Earth Chapter Five – Homecoming

 

 

Earth

September 2012

SGC – Level 25 – Interrogation Rooms

“I have no idea how Colonel Carter managed to jury rig the Ori battlecruiser we brought home to work. That’s not my field and I have never pretended to actually understand what she is talking about when she gets on a rip.” Daniel said calmly.

He was on hour number four of his fifth interview with the people who were supposed to debrief him and he was tried. Tired of having to answer the same questions over, and over again for people who didn’t listen. It didn’t seem to matter how they phrased them, he still heard the same questions. Not like the answers were going to change. Engineering, astrophysics and electronic anything were way outside of his knowledge base. As everyone at the SGC knew. There was a reason that Siler had a set schedule to come in and change his light bulbs.

“Dr. Jackson, you have been part of the Stargate program since its inception and have been on an active Gate team for most of your time here. Can you honestly tell me that you have no idea what Colonel Carter is talking about when she begins to deal with her fields? After all, she has demonstrated several times that she has a working knowledge of your field.” His questioner was one of the many Pentagon personnel that Franklin (the moron) had brought into Homeland. Fresh faced, young and really, really stupid.

Daniel cocked his head to the side and looked at the… person across the table from him. “Oh. Right. Let me see if I can put this in a way that you understand. I am at the level where I can see something, and if it is pointed out to me, I can find the problem area. Kinda like I can see when my plumbing is leaking under the sink of my house, but I haven’t a clue how to fix it. That’s why I hire plumbers. Colonel Carter is an expert at what she does. Me? I am someone who can screw up putting light bulbs in. She wins.”

It was always fun watching overblown egos get deflated when introduced to reality. There were many reasons why one of his favorite intellectual sports was moron baiting. And why Jack had despaired at ever teaching him manners when it came to the Powers That Be. Whomever they might actually be at the time. “Be that as it may, Doctor, you must have some idea of what she did. After all, you were briefly an Ori yourself,“ his latest moron said.

“Point of order,” Daniel said mildly. “I was a Prior and one who was also housing the remaining consciousness of Merlin. So, not an Ori and not your typical Prior either. And just because I was one does not mean that the knowledge of what goes where stayed. Because it didn’t.”

Daniel was not pleased to see that the man he was now mentally calling the ‘Pentagon Moron’ wasn’t even bothering to hide his skepticism. “Whatever you were, Doctor Jackson, you were connected to everything that made the Ori what they were. And we have no real evidence that you didn’t bring that back with you when you regained your human guise. For all we know, you could be like Adria and hiding the abilities of an Ori stuffed into a human shell.”

“So the exhaustive physical, mental exams by both psychologists here on Earth and the technology we got from the Tok’ra to determine if a person comes home with new mental additions don’t count? I would suggest that you never tell General O’Neill that. He will definitely be less than pleased.”

He was pleased to see that Pentagon Moron had enough brains to be afraid of that. The fucker.

 

 

Jack watched from the observation area as Daniel started playing with the Homeland Security agents head. Apparently the good Doctor was bored and needed something to do. Not that Jack cared. He had been overruled when it came to who could interview his team and he was less than concerned with the new assholes’ mental health due to that. Jack wondered how long it would take the various weenies that cycled in and out of the room to notice that Danny was playing with them like a cat with a new mouse?

Looking to his left, he could see that Carter was also bored enough to have started to play with her Homeland twit. She was further along with her playing than Daniel was because she had a lot less patience for human stupidity and a lot less compunction about being evil. Mitchell was talking football to his interviewer and the poor sod was trying to pull the good Colonel back from his haze so he could ask relevant questions again. Teal’c was sleeping with his eyes open and his Homeland Security agent was being very, very quiet at the table. Vala had backed hers into a corner. Jack leaned over and turned up the sound on that monitor to find out what she was saying. “… so I like a strap on that has ridges and a vibrator on my side. After all, I need to have fun too. What about you?” He hit mute before putting his hands over his face and laughing at the flabbergasted look on the weenies face. Jack could have told all of the agents that the whole interrogation thing was a lost cause, but no one was asking him and he was having too much fun watching them fail.

“Is this normal, General O’Neill?” a very puzzled Secretary of Defense asked.

Jack sat back in his chair and let his hands fall from his face. “Mr. Secretary, this is very normal SG1 behavior. Especially since they are all deeply bored. We’ve scanned them for snakes, checked for nanites, hit them with an EMP pulse, they aren’t Priors and they’ve all gone through the Za’Tarc detector to see if they were brainwashed. Each and every test has come out clean. Can I get my team away from the Homeland agents before they stop being nice?”

“This is nice?” Secretary Morris asked incredulously.

Jack chuckled harshly, “Yeah, it is. No one is crying, bleeding, ripping their eyes out or running for the hills. They are actually trying to be good.”

Morris actually looked horrified at that.

“Secretary Morris, if you take five highly intelligent people and put them in a 10×10 room with nothing to do and someone to torment, this is what you get. They were good, very good, for the first four rounds of this ‘debrief’. We are now on round five and they are tired of it. Tormenting an underling is a pastime SG1 has always shared. And they are still answering the questions put to them, they are just doing it creatively.”

Secretary of Defense Joseph Morris eyed the various monitors, each showing a different room and occupant. “Agent O’Connell, have any of the answers your team has been given been inconsistent with known information?”

The head of the debriefing team looked at each monitor in turn and settled on Daniel’s. “The only question we have sir is about Dr. Jackson. He has repeatedly said that he doesn’t understand the levels of engineering required to repair the Ori ship. And yet his teammates say that he worked just as hard as the rest of them to get the ship ready. This is causing us to wonder who is telling the truth.”

Jack snorted in sour amusement. He knew exactly what must have happened during the time that SG1 was working on getting the battleship functional. After all, he has seen various versions of it for years while he was leading the team. He decided to be nice and give some background that no one at the SGC really thought of anymore. “Daniel is the only geek in the whole Mountain to have the head of maintenance swing by his office on a daily basis to check for blown bulbs, backed up sinks, broken chairs and anything else that might need to be replaced or repaired. He gets totally engrossed in his work, to the point where he misses the little things like food, sleep, comfortable working conditions and on one memorable occasion, light. He was using his flashlight to read.

“What likely happened with the refit is that Dr. Jackson was reading/translating any and all manuals that he found on the inner workings of the ship. Daniel likely understood what each and every word he read meant, but he doesn’t have the technical background to understand the theory behind it. While doing that he would have been handing over tools as needed or holding parts. Basically being an extra set of hands or a place to hang a flashlight that would do what it was told when requested. However, when it comes to things like ancient architecture, he is well able to assess its structural integrity, draw out the plans for it and build you a new version. Dr. Jackson is not good at is super advanced machines like that Ori battlecruiser.”

O’Connell was looking at Daniel’s monitor with what looked like perturbed comprehension. Obviously the light had come on, but it was still shaded. “Something about that bothering you Agent?”

Nodding quickly the Homeland Security Agent pushed on with his questions. Jack was certain he was trying to get them all out at once now that he had found someone who they trusted and could give them answers that were not going to require dictionaries or a translation guide. All things that Jack had seen the weenies pull out as they reviewed footage of his team and their various debriefs. “From all reports, General, Dr. Jackson has been seen using a lot of really sophisticated equipment with very little trouble. How do you explain that sir?”

Jack turned his eyes to the ceiling and thought about how to put something that he thought was obvious into words that this paper pusher could understand. “Daniel is one of the smartest men on this planet, if not the smartest man since McKay is in Pegasus. But like everyone on this planet, you have to take the time to teach him something. If he is interested, Daniel will learn a skill down to the very end. Since he isn’t interested, Carter doesn’t teach him about the complex guts of a starship. And 90% of the time, he doesn’t need the information on a day to day basis. Carter does, however. In this case, what she would have taught him would be how to access the computer systems, how to get around on the ship, bridge controls, and basic ship handling. Daniel learned all that and more about the Prometheus when he was prepping for that aborted mission to rescue Atlantis a few years ago. It was going to be a long voyage and he gets bored very easily and very quickly. Unfortunately for the pride of her crew, the information came in handy.”

“And the reason he ignores general housekeeping here in the Mountain is that he doesn’t find it interesting?” Morris asked with a raised brow.

“Well, that and Siler got upset the last time Daniel tried to do any basic maintenance in his office. It is just safer all around if he doesn’t.” Jack agreed.

Eyebrow raised in reluctant understanding, O’Connell stared at the monitors showing SG1 quietly expressing their frustration at not being free in a non-injurious way. “Well okay then. I had better go rescue my agent from the good Doctor. It looks bad when I let them get gratuitously insulted.” He said as he walked out the door. Jack was honestly surprised to find that the other man had a sense of humor. It boded well for any future interactions.

 

 

“You kept the house? And all our stuff?” Daniel asked as he looked over the outside of the house he had shared with Jack before SG1 had left on their suicide mission. Not that they had managed to spend a lot of time together at the house. Daniel had still been an active member of SG1 and Jack had spent his time bouncing back and forth from Colorado Springs to Washington DC. Their schedules had not been conducive to maintain a relationship at all.

So to know that the house that he had been dreaming of for the last three years was intact and still theirs was a wonderful surprise. One that he would have to show Jack how grateful he was for later. Right after he got a really long shower somewhere no one other than Jack was watching. The whole damn Mountain was covered in CCTV’s, and that included the showers. Daniel had gotten used to them, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with the overt level of observation.

“Yeahsureyoubetcha! There is no way in Netu I would let the house go after all you did to buy it!” Jack said with a grin, rocking back on his heels. “And I wasn’t going to move too far away from the Mountain when my access was limited due to the assholes.”

Daniel smiled at that. It had been a fight to buy this house. And he had managed it without letting Jack know that he had done it until the man had come back for a visit. The house had been his first real home after getting back from Abydos and there was no way that he would let that go without some form of action. Thanks to nearly a decade of really good paychecks, an aversion to gratuitously spending money and a decent housing market, he had had the money to buy the house outright. Jack hadn’t known a thing until they had turned onto the right street on his first leave home.

The look on his face had made all the fuss and bother that Daniel had gone through worth it.

When Jack handed him his keychain, the one that he had left in his locker under the Mountain so long before, it just made it all real. He was home. And unless Jack was going with him, Daniel knew he wasn’t going to go anywhere else again.

Jack was perfectly happy to let Daniel spend 20 minutes or more in the shower. For a desert baby, his Danny really did love getting wet in either a bath or a shower and Jack had a lot of fun indulging that. While his partner had been gone, Jack had done some selective remodeling of the house with an eye to the future. After all, he wasn’t getting any younger and his doctor was already pushing hard for knee replacements.

Given all of that, he had gone for a huge walk in shower with enough room to keep flooding to a minimum, and a bathtub that was deep enough that the water came up to his chin when he was sitting. The neat part was that it opened from the side so he just had to step in. His desert baby had taken one look at the new set up and started stripping his clothes off and making hungry noises at all the shiny showerheads. The noises Daniel had made caused Jack’s cock to stand up and take notice of how long it had been since he had played in his favorite playground.

Grabbing his patience with both hands, Jack had retreated into the kitchen and quickly prepared a tray loaded with all of Daniel’s favorite foods. More importantly, he made a pot of Guatemala Hunapu Antigua Bourbon coffee. Folgers was not a coffee allowed in their house and he had turned into as big of a coffee snob as the archeologist. While that was brewing, he took the tray back into the bathroom and started to get things ready for a bath. One table to hold the food and drink, the bubble bath that they both liked, waterproof lube, huge thick towels over the warmer and the score from Madame Butterfly waiting to play. Daniel was still making the type of noises that went straight to his dick as he scrubbed at his skin, obviously washing something off with intent. Jack left him to it as he headed back to the kitchen to get the insulated carafe of caffeinated nirvana.

Setting the carafe and cups on the table, Jack stared at the figure in his shower. Daniel had been in there long enough that he was silently congratulating himself on his decision to buy the tankless water heater. HGTV and their brand of home improvement crack had paid off in spades. Stepping into the tub, he closed it up and started the process of filling it. It took a while. “Daniel? Come join me?” he called.

The water shut off and a wet and very naked archeologist padded out of the shower. Daniel was no longer the weedy academic that he had been on their first mission to Abydos. He was now buff, capable of pulling his own weight and walked like the soldier he had been trained to be. Jack felt his mouth start to water at all the golden skin spread out before him. Then he had to hide a wide grin as Daniel caught sight of the coffee carafe and moved to get a cup.

If Jack thought the noises the other man had made were for the shower were bad, the ones that he let loose as he drank his first cup of coffee in three years were a million times worse. Pretty, pretty lips caressed the edges of a plain mug as they slowly but surely sipped at the fragrant brew. Once it was all gone, Daniel reached for the carafe and refilled his mug. “Oh, this is a very fine coffee, Jack. Where did you find it?”

“Mini-me told me about it. He bought about a thousand pounds of whole bean coffee before he and the mini you shipped out for lands unknown. And that was just for them. I made sure there was about the same for McKay. Otherwise, I think that too smart Canadian bastard would have found a way to fire up the gate to kick my ass on general principles. Now come over here and slide in. I wanna feel you.”

Daniel had rarely felt more pampered in his life. And most, if not all the times that he had, had been because of the man whom he had just spent the last hour in the bath with. Jack did nothing by half and his spoiling campaign was well appreciated. To make it better, Jack had brought out the massage oil after their soaking and was slowly but surely reducing him to a quivering puddle of man-shaped jello.

His shoulders were loose, the spot right under the shoulder blades that ached was unknotted, his legs were tingling and Jack was sitting right below his ass and his cock was nudging the cleft in a manner that promised all sorts of interesting things to come. But the hands that were turning him into jello weren’t stopping their movement and Daniel was torn. Stop the really, really wonderful massage (the most voluntary touching he had had for the last three years) or get fucked into the mattress. Choices, choices.

When Jack’s hands reached his lower back, Daniel moaned in ecstasy. He held himself still with an effort and shuddered as the muscles unknotted under his partner’s skilled ministrations. Apparently Jack had enjoyed his moan because the cock that had been nudging his ass was now trying to drill a hole in it, it was so hard. When Jack shifted to put more pressure on the spot he was massaging, Daniel spread his legs as a blatant hint. He had decided. He wanted to get fucked. Hard.

Jack’s hands were still working his back, but with every pass, they were moving lower and lower until they were playing with the globes of his ass. He moaned again. This was so much better than his imagination and dear gods… Jack’s thumbs were now playing with the cleft of his ass and massaging around and around his asshole. When the hands that were driving him insane lifted away, Daniel lifted up, trying to get them back.

“Don’t worry, Daniel. I’m just getting some more oil.”Jack murmured. Daniel tried not to twitch as he felt the line of oil move over his ass and down his cleft. Feeling the warm oil sliding over his asshole, Daniel arched into the sensation. It was so damn sensuous and arousing to feel that stuff run over his skin again. And to have Jack spread the oil and work it into his ass? Oh, this was heaven.

Only it got better. Because Jack was tagging his prostate with every twist of his fingers and Daniel was trying to keep his body from flying off the bed with each exquisite jolt. And when Jack slowly found home again in his body? Daniel just gave up and came. It was home, it was life, it was each and every experience he had ever had with this man and he was never going to leave his side again.

When Jack tapped his hip in their old code, requesting that he turn over, Daniel sighed. The position he was currently in was great for just getting fucked to within an inch of his life and it was a wonderful feeling that he didn’t want to have ended. But if he got on his back, he could kiss Jack and that wasn’t something that he wanted to miss. Starting the roll meant that Jack had to pull out, but he would find his way back in soon enough. As soon as his back hit the sheets, Daniel reached up and cupped his hand behind Jack’s head. He truly loved this man.

Sharing kisses while Jack slid home again was as natural as breathing and almost as easy. Hips moving together, they worked together to find heaven that both barely remembered. Daniel was hard again and it felt so damn natural to reach down and start to stroke his cock in time with Jack’s thrusts into his ass. Blinding pleasure urged him to grip tighter, move faster, add an extra snap to this hips in an effort to reach a singular goal. Paradise.

When he reached it, when all went blinding white with the pleasure that only Jack could give him, Daniel felt himself reaching out to the other man. His skin felt too thin to contain him, and the part of him that had been locked away by the Ancients broke free enough to connect with the man above him. And Jack felt him. Daniel knew that if Jack hadn’t wanted the connection, the joining that they were sharing, he could have kept him out, could have stopped the bonding. But he didn’t and they were together.

Pleasure ebbed from its frantic high and the connection that Daniel had set in motion between them fell silent. Breath coming in harsh pants, Daniel hugged Jack to him, trying to burrow into his skin. The lovemaking had cemented something that had been building all night. Each touch by Jack, each action taken by him to welcome Daniel back into his life had highlighted it. He was home. And that was where he was going to stay.

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