Nobody ever said to me, "Here, stick this fish in your ear." They've tried to stick snakes in my head, but that's different. A fish I could maybe live with. Better than knowing that some techo-thingy has rewired my brain. I get enough of that.

Hey, here's one for you: the whole universe speaks English. Think so? Think again. Daniel and Carter say it's the gate, and yeah, sure, I'll buy that. The question isn't what it is, but how. Ask for an answer to that, and they just play let's pretend. They call it theorizing--same difference. I can read their voices and the way they cock their heads, how they hesitate and check out the details with each other as they go. Explaining it so carefully you know it's all just apple cobbler. They always have a good theory--hell, they can come up with a theory for anything if you give them ten minutes--but for this they don't really have a clue. And what are you going to do, take apart a gate? Tried that. Guess what. Doesn't work.

Every time we hit dirt, Daniel puzzles his brows together and checks his software, but we just walk around speaking English like apes until some guy in a funny hat shows up and says kom-try-whoo-ha, or the local equivalent. Then it's presto, gibberish pouring into our ears and spilling out our mouths. Except not, because the point is we understand nine out of ten words. Usually the tenth word is the handy one for "poisonous plant you shouldn't sniff" but never mind. I'm not bitter.

Daniel hates it and loves it, but basically it makes him squinty, like he doesn't know which way his hat will fall if he drops it. Says it puts him out of a job, makes him feel useless. I know that feeling. I do my share of standing around when he and Carter get going. Of course, unlike the rest of us he can also do something with the brain dump. Sooner or later he ends up hunched over his notebooks by firelight, broody and scribbling out the contents of his head. You ought to see how pissy he gets if he doesn't get a few pages of some alien language worked out for each planet we visit. Like Sara whenever she was going through that PMS thing. Not pretty.

And, with Daniel, kind of heartbreaking. Here's a guy who speaks twentysomething languages and he thinks he could speak a hundred and twentysomething except it all just...fades away after you gate out. He's not used to that. Losing his memory, losing words. I keep wanting to tell him, get used to it, champ. Forty years from now, if we're still kicking, he'll be lucky if he can find his nose with his glasses. The brain gets tired. Hey, mine's tired now but you don't hear me complaining.

He's not useless. I've even told him so, once or twice. Given him the pep talk. I've given that talk to all of them--Carter, Teal'c. Coach O'Neill, a pal to all. Daniel isn't any needier than the rest, but he has his moments. Looks at me, lost. I feel like I'm looking in the mirror. Well, not really. But sometimes we're on the same wavelength. Once I gave him the talk pillow to pillow. Never tried that with Teal'c. Probably best. Carter...yeah. I don't think about that. I've made my choice of regulations to break and in which direction.

I look at him sometimes, ask myself if it's worth it. Lying by omission to everyone I know. Acting one way in public, when I wrap my arms around him in private. Inviting him over to watch the game, in a casual voice, palsy, when I intend to neck with him on the couch. It's not as if I need this stress. I've got my share. I'm forty-four and still wearing combat boots to work. My job takes me, oh, ten million light years from home most days, and I usually come back having left something dead behind me. Snakes. Men. Why do they call them light years, anyway. The years feel heavy to me.

Now that's morbid.

Why be morbid, it's not like we're sitting on some dark planet in the backyard of nowhere, waiting for dawn so that we can trek through the woods to reach a possibly broken stargate without having venomous nocturnal spiders drop on our heads.

Oh wait. We are.

Holy crap, but I hate it here.

Poke the fire, keep your mouth shut, wish for a hotdog. They tell you: join up, see the universe, son, travel on the Air Force's dime, make a man of yourself. Twenty-six years later, you're on some chilly hellhole with two moons, craving the nitrate-ridden back of a pig's ass. On a bun. With mustard. Oh...yeah. Onions, sure. Why not. Pile them on. No moonlight kisses tonight.

He's scribbling in his notebook, muttering Greek. Maybe. It's all Greek to me, right? Okay, all English. Same difference.

"So, Daniel. How goes the Greek?"

He looks up, squirrel-eyed, glasses slipping down his nose. "Um, well, it's not Greek. But other than that it's going...well."

"Latin? Pig Latin? Sabellian?"

He blinks at me. "Where did you learn that word?"

"What?"

"What?" He frowns as if I've just lobbed one past him. "Did you have a question?"

"Just checking your progress." I pause. "That's what a good commander does, Daniel." I say this like something your mother would read to you off a greeting card. Carter looks up from checking her pack for spiders and gives me a smile.

"Oh. Well, I've matched up some of the ideograms on the temple walls with their phonetic values--just the simple ones, so far. I think they must use a mixed system of both ideographic and phonetic scripts, kind of like Japanese or Hittite."

"Hit who?"

Hit you, his look says--blink and you miss it--and then he's back to being the mild-mannered geek he pretends to be. "I'm going to work on this now. Again." The way he sounds out his vowels you'd think I was an especially slow alien or maybe had recent head trauma (it's just a scratch), but he talks that way to everyone at times, including the general, so I try not to take it too personally. Once, on 668, he got cornered by this big animal with horns and hooves and a mean look in its eye. "I'm going to walk away now," he said to it carefully, and did.

I know what vowels are, thanks.

I want to chuck something at him. A ball of rolled-up socks, a power bar, a pebble or two. Nothing big. Just something to bounce off his hard head or rattle his glasses, to make him look up at me again with those blue eyes. He's got stubble and a scrape across one cheek, and he's been wearing a bandanna and a hat now for three days straight ever since that one spider landed in his hair. He looks tasty, though, and man, I did not think that. Not here. Not now. Not with Teal'c just four feet away from me, staring with his big stone face into the fire. That's messing with my head. Work. Not work. Box A. Box B.

There's a hiss and a pop as something dark disappears into the fire. I look over at Carter.

"Sorry, sir." Her face twists up, like she's apologizing with a headache. "It was already dead, though."

"That's nice," I say, making it clear I mean otherwise.

"I hate spiders," she says rather viciously.

"We all hate spiders, Carter."

"I do not hate spiders," Teal'c says with the kind of serenity you want to punch right out of a guy.

"You are deeply unnatural," I tell him, pointing a finger his way. He looks at me, tilting his head like he's considering whether or not I'm serious. Or maybe how I'd look if my hair were on fire.

"I do not think I am, O'Neill," says the man who deserves a spider in his kit bag. You gotta love Teal'c. But sometimes the temptation to...well, you know. He's gotten complacent around us humans, is what I've been telling Daniel. At some point, he figured out he's the only one of us who's not neurotic. Of course he had to figure out what neurotic meant first. And he did. I'm not even sure I know what neurotic means, when you get down to it. The guy reads more books than I do.

"Do you think I'm neurotic?" I wonder aloud, staring at the burning lump of spider.

This makes Daniel look up again. Owlish blinking. "In what sense?"

Damn him.

I don't answer and eventually, confused, he goes back to his notebook. Then he darts another glance at me. Then his notebook. He frowns at his notebook like he's frowning at me. I want to be the notebook, under his hands. Oh boy.

"Well," says Carter, taking up the reins, "they say that neurosis is a maladaptive habit that resists modification through the normal processes of learning."

I stifle the urge to say, Did I ask you? I give her a look that speaks it for me, but she misses it. She's shaking out her boot, even though there's no way anything could have crawled inside when it's been laced up tight on her foot all day. "Phobias, obsessive thoughts, compulsions, unreasonable anxiety are all neuroses."

Teal'c straightens. "Then, unreasonable anxiety about whether or not one is neurotic would in itself be a neurosis."

I glare at him as Carter grins. White teeth to the left of me, smirk to the right, and then Daniel the traitor snickers to himself.

"Find a joke there in your phony scripts?" He once taught me to say phonetic with his mouth on mine, and all of a sudden I can tell we're both thinking about it. He gives me the eye, flirts with me in front of the others. Lashes, mouth, ballpoint. I'm connecting all the dots. Damn.

I'd like to learn a lot of words I already know, just to have him teach me. I can't stop looking at him across the fire. I'm going to blow it, here and now. Or someday.

I look away just as he looks down. I still hold him in my peripheral vision. I just need to stop thinking. Thinking too much can be a dangerous thing. Thinking outside the box--they say that's supposed to be a good trick, but I've never found it to be anything but trouble. My boxes must be different, because I keep one set of marbles in Box A, and another set in Box B. And if you shake the boxes and mix them up, you get thoughts of Daniel naked by firelight when you should be thinking of a broken stargate and fanged bugs and natives with a grudge.

He looks good naked. First time I got him stripped him down and alone I had no clue what to do with him. He stood there in my bedroom and his eyebrows pulled together like he was trying to remember if he had to catch a bus. He had his arms wrapped around himself. He said, "It's kind of cold. Don't you have heat?" He'd noticed the cold, but the way he asked it sounded like he doubted. Doubted himself, or me, or the temperature of the universe. I think now that if I'd told him the heat was already on, he'd have said, oh. And then he'd have accepted my answer, or else fought me on it to the death.

Back then I couldn't have said which. Could never predict which way he'd roll. I was out of my mind, crazy with fear at what we were going to do and there he was, awkward and familiar and standing in front of me naked. Only then I realized--a big hell-o--that I didn't know the first thing about Daniel. Didn't know when he was being polite or rude or if he even knew the difference. Didn't know when, if ever, he was feeling unsure or when he was being the arrogant egghead he looked like from the outside. It all read like the same script to me. Cryptic Daniel. An alien language. And I could do without another alien language, so that should have been a deterrent.

But I wanted him, bad.

It was winter in Colorado, and we'd been offworld for two weeks. It had been summer there. P5X-something-or-other. My pipes had frozen. I turned the heat on. I fucked him on my bed. I wasn't very good at it, and he got so quiet that I could feel my career drying up in the pit of my stomach. And then he said harder like he'd forgotten how to breathe and my dick jumpstarted inside him and it was so fucking good that I bought a new bed the next weekend, and new sheets and towels and a decent coffee pot. All the things I'd never given any thought to since Sara left. I dusted the house, even. I learned to fuck better. I was inspired. I mean, a man doesn't suddenly up and get interested in better fucking after a quarter-century. You learn the routine early, with women, and you figure that by this time of your life you know what you're doing, more or less. With a woman. But he wasn't a woman and apparently this was my midlife crisis, so I learned how to fuck all over again.

When I realize I'm thinking about this now, I half hate myself for it. I'm on a mission, goddamn it. And I'm being well-paid to think about spiders and the safety of my people. Not about an archaeologist's fine ass. If I were a sane man, I'd end this thing. I think about it seriously, once a week at least. Daniel knows I do. He must. We cut each other the same thinking looks, when we're not talking about it. We're obviously not made for each other, aside from planet-hopping and wild animal sex. Even if we were just friends, we'd be an odd couple. We bicker and misunderstand each other and could probably disagree on the value of a postage stamp. Here's a man, for example, who eats anything you stick on a plate, doesn't even notice if it has salt or not, which I think is all the proof you'd need that he's an alien where it counts, whereas get me off-duty and I become an anal-retentive bastard who gripes about the condition of supermarket green beans these days--if you call that green--and measures the depth of char on my steak. I don't care what peg you want to hang me on. These things matter.

I could list a hundred differences between me and Daniel. The obvious: he reads books about rocks that you could flatten mice with--the books, not the rocks, but that doesn't matter. The point is: Books. About. Rocks. I read Tom Clancy, or better yet don't read at all when I can watch sports and news and sitcoms that I forget exist ten minutes after I switch the set off. He snores, I shove him. He mocks my hats and I mock those freaky patterned dress socks he buys because he might as well be color blind.

Republican, Democrat. Yada yada.

The less obvious differences...well, you know, I think he's with me because it's convenient and simple enough not to distract him from work. I think I'm with him because...

"Do you wish to take first watch, O'Neill?" asks Teal'c. That voice of his will recall me to duty even when I'm dead.

"Oh, sure. Why not," I say, keeping my own voice light as befits a man whose thoughts were just dwelling on the Blackhawks' new season line-up. On installing a bigger mailbox. On a hot shower and prime rib. Or about a mission he's currently on, if he happens to be an optimist and a sunny inspiration to his team.

I glance at Daniel. He's fallen asleep sitting up, pen hanging from his fingers and about to roll free. Mouthbreathing quietly enough that I can't hear him, not over the sound of the fire and the lizardy things chirping like blasted cell phones in the grass. But I think about how his breath feels in the middle of the night on the back of my neck. The hairs there lift and it's not a breeze, what I feel.

Because...

"Would you like my spider, sir?"

"What?" I jerk back from Carter, who raises her eyebrows at me.

"I said would you like more fire, sir." She waves her hand toward the pile of kindling.

"Oh. No. Thank you." I stare at her suspiciously, and all the thoughts in my head feel naked and obvious, like they've been jarred loose, like they're about to tumble out onto the fire. Nothing to do with what she said, or what I thought I heard. It's the way she looks, her knowing smile right before she turns away and starts to roll out her sleeping gear.

I'm afraid of just how obvious I might be.

Because I want him so bad it makes my balls ache and my heart rip open, like I've just pulled the cord on the rest of my life and jumped.

If I start thinking too much, the whole damn mess takes over my brain in words of one syllable that I can't pretend to misunderstand. It's my brain--the same old one I've gotten used to--and it doesn't take a gate or a fish or a personal translator to figure out what it's trying to tell me. Which is why I don't. Think about it much. Words are overrated.

Naked is good, though.
 
 

End.

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