you take the blue paian

Stargate Universe/Stargate SG-1 future fic/AUish thing
Spoilers for SGU S1 Ep14 'Human'
Jack/Daniel established relationship, ~4800 words, teen
Response to the dailyprompt prompts 'carpet with grey stripes' and 'the quiet one in the corner.'


The Phrygian Progression

"Wal-TER!"

Harriman appeared promptly in Jack's office doorway. He made half a vague, pained gesture in the direction of the intercom, then let his hand drop. "Sir?"

"Did somebody recarpet this office again last night?"

"Not to my knowledge, sir."

"Did you know there are grey stripes in this carpet?"

"The pattern's called Seaside Heather, sir."

Seaside Heather my ass. More like Misty Prison Bars. "It's Air Force blue with jailbird stripes. How is that a good message to send?"

"The checked pattern gave you headaches, sir."

"This one looks to rate migraines."

"Should I pull up a requisition form?"

Jack had half a mind to say yes, then half a mind to say no and hit Home Depot after work and pick up something in a nice neutral buff and do the job himself in the morning.

Quietly, into the pause, Harriman said, "Less than a day left, sir."

Jack went still and expressionless, old habit, then released the breath. "Twenty-one hours and thirty-seven minutes." He didn't have to glance through the glass to check the wall of world clocks.

"Yes, sir," Harriman said, after he had.

Jack appreciated the glass-half-empty stretch, even though it was a long stretch. He gave Harriman a nod, a smile that he hoped was more tired than tense, and a that'll-be-all wave. Harriman hesitated, then turned and left, and Jack turned his attention back to the reports on his desk and his notebook screen, operatives on a dozen worlds cleaning up the mess left by dissolving the remains of the Lucian Alliance. Organized crime had been the closest approximation of government on the planets the Alliance had operated from, and 'disorganized' was an understatement now. He combed through the information for signs of anything that had or might grow to have bearing on the security of this planet, but he wasn't the target audience here. This stuff was for relief groups, civil engineers, educators, negotiators. This stuff was for the people who came in after people like him did their jobs.

He'd done his job. With one exception, one mistake -- putting the wrong guy in a position to do exactly what that one guy had done, with insufficient foresight or supervision to keep him from doing it -- he was done. But he had to see that mistake rectified. He had to see this through until those people came home.

His gaze had drifted to the carpet again. His thoughts were drifting back to the symbolism that was glaring only to him. It was a goddamn Rorschach carpet, as bad as Daniel for sending him off into metaphorical musings he'd never been prone to before Daniel, before this office. The greying of SG-1, most notably himself, then Teal'c under extraordinarier-than-usual circumstances, now Daniel too, with Carter overdue if it wasn't already hiding in all that blondness. Prison stripes and prison bars, how he was only staying on at this job until the Ori situation was resolved, then only until the Lucian Alliance was dealt with, now only until they brought Destiny home. How it was way past time for another visit to Hank Landry's place, another suggestion that he might be vacating another pair of George's shoes pretty soon and if Hank was interested and yadda. Another five years until higher would consider Davis, and by then it would be a different higher. Barring bootable offenses in the meantime, they wouldn't boot him for another seven years. He could hang in for those five, make sure he was still higher when the time came, make sure Davis got it. But he couldn't hang in another five years. Couldn't separate either, unless Daniel did, because Daniel got into the damnedest scrapes even now, even off active gate-duty rotation, and Jack needed the authority of an active commission. But he was thinking that maybe Daniel was starting to think about it.

OK, wishing that Daniel would think about it.

OK, wishing so hard that Daniel were thinking about it that he was staring at the damn migraine-inducing carpet instead of doing the migraine-inducing work that would keep him from thinking about it. Wishing so hard that Daniel were thinking about it that when he sensed a tall, soft-shod body loom in his doorway, for a moment he thought it was Daniel, and as his eyes rose to take in his unannounced visitor a wild hope rose in his heart that Daniel had reconsidered, found someone to cover for him, left the chair in that room down the hall and come straight here to say, "Jack, I'm done. Let's go home."

It was Daniel standing in the doorway.

The long, slim, wide-set legs were Daniel's. The dark pleated trousers were Daniel's, and the hips and the way the pants draped on them were Daniel's. The belt was Daniel's, a Dior Homme that Jack had given him for some anniversary. The inexplicable swell of belly above the belt was Daniel's, over abs that Daniel kept as toned now as when he'd had to stay in field condition. The long, slender fingers were Daniel's, two of them still stained with ink from the other night when he was doing shodō with a Japanese brush set. The disproportionately heavy chest, the shoulders bulked with muscle from an addiction to lifting, the thick neck, the cut of the hair, the renowned blue of the eyes, all Daniel's.

But the feet were set close, not planted at shoulder width, and the knees were locked with tension when Daniel always kept his flexed, as if to balance on a world that had a tendency to tilt without warning. Arms and hands hung limp to either side, not in motion the way Daniel's would have been, not continually punctuating and subtitling with gesture. The jaw was pulled back and looked weaker than it was, where Daniel's came out to a point and was frequently jutted out in thoughtfulness or stubbornness or controlled anger. The pouty lips were thinned and tightened into a flat line. The line of the brows was even flatter than that.

Not Daniel after all.

Someone else. Someone who needed to see him. Someone with entree to him, since they'd been allowed to walk right in, and that meant either Rush or Young, since he had standing orders not to let any IOA reps near him without a minimum thirty-second heads-up to get his temper preemptively under control.

Ohhhh, he thought, this was such a bad idea.

He'd hoped that it'd be someone who didn't report to him, who had no reason to come into his office wearing his partner's body, who'd go off and, say, binge on ice cream for twenty-four hours and let Daniel work the calories off when he got back. He should be relieved, he supposed, that it wasn't someone running straight off to use his partner's body to have sex with someone else -- especially christ, this crazy fucking situation someone he knew, like Young's wife -- or let off steam in a drunken bar brawl, or do something else he'd really really really prefer his partner's body not do. But it was Daniel's body, Daniel's choice ... and Daniel had wanted to visit Destiny.

Of course Daniel had wanted to visit Destiny. Of fucking course. And how could Jack say no this time? It was Daniel's body, it was Daniel's choice; it was a one-day trip, not a two-year tour; the only solid argument he had against it was that there still might be something they didn't know about how the Ancient communications stones worked, and that if there was bleed-through of consciousness, and the person in Daniel's body was someone they couldn't trust -- which was everyone on that ship, as far as Jack was concerned -- their relationship might be outted, and that argument held nary a drop of water anymore, with DADT in medias repealus and the Program about to go public. They'd been out to friends and enemies and Jack's bosses for a year, living openly in Arlington and the Springs, and nobody had bothered to bring charges yet.

OK, not the only solid argument. But the other solid argument he had against it was that it was fucking risky. The connections had cut out before, and if things ran true to form, one of these days the outage was going to be prolonged or even permanent, and it wasn't going to drop the participants back in their own skins when it happened. Any day could be that day. Today could be that day. He'd lost Daniel way too many times and for way too long at a time to face it again. He'd come this close to going with him, volunteering for the same stint with the stones. But the director of Homeworld couldn't give someone else control of his body; too much power for that, too much risk of impersonation and catastrophic abuse, see Caveat XII Subsection Whatever above about not trusting anyone on that ship. He couldn't volunteer. He could only commandeer. And he couldn't do that in good conscience. Not for what amounted to a personal reason.

The person in Daniel's body was just staring at him. No minder stood by the door; in fact, the operations room beyond the glass seemed eerily quiet. Rush would be babbling a mile a minute like every other damn scientist they'd ever had on staff. Young would be standing at parade rest and reporting with military efficiency. Every hair on Jack's nape rose, every sense went on alert. Not Rush, not Young, therefore someone who'd lied to the MPs and snowed Harriman. Someone looking to capitalize on the fact that he wouldn't harm Daniel's body? He considered saying, "Hey, ever read the mission report about the time Anubis went body-hopping at the SGC?" He tried a less aggressive angle instead, lobbing a non sequitur: "If you're here for a conjugal, you took a wrong turn."

No startlement or confusion in the blue eyes. His own eyes narrowed. Remote possibility that this was Daniel himself. Barely three hours into the shift, but maybe someone had replaced him. Whatsisname had a tendency to shove in and take turns out of turn, and yeah, it was impossible to intimidate or sweet-talk Daniel out of something he wanted the way he'd wanted to see that ship, but not outside the realm of possibility -- or maybe he didn't feel well and begged off or who the hell knew what, and maybe he was roleplaying here, he might actually get a charge out of Jack genuinely believing he was someone else for a while, but the cruelty and the stupidity of it would vastly outweigh any entertainment value, and it wouldn't be much fun anyway if they couldn't have sex, which, you know, his office, middle of the workday ... So. What the fuck?

"General O'Neill," Daniel's mouth said, using Daniel's vocal cords, with a very un-Daniel-like accent and an even more un-Daniel-like quaver.

"The same. And you are?"

"Doctor Yassine Lasry." Usually people's voices firmed when they said their names, especially people, in Jack's experience, who used the title 'doctor.' This person's voice got so small that Jack barely heard it. It was like Daniel trying to imitate the Geico Gecko at a funeral.

He had no idea who this was. He couldn't tell male or female, young or old, and he should have every detail of that ship's complement in a mental Rolodex, but the bald truth was that he didn't know much more about most of the civilians than their names.

"What can I do for you, Doctor Lasry?"

Daniel's eyes closed into a wince, Daniel's fingers twisted into the fabric of his trousers. "Listen to what I have to say, and if you think it has merit, let me record it somehow, and pass it along to Doctor Rush or Colonel Young the next time they're here."

Jack got up and came around the desk. He wasn't moving fast, but Daniel's pupils dilated and Daniel's body shrank back into itself. Jack suppressed his personal reaction to that and parked his butt on a corner of the desk, made his posture easygoing, unthreatening. A dozen things had already clicked together in his head. He didn't have to say, Why don't you tell them yourself? There was no question that Doctor Lasry, soft-spoken and agonizingly shy, had tried and been waved off by people too busy, too pressured, and too full of themselves to pay attention.

"OK," Jack said. "I'm listening."

Slowly and stiffly at first, then revving up to a pace that would have left Rush or McKay or even Daniel in the dust, Doctor Lasry explained the theory behind a proposed solution to the problem of steering Destiny, outlined a suggested implementation, relayed the background that made her -- or him; Jack kept vacillating on that, and didn't have the first clue how to ask -- qualified to develop the solution and present the proposal, and then explained why his -- or her -- attempts had been rebuffed.

Jack didn't understand the science, but he understood the story of a musical prodigy who'd been pushed too hard as a child, suffered a breakdown, become incapable of performing in public, and veered off on parallel trajectories of music theory, neuroscience, psychoacoustics, and psychomusicology, and how someone with a background like that would fit right in at the SGC, where flexible thinking and diverse specialties were prerequisites and the heretofore-unimagined was a daily ration. Jack had seen the melding of scientific and musical power on Latona; he was familiar with the development of acoustic weapons, and knew that sound was something to be reckoned with; he blessed the psychological and therapeutic aspects of music every time he watched Daniel pull himself out of some hellish pit of depression by playing the piano for a few hours; and he knew about music's power to communicate, because it spoke to him personally. So he wasn't particularly surprised to hear Doctor Lasry's contention that harmonics could be a safe conduit between the ancient Ancient vessel and the humans riding in it.

He was surprised by the alleged negligence of Destiny's senior staff -- the misallocation of human resources by people who should know better. Rush and Young and even, oh so ironically, Wray pigeonholing their personnel right from the start, discouraging mutual training. Corralling and suppressing a boatload of brainy people instead of encouraging them to use their potential. Fostering the hoarding of specialized knowledge instead of its distribution. Ignoring the quiet people in the corners when they were trying to tell you they'd figured out how to get home, because you'd classified them as useless. Survival inventory wasn't just counting how many knives and spoons and rubberbands you had. It was figuring out how the knives could double as forks and the spoons could be rubberbanded to make salad tongs. You had five people who could box, five people who knew algebra, five people who could fix a broken computer, five people who could garden, you turned them into twenty people who could box and solve for X and reboot a machine and grow vegetables. From what he was hearing, Johansen in medical was the only one training up staff.

Lasry had finally relaxed enough to sit down in the chair Jack offered, and had asked for a pad and pencil. Now she-or-he displayed a finished sketch: the Ancient chair on the ship, which gave Jack a twinge of recognition even though it was a way older model than the one he'd been in; the rig the engineers had set up behind it to filter its effects on Rush's mind when he went in; and an intermediate device inserted by Lasry, with a complex table of correspondences above it, and an index of waveforms, and little arrows showing how it all interrelated.

"I was on Icarus Base researching a pattern of harmonics emitted by particularly dense naquadria deposits. One of my goals was to determine how the Ancients used the acoustic properties of naquadah, which are enhanced in its engineered form to a measurable level. We have no hope of controlling Destiny by overmastering it -- Rush's dream of manual control is narrow-minded and presumptuous -- but it's not necessary to hijack it, General O'Neill; we have merely to communicate with it and make our predicament clear. This translation matrix will allow us to safely interface with the ship and ... well, ask it politely to drop us home."

OK, that veered a little towards the crazy, but Jack had had a lot of experience with crazy, and with geniuses, and with geniuses who had crazy ideas on a regular basis. Way more experience than Young or Wray, and probably way more than Rush, who knew how to have crazy genius ideas but might lack the ability to evaluate someone else's, and was arrogant enough to dismiss out of hand any that weren't his own. Jack had had his own share of crazy ideas. In this business, the crazy ideas were the ones that saved your ass. This one rang true.

"You'll get a big honkin' medal for it if it does."

Doctor Lasry shook Daniel's head. "I'm not interested in accolades. I won every award in my admittedly minuscule field before I joined the SGC, I don't need grant money, and nobody in the Program has a hope of receiving a Nobel in this life. Credit doesn't matter to me. All I want is to return to my work."

Clear as day, Jack heard Daniel's voice in his head: Um ... that planet kind of blew up. Jack hesitated, then said, "You are aware that the planet ... "

Daniel's face twisted with a kind of grief that should have looked alien on it, but didn't. Jack had seen an identical expression on it before. When they blasted the Heliopolis library device. When he blasted Thor's Hammer. "Yes," Doctor Lasry said, with a quiet resignation that Daniel's voice had never carried. "I know."

Jack cleared his throat. "All right. I can see to it that Rush evaluates this, or order Young to see to it, or tackle Wray, but it'll be faster to send you back with a directive from me."

"They won't believe me. I've been ... a bit of an irritant, I'm afraid."

Well, there's one thing you have in common with the guy whose skin you're wearing. "You'll memorize an authorization code along with the wording of my orders. Deliver it to Young and he'll hear you out." Fear flickered in the borrowed eyes, and he added, "Worst that can happen is you get the same reaction from him as before. Difference is, he'll be obliged to come to me to check it out, and then I can show him this."

Looking down, avoiding eye contact, Lasry said, "I rather hope it doesn't come to that. While it did take all my resolve to approach you -- more than three hours, girding my loins -- this meeting is the contingency plan." Raised voices in the operations room raised both their heads. Lasry kept talking, but trailed off, distracted by the surge of urgent activity. "With any ... luck ... "

Jack was already off the desk. Through the glass, he saw Harriman headed his way. Between the glass and Daniel's body, he caught a humming flicker in the air. By the time a single figure had materialized in the office, he had his body between it and Lasry, and a sidearm in his hand, and two MPs were through the door and taking position in the corners, a third covering the door itself.

The figure was a little wrinkly man with a shock of white hair. Seventy-something, five-fourish, maybe one-twenty, a build that would be described as slight; deeply creased skin, drab civilian clothes that had forgotten what ironing was. His feet were planted like a sailor's on a ship's deck, knees flexed. Laughter danced in his black eyes, and a smirk pursed his thin lips. The right hand rose and gave a little back-and-forth wave.

"Hi, Jack," said Daniel, in a soft, scratchy voice.

"Back a little early, aren't you?" Jack replied casually, lowering his weapon, gesturing for the MPs to stand down.

"Yeah, I thought I'd grab a sandwich. The food up there kinda sucks." He gave a gracious nod to the person stepping out from behind Jack wearing his body. "Doctor Lasry. It's a pleasure."

"Likewise, Doctor Jackson. Likewise."

Would I have overlooked this man? Jack wondered, looking at Yassine Lasry's outward appearance. Disregarded him because of his age? Dismissed his wacky specialty as irrelevant to my needs?

Jack's pager buzzed and two of Jack's phones rang. Harriman called "On it, sir" from beyond the MP at the door. Jack kept staring at Daniel, and Daniel shrugged and said, simply, "It's fixed."

"Fixed as in ... you brought them home?"

"Well, Destiny's in orbit now, but it wasn't me. I found Doctor Lasry's notes in his pocket, where he left them for whoever swapped with him to find, with a note asking whoever it was to advocate on their behalf. I had a chat with Wray, we went to see Rush and Young, Doctor Lasry's idea worked, here we are. I also I corrected a few mistranslations of Ancient symbology so that Eli could access the ship's beaming device. Which the Pentagon shields are going to need to be recalibrated for, by the way."

"So we could have gotten you onto that ship the first day and saved a lot of lives."

"That kind of depends." Daniel slipped a hand into the pocket of the wrinkly cargo pants he was wearing, drew out a rolled-up sheaf of notes and drawings, and said to Lasry, "How long did it take you to do this?"

Daniel's cheeks flushed bright red. Jack had never seen them do that outside the bedroom; it was distractingly fascinating, and reminded him of Reason No. 873 that working with Daniel had been a pain in the ass. Doctor Lasry said, "I finished the translation matrix last week."

"So, no," Daniel said to Jack; then, to Lasry, "You did a brave thing, using the stones."

"It should not have come to that. I should have been more assertive, more persuasive."

"No," Daniel said. "They should have listened to you."

"Well, they'll listen to me," Jack said. "Excuse me a minute, gentlemen." He went out into Operations, got Young on the horn. Informed him that he owed someone down here a big honkin' apology and he could deliver it in person in the SGC infirmary after the staff here alerted Landry that they were inbound and he received the all-clear to beam his people down. He could hear the excitement in the background, cheers and laughter; if they'd had champagne there'd have been corks popping. He welcomed Young home; Young thanked him and informed him of Rush's intent to stay on board. Jack told him they'd address that in a few hours and signed off. He wouldn't fight it. He'd see what they could do to provision him. Plenty of cool stuff to explore out there, and Rush could tell them all about it through the stones. Surgery, dental work ... well, explorers had done without modern medicine and dentistry for millennia. It was Rush's choice to make. Jack knew he had no one down here, only a gravesite to visit. Jack had been that guy. He understood.

" ... of desperation," Daniel's voice was saying with Lasry's East End accent, back in his office. "I didn't know who would be on the other end of the stones. You might not bother to look in my pockets, you might not find my work or find it valid or even understand it if you did, and they might not listen if you vouched for it."

"It was a bit tricky," Daniel said in Lasry's scratchy voice. "I'm no more an engineer or physicist than you are, and if you've been telling the general here how the only people who count up there are the engineers, the physicists, the medic and the military, I'm inclined to support your assessment. But I have what you might call tenure in the Program, and I'm the one who recruited Rush. I was able to persuade him to give your proposal the attention it deserved. Then ... well, it turned out that one more element was required -- ironically, someone to vouch for Doctor Rush to the ship." He smiled at Doctor Lasry with Doctor Lasry's wrinkled face. It was a wholly Daniel smile, gentle and diabolical, and expressed with Doctor Lasry's features, is was elfin and absurdly adorable.

"Daniel," Jack drawled mildly. "Tell me you didn't stick your head in that spikes-through-the-head thing."

"I didn't stick my head in that spikes-through-the-head thing." He swept clouds of snowy hair up and back to demonstrate the absence of grisly holes in Lasry's temples. "It's all ... vibrational. Harmonic -- essentially acoustic. That's the beauty of it. A breakthrough regarding the properties of naquadah and how they can be reproduced with other materials. The spikes only go into your head if you don't know what the hell you're doing and it's the only way the ship can try to give you an audience."

"And it listened," Doctor Lasry said.

Daniel nodded. "Apparently in Doctor Rush's heavily filtered attempt at contact, his memory of me from when I recruited him for the Program combined with the ship's sentience to create an intermediate construct that they could interact through. Having the actual me there -- my consciousness, as carried by the stones -- was a stroke of pretty astounding luck. I'm a little nicer than Doctor Rush, I've had more experience with Ancient stuff and first contacts, and the ship was already somewhat familiar with me, or the idea of me, from the previous session. Anyway, it worked. The ship's here. It'll stay for a couple of days, then go on its way."

Daniel's body groped for the chair Lasry had been sitting in and sank down, looking a hundred years old, as it sank in. "Thank you, Doctor Jackson," he said, grave and fervent.

"This all owes to you, Doctor. They're home because of you. Because of the work you've done in the mechanisms of communication through harmonic systems, and your hypotheses about how the Ancients did it."

Whatever Lasry said, Jack missed because his red phone rang.

He picked up, still looking at Daniel. "Mr. President." He listened while Hayes talked, answered Hayes' questions as best he could, assured him that the ship was no threat and that their people were OK. Daniel looked over just as the brief conversation was winding down, and Jack said, "Oh, by the way, sir. That retirement thing? Gonna be pulling the trigger on that pretty much imminently, sir." He held eye contact with Daniel, waiting for the sour expression he expected. Once he had it -- Yeah, it figures you'd make an announcement I've longed to hear for years by telling a third party while I'm wearing the body of a fourth -- he suppressed a grin and returned his full attention to the president long enough to promise an initial report in an hour and accept one more round of congratulations on behalf of the people who made this happen.

Somebody, he'd realized somewhere in the back of his head while everything else was going on, had to go first. Somebody had to say "We're done. Let's go home." Maybe Daniel would say it as soon as he was back in his own skin, or maybe he wouldn't. Jack wasn't waiting to find out. The stripes in the carpet weren't bars. They were guidelines, and they all led out.

He hung up the phone, and said, "So what do we do to get you guys switched back?"

As they headed down the hall for Daniel to disconnect them from this end, Daniel said, "So, Jack. Betcha didn't know that naquadah sings."

"Do not tell me that it's sentient, Daniel. Do not even try to tell me that."

Daniel looked over and up at Lasry, who shrugged and said, "Well, that is one of the questions my research explores. In sufficiently dense deposits of the unstable derivative, there is activity that suggests ... "

Jack groaned. No wonder the damn carpet gave him headaches. The color was naquadria.


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