel it through the mattress. "Not something bad," he ground out. "Not something bad."
"No. Just that -- " Daniel shook his head at the page. "I must have been reading into it. It's private and I didn't really want to understand it and I was paying more attention to sounding it out than -- "
"Tell me what she says about you."
"I don't trust my -- "
"I do. Tell me."
Daniel was still staring at the paragraph. The lines were orderly, scripted along penciled rules, with dots down the sides where she'd measured and marked to get the rules to line up. She'd had a lot to pack in to these two sides, so the lines were closely spaced, and conceptually this paragraph was the densest of all. Strange that she'd had a pencil and a ruler but apparently only this one sheet of paper, this one envelope too short for it to fit in without an extra fold. Strange, the impression it gave -- that she was on her last reserves, not just of health and time but of resources. Stationers and newsagents had stocked ruled air mail paper in the nineties. If she was close enough to a big town to post it from there, she or the people around her would have had reasonable access to those kinds of shops, and one more sheet shouldn't have bumped the postage up. Was she deliberately limiting herself, trying not to say too much? Was there something special about this paper? Was she that destitute at the end? Or that alone? And then who mailed it for her ...
"Daniel."
"Yeah. OK." He read the paragraph again, silently, twice. It described how dearly she loved Jack, and how she grieved the brutally dark places he had been and the unspeakable blow he was about to suffer, the place he was bound for that was darker than any he'd been in before. How nothing she could say could help him avert that blow -- he still wasn't ready to listen, and she couldn't see enough detail even if he were -- but that he was going to wish for death, and her dying wish was that he choose life. He would be in a dry land when that time came, so far that her mind hurt with it, and a man with the desert sky in his eyes would offer his hand, and Jack should take it, because for all the pain that lay down that road -- oceans of stars would separate them, time and time again -- it led to greatness, and it led to life, not just for him, and them, but for countless others. When Jack was ready to hear these words, if her wish came true and he lived to hear them, the man who could speak them for him would be close at hand. She didn't know if it was the same man -- his path was so blurred at times that it was lost to her -- but she felt that it was, and she believed they would be each other's pulse and heart, as the men of Jack's line had been hers. She blessed them both and prayed for their happiness. Daniel translated it all as best he could for Jack, and then said, "But I wouldn't take my word for this even if it didn't seem to concern me. I think there's a good chance that your grandmother was genuinely clairvoyant, but right now this is like running your German horoscope through Babelfish. Not worth freaking out over until you have more data and a reliable translation."
"As long as that's all she said about you, I'm not freaking out," Jack said. "Is that all she said?"
There was a passage Daniel had left out. A warning, but with terms and verb tenses Daniel was too uncertain of to be comfortable relaying. "Bite the wax tadpole," he said, his own warning. "The Chevy Does Not Go."
"Coke brings my ancestors back from the dead," Jack said. "Tell me, Daniel."
"Right before the blessing, she says that if we don't leave the past in peace, if we ever go back to the desert in our greed, we'll die alone and before our time in a place where we don't belong. She says that if you're hearing and understanding these words, it means you made the right choice before, and now you have to do it again. I think it says that crossing the ocean of years would be a big mistake, but the 'you' is plural there, so ... " He opened his hands, defeated. "Maybe she's talking to both of us. Maybe she got her grammar mixed up. Maybe I'm getting the grammar mixed up. There's one particular word out of the many I don't know, and a prefix that means 'really really bad,' and that's what will come of the wrong choice, and nothing is so valuable it's worth that price. That's the best I can do on the fly."
"OK," Jack said, releasing his tension with a breath. "So, no going back to the desert in our greed."
"Or 'greed' might be 'hunger' or 'thirst' or 'need,' or, I don't know ... 'doorknob.'"
"No crossing the ocean of years."
"That part I'm pretty sure about. Unless she's speaking metaphorically, which -- "
"OK. OK. That's fine. That's plenty." Jack had relaxed completely. He seemed relieved, even content. Appreciative and satisfied. "Thanks for doing this."
"You don't find it to be a little ... out there?"
"They said she had the sight. So, turns out my gypsy-fortune-teller grandmother was the real deal. The crazy shit we've seen, this should faze me?"
"I don't mean she's out there -- come on, you've met my grandfather, and you already believed she had some precognitive ability or it wouldn't have scared you to hear that there was something about me in -- "
"She started writing me the day I was born. I mean the day I was born. Nobody phoned in those days. Well, not in my family. Ireland, Italy, you sent cards, mostly, and until she started sending letters nobody'd had a mailing address for her in years. Her first letter's addressed to me by name and postmarked October twentieth, nineteen fifty-two."
"That's -- Wow. Huh. I mean, I suppose there's a remote possibility that some relative knew what town she wintered in and sent a telegram or called a pub where someone could run a message out to her, or -- Anyway, what I meant is the haziness of the ... prophecy, I don't know what else to call it, and my very loose translation."
"I'm ever tempted to cross the sea of years in my doorknob, I'll check back with you."
"Jack, I've got a dictionary and a grammar on my notebook, let me do this right, there was a lot I didn't catch and as long as you don't think the content is too private for me to ... "
Jack was shaking his head. "You me no secrets yadda, but no. You do enough of this stuff in your day job."
"Because I'm very good at it. This is a well-documented Earth language I'm already familiar with, it'll take me like half an hour to -- "
"No, Daniel. I meant it about the reading and the puzzles. You bring too much work home with you."
Daniel heard the unspoken That needs to stop, felt himself bridle at the near-order even as Jack stifled it. He let it go. They both brought more than work home with them from the job. "That's why you never gave me this to translate?"
"I've only had it a couple of weeks. Had it back, I mean. The box got in with Sara's stuff and wound up in her attic. Came to light again when they moved last month, and she shipped it here as soon as she had a chance. I opened it up, that one was on top, I pulled it out and stuck the rest in the storeroom."
"And didn't give it to me to translate."
"I thought you'd have to learn a whole language!"
"Well, I don't."
"Daniel, that box is a can of Pringles. A hundred-some letters in there, and no way you're gonna stop at just one. I'm concerned about your level of fatigue and since I gave at the office I hoped I could opt out of contributing at home."
Not controlling paternalism, then. Worry and care. "I'm sorry," Daniel said. "I mean, I apologize. They're your letters. Whether to have them translated is your decision."
"You want to know what they say. I get that."
"Yes. I do. They could be a priceless chronicle, she's a charming writer and your grandmother and I'd like to know her better, and to one degree or another she could see the future, so yes. I also like translating. It's fun for me. A lot more fun than a crossword. But these letters aren't a game. Your grandmother did not write to you for my personal entertainment. Thus, I am an ass, and I am sorry."
"I'm afraid of what's in them."
The abrupt confession pulled Daniel up short. He didn't know what to say. They'd already read the worst part, he thought. Except for the potential time-traveling doorknob, what Ina had foretold in 1995 about Jack's future was in the past now. She'd said she couldn't help him avoid the blow that Daniel assumed meant Charlie's death. Daniel believed her, and even if she had known more, she hadn't shared it, so there was no information Jack could have acted on. But there were parts of the letter Daniel couldn't translate without a dictionary. He couldn't promise Jack that there was nothing to fear in it, or in the others.
Jack lay back down, and put an arm behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. "Gramps wouldn't talk about her. He broke her heart, she broke his, he clammed up, O'Neill family trait. When the letters started coming, Ma asked if he could read them, and whatever he said, she never asked him again. So she squirreled them away for when I was older. I think she must have written back at some point, because they came to Park Rapids after we moved there. I don't remember when I first found out about them, but by my teens I knew and I didn't care. I remember one fight about it -- Ma felt sorry for the poor woman and it was rude and cruel not to write back, I was all 'Why can't she write something I can read?' and Ma was all 'Maybe she has no English, make an effort, she's your blood, find someone at the college who can read it,' Pop's about to blow his stack because he's embarrassed about the tinker thing and it's his mother and also creepy and he just wants shut of it all. Big blowup, doors slamming, last I hear about it for a few years except that I know the letters are still coming and Ma's still saving them somewhere. Then one comes when I'm home right before my first deployment. It's the holidays and Gramps is staying over and he's the only one around when the mailman delivers. I walk in and he's sitting there with a letter open on his lap and tears streaming down his face. Turns out he could have read any one of 'em to me anytime, he just couldn't stand it."
"He didn't tell you what that one said?" Daniel knew the answer, but he prompted anyway.
"He tried to. I said no. I wanted to make my fortune, not have it told. I had my orders, and some wacko relative doom-and-glooming me wasn't gonna change 'em. She kept writing right up until that one you're holding. Now and then somebody opened one to see if it was in English -- Ma, one of the girls, Sara."
Daniel looked at the envelope again. Slit open with a letter-opener, recently, no weathering of the edges. "You opened this one."
"Apparently she was right. Apparently I was 'ready.'" Jack made the air-quotes with his fingers, then let his hands drop. "I want to hear what she had to say. I regret not listening all those years, I wish I'd written her back, and the galactic situation being what it is, if my psychic granny's offering some intel I can use, I'm sure as hell not turning a deaf ear. But I'm afraid to find out what I missed. I'm afraid I'll want to answer one, now that I can't."
Daniel nodded. He put the envelope on top of the letter and put The Territory Ahead on top of both, sandwiching them in catalogues to bring safely out to the dining room. "You know where I am," he said quietly. "If and when."
Jack said, "There's an Irish dictionary in the cabinet."
"In the ... Did you re-task that part of the nightstand at some point?"
"It's between the Hustlers and the DVDs. It's known as hiding something."
Daniel laid the letter sandwich sideways on his lap with one side securely butted, then displayed the trade paperback that had been under the catalogues. "I think you need to work on that."
Jack looked over. This time he winced. "Oh. Wondered where that went."
"You might conceivably have some fatigue issues too."
"You think?"
The trade paperback was Teach Yourself Irish. "You were going to translate it yourself."
"I was gonna try. Handled Farsi and Kurdish OK -- I figured, Irish, hey, this time I've got the right genes. Turned out to be about as much use as the Ancient gene. 'The book is at me'? Who talks like that? Who thinks like that?"
"It's a beautifully lyrical, prepositional language," Daniel said. "If you weren't falling in love with it by Chapter Two, there's something wrong with this book." Then, slowly: "You know, I'm a way better teacher than any self-instruction book. And if it's presented properly, I think you'll find Irish a lot more appealing than, oh, say ... Latin."
Jack looked over in sharp surprise. For a second, Daniel was certain he'd reject the offer out of hand -- giving language lessons qualifies as work, don't hand me some line about it being fun. Daniel didn't know if it would be fun, exactly -- when he'd indulged his curiosity and asked, Teal'c had confirmed his suspicion that Jack was a pain in the ass in the time loop, so quick to grasp grammatical concepts that he thought he could wing it without memorizing vocabulary -- but he was marshaling a defense of the idea when Jack's eyes narrowed in wary speculation and he said, "You were a slave-driver in the time loop. You were the devil with a pitchfork. You were the border collie from hell."
So he was thinking about it. Considering it. "Was I better than Latin for the Novice?"
"You were more appealing than Latin for the Novice."
"I'll teach you faster than this book will, Jack, and I'll be learning at the same time. No pressure, no pitchfork -- any time you want to stop, we stop. I'll always be available to translate for you, once I've brushed up it'll be even easier, and if you change your mind and decide to let it be I'll respect your choice. But if we do this, those letters won't need translating. You'll just read them, same as you'd read a Kurdish newspaper. She'll be speaking directly to you."
Jack looked at the letter again. His expression said I want that, and his silence said a lot more than I'm going to admit, because I don't want you putting yourself out but I'm a dick if I keep nagging.
I want you to have this, Daniel thought, and I can give it to you. Please let me. He said, "You know, in some other life, some other universe, I was probably a language instructor. I enjoy teaching, and I almost never get to do it anymore."
"The only reason you didn't kill me over the Latin thing was that the loop kept zeroing out your frustration level."
"You really, really didn't want to learn Latin, and I'm not surprised that I wasn't a model of patience when you were in the midst of losing your shit, never mind trying to pick up where I had no memory of leaving off each time."
"I can get tapes. Software. A better book."
"And deprive me of the pleasure of sharing my specialty with you when you're engaged and motivated?"
Jack groaned in surrender and slapped both hands over his face.
Knowing that Jack would hear the winsome smile in his voice, Daniel said sweetly, "Making me happy makes you happy. Someday it's going to sink in that the reverse is equally true."
"Yeah, someday it's gonna sink in that I'm married to a goddamn veteran negotiator." Jack rolled to face Daniel with a look of exasperated affection. "We've got a deal, Doctor Jackson, and I am so going to sleep now."
Daniel brought the letter out to the breakfront, dumping the remaining pile of reading material on Jack as he pushed out of bed, and when he came back in, everything was stacked on the nightstand in order of size with the corners squared, and Jack was back under his blanket mound. Daniel got into bed, set his glasses aside, pulled the lamp cord, doubled the comforter back so that it would keep Jack warm without overheating him, and drew Jack's arm around him as he turned on his side and pushed into the curve of Jack's body. Jack started snoring as soon as he was tucked in.
Soothed by the sound and the coziness, Daniel risked letting his mind drift. No replays assaulted him, only a yearning for more hours in the day. He knew a little about an lucht siúil, the Walking People, the indigenous itinerant population in Ireland, but not much. Not enough; not as much as he wanted to, now. He was eager to start reading up on them, and it felt strange to quell the impulse with a reminder that Ina could tell them herself -- her own experience of the life, in her own words, more vivid and relevant than any scholar's analysis. It felt equally strange and somewhat bittersweet to consider that half-century of first-person narrative in a personal rather than an academic context. The archaeology of family history wasn't something he generally delved into, and professional publications were all he had left of his own parents; any journals they'd kept, any letters, any mementos of their lives or their families or his childhood were lost long ago. Jack's parents were gone, and there hadn't yet been an opportunity to meet sisters or cousins or surviving aunts and uncles; the once Chicago-centric family had scattered across North America, and he got the impression that when Jack lost his son and his wife he'd lost a lot of what connected him to his own generation in the family. The South Side tenements they'd crammed into when Jack was a kid had been demolished in the sixties, they'd sold the Park Rapids house when Jack's mother went into the nursing home, and the Minnesota cabin was as far as Daniel knew the only tangible family link left in the Midwest. One sister was in Oregon, the other in Florida. Their domestic arrangement didn't extend to answering each other's phones, so he'd never even spoken to either of them. The upshot was that he'd never met Jack's family, and inasmuch as there was no family unit to introduce him to, he never would. But now he'd met Jack's grandmother. He'd fulfilled her vision of him twice over. Made good on her expectations of him, her hopes for them. It was strange and kind of wonderful to realize that that meant something to him. To find himself warmed by the sense of her approval.
It did make for a nice balance, he thought. Nick had met Jack, and liked him, and he'd given them his blessing, that third follow-up visit, when Daniel finally told him and he laughed and said that he was wondering how long Daniel would persist in the delusion that this would be news to him, now look at these notes on the Giant Aliens and tell me that the ramifications for our understanding of Mayan iconography aren't staggering, I've made drawings, here, and here, look. Though Ina had had larger things on her mind as well, they'd had her blessing before they'd even laid eyes on each other for the first time. There might not be wackier ways to meet relatives, but there were certainly worse ways. If he could just be sure about that one passage ...
The snores caught on a snort as Jack nuzzled himself awake against the nape of Daniel's neck. "You better not be translating in your head."
"I'm outlining lesson plans."
"God, you probably are. Please stop."
"I can't believe you stashed an Irish dictionary in your wank drawer."
Jack shifted for a better grip on him and answered in a growly grumble, "It's a cabinet."
"It's a figure of speech."
"No, it's a cabinet." Jack was smiling into his skin. "And maybe I did want you to find those things. In the headshrinky stuff-you-don't-realize-you're-doing sense." He kissed Daniel softly at the hairline and settled his head into Daniel's pillow. "Now go to sleep. Don't sweat the doorknob. In the morning you can translate that one part so we'll know exactly what we're supposed to not do when the time comes. OK?"
"OK," Daniel said, and relaxed completely in Jack's arms. Pleased at how clearly the care in Jack's commandspeak came across to him now, wryly surprised by how fluency in Jack O'Neill didn't mean there wasn't always something new to learn, he barely noticed the shadow passing away under the bow wave of that simple agreement, barely sensed the twistedness untwisting and smoothing out straight. He felt lightened, relieved, freed. He ascribed it to his backbrain finally accepting that he was home and safe after a trying mission. He cuddled Jack's arm in tighter to his chest, and listened to his heart beat into Jack's palm until he fell asleep.
