Field
 

"I think we're a thing," Daniel said.

"We're not a thing."

"I'd be willing to admit it if you were."

"Oh, for crying out loud."

"Would it be that awful?"

"We're not a thing."

"Look around you, Jack." He leaned his scythe against his chest a moment and swept one arm out wide. "Who else do you see?"

I glared at him from under the brim of my cap. "You know that saying, if you were the last man on Earth?"

"Well, this isn't Earth either."

"Rub it in, why don't you." We scythed another minute or two in silence before I spoke again. "The key word there was 'man' by the way, in case you weren't paying attention."

"I think we should be able to talk about these things." He sounded reasonable, but he was saying unreasonable things. Why was that, I wondered, then remembered: because he was insane.

He had a point, though. Wasn't much else to do but talk. That's how he always wore me down. He started with simple statements. We should be able to cultivate the wheat, Jack. There might be more artifacts over that next hill, Jack. Jack, I'd like to drag this heavy fucking loom five miles through the rain to the hut, oh but wait, could you do it, because I've got to carry these pots. Then if I disagreed, I'd get the talk. Talk, talk, talk. And in fact he was still talking now. I ignored him and hoped he'd shut up.

"--really believe that all human beings have a bisexual potential--the very fact that we arouse ourselves--"

God, make it stop. I looked at the skies, and jerked my head in Daniel's direction where the thunderbolt should be hurled.

"--derive pleasure from a variety of stimuli throughout the ages--"

He didn't even need me here. Give him an earless scarecrow and he'd lecture it until the rags fell down with exhaustion.

"--who pointed out that the ancient Greeks conceived of sexuality in terms of quantity instead of orientation--"

I leaned on my own scythe a moment and pressed my forehead against its handle, then suddenly looked up.

"Sheep?" I interrupted, cocking my head at him. "Are you talking to me about sheep?"

He stopped and frowned irritably. "I'm not advocating it as a lifestyle choice, Jack. Besides, that wasn't important. I'm simply saying--"

"Well, stop saying it!"

"The point I was trying to make--"

"La la la la la, la la," I sang.

And then I got some damn seventies song stuck in my head.

"Checkmate," I said.

He blinked and looked over at the board. "Well, yes." He slid my castle back to its original square. "If you could move your rook like that, I guess it would be."

"Just making sure you were paying attention." I made my real move, the one I'd been keeping in reserve in case he noticed my sleight of hand, and which was going to lose me the game in five.

I watched him study the board. The firelight cupped the right side of his face and the strands of hair that hung there. His hair looked terrible. I supposed mine did too. I never should have let him cut it, but I'm too old for the hippie look even if he's the only one seeing it. Plus it'd tickle my neck and I know I'd hate that.

My thoughts drifted, but my gaze stayed fixed on him. I kept mulling over his attempts to get in my pants. It was very un-Daniel-like of him. But he'd gone round the bend a while back. Once he'd finished sampling the local rocks and caves, and dug up every cracked teacup within a ten-mile radius, he'd become as bored as I'd already been for the previous five months. He'd gotten domestic, gotten in touch with his inner hausfrau or something. Started cleaning up the odds and ends he'd found around our deserted village, made me help him fix a fence and herd in some of the wild goats. Before I knew it he was weaving and doing artsy-craftsy stuff in his off hours, which was whenever we weren't hunting, gathering, and tilling the land together like a couple of primitives. He'd frown as he figured things out, then sit for hours on end, calm as dirt, pinching out pots and spinning thread.

He pretended that everything he was doing was useful. "We'll need more than our jackets when winter comes," he'd say, and, "At the rate you keep breaking bowls, Jack, it's hard for me to even keep up." But I knew something else was going on, and when he started talking about sex one day, the pieces fell together. It had all been a sneaky plan to woo me with...with pottery. And lopsided sweaters.

I wasn't going for it. We were both lonely, sure, but I was perfectly capable of being lonely without sex. And he was my subordinate. Sort of. And he had bad hair. I squinted at his head some more to confirm my judgment, and my gaze slid to his glasses propped up there, and the stringy clay he'd used to mend the joint. I needed to find a bit of metal and fix that. Solder it. I had to have something in my pack that'd work. I considered our dwindling supplies, and let my gaze wander down to his forehead and the groove between his eyebrows. If you looked at it in a certain way, the groove was like the spine of a bird, and the eyebrows the wings--sort of a hawk flying toward his nose. I'd noticed that a few months ago. I really needed to stop noticing it. I'd have sacrificed a goat for a TV set. Just one channel, that was all I asked. Even PBS.

He looked up and caught me looking. His blue eyes startled me. I half expected him to give me one of those knowing smiles, the kind women give when they catch you out. He didn't do that, though, he only stared at me and stayed quiet. That was almost worse.

I'd grown used to his face.

He made his move, and I had a reason to look down. I focused on the chess board with the crude wooden pieces I'd carved, but I could still see his hands, the dirty nails, the edges of his goat-colored sweater.

A few months back, I might have been able to get my mind off him entirely, to think of Carter and Teal'c and what they might be doing, to estimate our chances of discovery and rescue. But my mind had moved ahead a square a few months ago, when I faced up to how unlikely rescue was. When I'd been stranded on Edora, it had felt like the last stop on the line to me, but this was even more remote; the SGC had no idea where we were. Daniel and I had been dropped at the edge of the universe with no ride home. Every morning when I woke up, I walked to the doorway and stared out at the big sky. No chance of ships, I'd told myself until it sank in. But watching was a habit. So was twisted optimism.

It was a big sky, with a spread of green hills and mountains underneath, and sometimes the cover was grey and white and low all day as we worked outside, and then around evening the sun would break through just as it was setting. The place reminded me of Ireland, what I'd seen of it that time Sara and I backpacked our way across the O'Neill homeland. No pubs, though.

"Think it'll rain tomorrow," I asked, moving a piece at random, to see if I could surprise him.

"I, uh--hmm. What? Rain. I don't know."

It would rain. I knew it.

And it did.

Okay, I started it, I admit it. I didn't start it start it, but I made the first move. It was a month or two after he'd put the idea of sex on the table, so to speak. When I hadn't taken him up on his suggestion, he'd dropped the subject cold. He acted like it was no big deal, and I could imagine him shrugging as he dismissed the idea: Jack's not going for it, guess I'll pass the time curing leather instead. I didn't get how he could just let go of it like that, but I'd been glad to see the end of the conversation.

Except I brooded on it. I thought about the Air Force, about Carter, about my marriage and Charlie, about my wild youth and the women I'd had. I kept weighing all of these against sex with Daniel, and I didn't even know why--or even if it was supposed to be an equation. None of it made sense. Maybe I was trying to figure out who I was. Was I a guy who'd have sex with another guy when there was no one else around? Never had before, and I'd been trapped on base plenty of times, been stuck on missions where I kept bumping up against horny guys when I was dangerously bored myself. I'd always locked myself in a latrine with a skin rag instead.

That was then, this was now.

I wished I had more to think about, something to do. Boredom, I'd suffered that before. This was a whole new level of boredom, though. This was out-of-your-mind boredom, squared. I'd even started meditating, for christ's sake. I didn't even know I was doing it at first, then sighed one day after I'd been staring at the goats for an hour, and got into that lotus thingy position and tried to learn to breathe. I glared at Daniel when he asked if I wanted help. I could learn to breathe on my own, thanks.

Sex. Yeah. I really wanted sex. I wanted to nail him hard--no, hell. I can be honest about this. He was Daniel and I knew him well enough that I wanted to make love to him, like I'd made love to Sara. It was bad, I had it bad. He'd stopped talking about sex, and I'd started thinking about it constantly. Started watching him, the way he stood in the wheat field and wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, the way he puttered around the hut and crouched in front of the fire. When we went to the lake and he got naked I got hard, a problem until I figured out to strip before he did and hide in the cold water. But there was no escape. I'd watch him make soup and I'd want to put my mouth on the back of his neck and push up against him. He'd pull off his shirt, and I'd think about how it'd feel to run my hands over his chest.

I finally did one of those things. He was standing at the shelf under the west window when I came into the hut one night. I grunted. By this time we didn't always have something to say to each other every time we met, and he said nothing. Didn't even turn, just went on washing the small carroty things that we ate with all our meals. He had his hair in a ponytail, and his shirt had a few holes in it, and I closed my eyes and tried to find religion and discipline, something that would let me ignore what I wanted. Didn't work. I went over and stood behind him. He didn't notice; or if he did, he wasn't saying anything. I leaned in and breathed him, and my lips were an inch from his neck for a moment, and then my right hand lifted and slid up his side, around the ribs to touch his chest. I felt like a ghost, everything was that light.

He didn't do anything right away; let me do what I was doing, that's all. I kissed the back of his neck. I was diamond-cutter hard. That's all it took. I slid one arm around his waist and the other up to his chest and I felt his heart beat. It was beating fast. I pressed my chest against his back and he stiffened all over in a good way and then relaxed. I pushed against him once and then put my hand between his legs to see what was there. Hardness, like mine, filling my hand.

"Jack," he said, as if I were strangling him. I let go, flushed, and moved away, and then he was turning and in my face.

"Don't," I told him.

"It's okay."

I couldn't meet his eyes. He held me and kissed me and I gave in again for a minute. He tasted so good I thought I might be dreaming. Maybe I was dreaming this whole other life. I'd wake up and I'd be back in the SGC or in my house and remember what never happened, the end of the universe, the white sky outside the window, and the chilly air and smell of peat and the noises of the goats. Some strange world, a man kissing me.

And something chewing on my leg.

"Bart," Daniel said.

I opened my eyes and found the goat eating my fatigues. "Go," I said roughly. "Get out." I gave it a weak kick and it gave that little rattling cough that real goats don't make, and trotted back out the open door.

Daniel got in another kiss when I turned my head back. There was nothing I could do to stop him so I grabbed his head and we ate each other's tongues and it was wet, sweet, it was like drinking. But then I broke away and took a step back, hands raised. My mouth ached, my dick ached, I ached. "This is not going to happen," I said.

He let out a whoosh of breath, then said: "It's not?" He sounded as if I'd told him that oranges weren't orange.

"It's against regulations," I said. I ran a trembling hand across my hair. "It's very against regulations, Daniel."

If I'd said anything else, he might have eased up, but I guess that was the wrong thing.

"Jack." He got a bit manic and extended both hands like Jesus about to start preaching to the sheep. Goats. Whatever. "I know I've pointed this out before, but look at where we're standing. In the middle of a hut, we don't know how many millions of light-years away from Earth--and it's been ten months."

I wouldn't admit his point. "Excuse me for being upbeat, but I say there's a chance we'll get home and a good chance it'll be sooner, not later." I was all nerves, denial. "And I can't go back with--" No simple way to finish that sentence, so I didn't.

"Well, I'd like to think that too." He crossed his arms. "But if sooner means twenty years rather than fifty, I think your optimism is moot. And I don't see how that changes things."

I glared at him, trying not to think of twenty or fifty years. "I'm your commanding officer."

"Well, supervisory officer."

"Don't split hairs with me."

"It's a fairly important hair."

"It's not an important hair. It's a very small, unimportant hair." I paused to regroup. "I'm charged by the SGC with command and you report to me in that command structure and that's it, that's the hair." That sounded nice and emphatic. But, wait. Did that make any sense? Regulations and semantics and hair. Fuck it.

"Well, I quit then." Daniel looked steadily at me.

"Pardon?"

"I quit. I'm a civilian stranded on an alien planet and I hereby resign from the SGC." He was far too pleased with himself. "I may reconsider my resignation at some point in the future, of course."

"Okay, that's--" I glared some more at him, searching for a word. The word. "That's irrelevant." I was glaring because I was touched by his silly gesture, because I wanted to hug him and bury my face in his neck and push him down in front of the fire.

"Irrelevant? How? I thought it was the hair."

"Stop saying 'the hair'!" I barked. "Look, Daniel. This is against regulations that I have to abide by. Nothing you do is gonna change that."

"Oh." A small word, a shuttered look. I shared his descent into gloom. Or maybe his was just deep thought. Hard to tell with him.

"So, what exactly are the regulations?" he asked, frowning at me. "Don't ask, don't tell, don't what?"

"The regulations." I knew he was going to ask me that. "Well, there's this whole idea of--" I hesitated, on the spot and knowing the memory was there somewhere. "Unit cohesion." That sounded good. It even sounded right.

"Are we still a unit?" he wondered.

"And no bodily contact," I said, dredging up another scrap of past reading, back when I was bored enough to read regs. The ones I thought might be kinky.

"You mean if we don't have bodily contact, we're not breaking regulations?"

"Probably not." But where was the fun in that, I thought sourly, before I realized that Daniel was...unzipping his pants. Whoa. "What are you doing?" I said sharply, my face tightening in refusal. I did not believe what he was doing. Did not.

"I'm just going to...oh, god, yes." His eyes shut and his head tipped back. His right shoulder rolled with suggestive movement.

"Don't do that!" I said, alarmed.

"Oh," he said, pitch lowering. "Oh. Oh." He sounded surprised, distracted.

"Daniel." I covered my face with both hands for a few moments.

"Oh, Jack. Wow."

Oh, dearly beloved...fuck. I bit down on my tongue hard as I could stand.

The rasp of flesh on flesh stopped, and he said, "Come on, Jack. Don't just stand there. Join in the fun." He pushed out the words between soft, quick breaths.

I took my hands down my heated face. "You are not fun. You are definitely something other than fun." My voice felt raw, and I was afraid he'd hear my desperation in it.

"You look," he paused to flick his gaze south and blink at me, "interested." He did an amazing thing with his mouth, tightening his lips and then licking them fast. His shoulder moved again in slow regular flexes that traveled down his arm, extending to his--I wasn't looking--and then he was using both shoulders, arms, hands, and his chest rippled and he panted and arched in place like a tree against an invisible wind.

Trees, I thought. Trees. Trees.

In a normal conversational voice, he said my name again. "Jack." Then his voice rose like he was calling to me across a field: "Jack."

A knifing need went through me like lightning, straight to my balls. My hands shook as I fumbled with my zipper and freed my dick and oh--

"Daniel," I breathed roughly, jerking my hungry flesh, bones loosening while my dick got even harder. I closed my eyes, had to, but heard his quick breathing and those other sounds, and my name now and then, choked out like it meant something to him. It was just a minute, one perfect minute, blindly listening to him gasp and groan and come with a wild cry, and then I was spilling over my hand with agonizing pleasure, almost pain. I worked the slickness over the head and down the shaft, keeping it going as long as I could bear before releasing myself.

I opened my eyes, saw him standing there with his head thrown back, lips parted, eyes closed. He looked like he'd blown a fuse. His shirt was spattered with come. I wanted him again.

I swallowed, found my shaky voice. "Okay. That was a good idea." I was resigned. And he'd resigned. And it was the end of the universe. Why not.

I wanted him again.

"I can't believe you did that," I said, lying propped next to him in front of the fire.

"I've been going out of my mind."

"Noticed that."

"I hate this place."

He'd never said that before. I'd said it, plenty of times, but he never had. It struck me hard. I'd been in charge, and we'd wound up here on an abandoned, gateless world with what felt like winter coming on, and no certainty whether we'd be able to make it through with the food we had; and if we did make it through, our best hope was for who knew how many more years scrabbling to stay alive with only a pack of goats and each other for company.

And maybe the worst thing for him was, he was stuck with me.

I stared down into his eyes and he stared up into mine. His were inky and deep, his brows like wings, cheeks chapped and lit by the fire, and his long, awful hair that spilled free across the stuffed goat-wool pillow.

"This has got to go," I said, fingering it.

"It's getting colder."

"Chop chop, and you'd look normal again. Almost."

"Yes," he said, drawing out the word. "I notice you snap like a dog every time I cut yours."

"That's because it takes forever and you bob my head around like an apple."

"I'm not seeing the incentive here."

I decided I wasn't seeing it either. I stroked his head a few times. He closed his eyes and tipped his head into my touch. We had a silence, where I dwelled again on what he'd told me. How much he hated it here.

"Have I ever mentioned--" I began, then cleared my throat. He opened his eyes, and I forced my voice to false lightness. "Ever mentioned that I'm sorry?" My lightness faded abruptly as I finally said this out loud. "I'm sorry I got you into this. Sorry we're here."

"It wasn't your fault. I don't know why you'd think you have to apologize."

"Because." Because I'd been in charge.

He tried to draw me in closer but I turned my head away from his kiss, thinking too much about myself. Forty-nine years old, grey as a goat, a colonel without a command, who'd failed his people and lost his way in the universe.

"Jack." Daniel kissed my jaw. "Have I ever mentioned that I'm crazy about you?"

Now he had to be joking. His quiet voice let him get away with saying things like that; things that almost sounded true. "Ever think maybe you're just crazy?"

"That too." He nipped my neck and then sucked my collarbone, then chewed my shoulder in an experimental way, with an intense frown. I had a feeling it had been a lot longer than ten months since he'd done anything like this, but I liked his strange enthusiasm. "I've wanted to do this for a long time," he said. "Years."

"Really?" That puzzled me. "I didn't...know that." I drew back and studied him. Thought he might suddenly look different, but he looked the same, a college boy who'd grown up to be a professor without really noticing. "You're a dark horse, Daniel."

"Yes, well. Maybe I'll tell you about that someday."

I raised a brow and penciled that one in on my mental calendar. "Oh, I think so."

He smiled. He didn't do that very often, and it was a kick in the guts to meet his eyes and see his face all lit up. It was like he was waking up, remembering for a moment that he was alive and even a bit happy, and for almost the first time, I felt like I'd had something to do with that. I felt my chest tighten oddly and I had to reach out for him, take his neck in my hand, pull him in and do things to that smile.

When my tongue had said a lot to him that I couldn't say myself, I pushed him back onto the blanket. Everything smelled of damp wool and goats, except for him; he smelled of himself. Two days since we hit the lake. I buried my face in him and felt myself growing hard again. I kissed his chest and licked up his salt. I took his nipples in my teeth, one then the other; they didn't get hard right away, but we had a lot of time, and I had nothing better to do, so I stayed there for a while with his chest rising and falling against my face and the fire crackling. He fell half asleep, but I didn't mind. By the time he roused back I'd made his nipples tight and stiff and red. It took a minute for him to catch up and then his body moved under mine like he was trying to shrug off his clothes, except that he wasn't wearing any.

"Jack," he said, and I felt his dick stir. "What--oh, god." He struggled with his pleasure; I was drunk on it already and sucked the hard little knots I'd made. He cried out and twisted his legs around mine. I slid down his body, my head buzzing and pounding with lust, and took his dick into my dry mouth. I'd never done this before in my life, but I was ready to pretend I knew the ropes. I don't know what I'd expected, but after a few maneuvers, I realized I could only get a few inches inside. All the women I remembered--they'd been a lot better at this. Apparently it was a skill, not a talent. Made a man wonder.

"Not yet," he groaned, even while he pushed inside me. "No. Not yet."

I let him go, which was okay. My jaw hurt. I'd have to work on that. We rolled together on the blankets and moved around and he got on top of me and kissed my fingers, sucked them. My hands were sore and raw from field work. Not the first thing I'd have chosen, if he'd asked what he could do for me, but it felt like heaven. I slitted my eyes open to watch him; it looked weird, seeing a man suck my fingers, seeing Daniel. I could live with it though. I could live with a lot of things, and I knew that now.

Rain started to spatter the roof and meanwhile Daniel moved, sitting on my thighs, leaning forward to rub our dicks together. They'd bump and he'd take them in his hand and slide them together a moment, let them go, squeeze them together again. We were getting sticky, the heads were, and then he half sprawled on me and traced my chest with his his wet fingers, while my dick throbbed and ached for his hand. My dogtags fell to one side, and he lifted them and tugged.

"Take these off," he said.

"What?" The sacrilege of it unnerved me. He didn't know what he was asking.

"Just for a minute."

I slid them over my head and gave them to him, and the sky outside thundered like a warning, but Daniel was rocking his hips against me, so I told God to pipe down and take it somewhere else.

Daniel held the dogtags in his hand and studied them, read them. First reading he'd done in a long time, it occurred to me. I had no idea what he was thinking; I don't know if he did either. He put them on for a minute, and leaned over me to let the metal swing and drag across my skin. I got gooseflesh, my stomach tightened, he was painting me with the cold metal. I thought that was all he'd wanted to do, wear them for a while, but he pulled them back over his head and wrapped the chain around his hand and began to jerk off, the tags jangling against his dick. He was mouthbreathing and gasping after a few strokes and I grabbed my own dick; I didn't want to be left behind.

"You, oh," he said. I was looking up at his face, didn't want to look away. He bit his lower lip and wrenched his head to one side; his eyes were squeezed shut. He looked like he was trying not to say something, his lips closed tight a moment, then fell open again. Maybe he was arguing with himself, maybe he was arguing with his own god, wrestling with demons. I'd seen women's faces when they were going wild, knew how they could seem angry, distracted, and they'd tell you later that it was nothing, they didn't know why they'd looked like that. That's how Daniel seemed, like he was getting ready to fight or shed his skin.

He pushed up on his knees and said my name, and his jaw worked, and he came. It landed on me in hot stripes. I whipped myself along, balls tightening, running inside myself for that place I wanted to get to with him--he was, oh hell, beautiful and exhausted looking and there was so much more of him than I'd known about before we ended up here. I angled my hand. I wanted to come on his cock, to get myself all over him. I stripped myself faster, almost snarling as the ache snaked out of my balls and shoved forward through my--oh, goddamn it, goddamn it.

"Oh, goddamn it, Danny, fuck!" I shot against him, lifting my head and chest to try and get a better look, and then falling with a thump back against the blanket, spent.

That was it for me. I didn't know it then, but I was in his hands.

He lay down with me and we got through that first night okay, and then more nights.

A few years later, I had to admit to myself we were a thing.

It wasn't that bad, and I still thought they'd find us one day. I suspected by the time they did I'd be ready to retire and watch TV and get a golden retriever. And whatever Hammond or Carter thought of me, I wouldn't care. It was Daniel. I grew carrots and goats with him. I made love to him. It happens.

Some morning I'll wake up and this will be the dream I had. Those years with him on another planet in the middle of nowhere with a big sky. I'll be waking in my own empty bed. Daniel will have left already for the SGC, all too keen to get in and start work on his latest translation, boss around the junior anthropologists.

I like to think he'll leave me coffee, and the newspaper on the table.

A normal life. That's all any man wants after he's seen the universe.
 
 

End
 

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