tagging @seancejunkie because I’m dragging her down this hole with me.
He still has the nightmares sometimes.
Hell, he has a carousel full of them, a lazy Susan chock full of nightmares that range from Baal slowly dripping acid onto his skin, the sound of a gunshot echoing through a Tuesday afternoon.
But one of them is supposed to be gone. FishFace told them the implanted memories would fade. That his brain would start processing it being false, and file it away.
Jack’s never been great at following orders when he’s got his back up, and it seems like his subconscious feels the same way. Because sometimes he wakes up with the heat of flames on his face and Daniel’s screams echoing in his ears.
Those are the nights he gives up trying to sleep. It’s not coming back. Jack sits on the side of the bed and he laces up the battered old sneakers he keeps under the bed for this very reason, and doesn’t bother changing out of the shorts and t-shirt he sleeps in. He’s going to be soaked in sweat by the time he’s done anyway.
The first mile is never easy. His brain is still too wired, sharp shocks of nightmare still turning circles in his head. Jack knows better than to try and outrun it. The static will stay as long as it’s going to stay, and all he can do is focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
Left, left, left right left.
But somewhere around mile two his heart gets in line with his feet and things even out. The neighborhood is silent at this time of night, removed enough from the city that it’s pools of shadow broken up by buttery soft street lamps at intervals. There’s an occasional barking dog, and nothing but the sound of Jack’s sneakers slapping the concrete.
He can’t run like he used to. He’s not boot camp aged anymore, his knees are worn thin, but he’s been doing the yoga stretches Doc Frasier gave him and taking a multivitamin, and it’s at least good enough that he can get out there and break a sweat, and his train of thought.
Silence has never been his strong suit. Even as a kid, he couldn’t stand not being heard, and it led to a great many interactions with his old man’s belt. Children are meant to be seen and not heard, son. Jack disagreed. And he made a habit of never cutting Charlie off, even when he’d been babbling baseball stats for what felt like an hour.
And after he’d been stationed overseas, after the Gulf war, silence sounded like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Fans and white noise helped him sleep, but sometimes the silence got under your skin. That’s when Jack had to move.
Implanted memories of fire and flame fall away, and Jack’s at the outskirts of the park now. He can take a lap around it, end up around 5k by the time he makes it back to his house. Sweat gathers between his shoulderblades and runs down his back.
He thinks of Daniel when he climbed out of the water, hair slicked away from his face, shirt clinging to his shoulders. He thinks of how damn blue Daniel’s eyes are, putting the ocean to shame. He thinks of Daniel on his knees, wet not from some alien ocean but from the nice, beating pressure of Jack’s shower.
On his knees, hair long like it used to be back then, moisture beaded on his eyelashes, dripping down the aquiline slope of his nose. Watching Jack with those impossibly blue eyes, soft lips wrapped around Jack’s mouth, his cheeks hollowed.
Jack has had this dream, a time or two. But he’s awake now, pounding the pavement in the park at half mast like some kind of pervert. Jack stops between two street lamps to tuck his hard on into the band of his boxer briefs and ignores the electric jolt of skin on skin.
At least he’s not thinking about fire anymore.
By the time he’s back at his house, there’s no thought in his head, just a white, hazy heat. Jack is too old to be having jerk off dreams about a team mate, and he’s too damn old to close his eyes and fantasize while he fucks his fist. He knows he should turn the shower on nice and cold and shiver out the worst of it. Once his heart rate came down again, he could sleep.
But Jack doesn’t go to the shower. He plants himself right back on the edge of the bed and toes off his sneakers. The sheets feel sticky and too warm against his skin, but Jack doesn’t take his clothes off. That’s more real than he’s ready for. Because now, all he’s doing is brushing his knuckles up and down the hard line of his dick and feeling the fizzle of fireworks beneath his skin.
Used to, he would think of Daniel with Shau’ri. Like somehow it made it better to picture the line of his back where he was folded over between her thighs, licking her open while she sighed his name, heavy and sweet. Dan-yel.
By the time he’s got his boxers and his shorts down around his thighs, the vision has shifted. It’s not Shau’ri but Sarah, his spunky Sarah who refused to so much as touch his dick until he made her come on his tongue, and then his fingers.
Jack remembers the way she’d grip a hand in his short hair and lead him right where she needed him to be. And when it got too much on her clit, he’d slip two fingers inside of her and focus on her g-spot, lapping just below her clit until she was bearing down on him, shaking with it.
Hundreds of times he must have heard what came next, a breathy, bossy fuck me, Jack but in his mind like this, it’s not Sarah insisting, it’s Daniel. Daniel, with his knees spread and his hole spread and Jack grips himself tighter and thinks about what it would be like to feed himself into that hole, to feel the slick heat of being swallowed by Daniel’s body.
Eyes closed, back arched, Jack strips at his cock but he can’t picture Daniel like that. On his back. Submissive and open and begging for it. It wasn’t him and Jack gives up that line of thinking along with the hand on his dick. He sighs, kicking off his boxers and his shorts, and sitting up to peel his shirt off too.
Jack’s grateful for the only light being from the streetlamps outside his window. He’s never been an Adonis, but he’s always kept in shape. But the years and the mileage catch up, and there’s a layer of softness over his muscles that he can’t work off. Right now, he doesn’t want to look down and see a paunch and salt and pepper hair.
Right now, what he wants to think about is Daniel on top of him, slick and tight and competitive. Jack reaches blindly for the bedside table and grabs the bottle of lotion he keeps there, pumping a few times into his hand to slick himself up and tighten his fist, like he can come close to what it feels like to fuck somebody.
He can’t, of course. But it’s the witching hour and he’s wound up with adrenaline and gritty sleeplessness and all he wants to think about is Daniel. Daniel, grinding down on him with hands planted on either side of Jack’s head. Daniel, with a challenge in his eyes.
His mind shifts, and unbidden, Jack thinks of Shau’ri again. Naked, pert little breasts bouncing as she wraps her arms around Daniel’s neck and grinds down on him. He thinks of her dark eyes, and the way she slipped her tongue into Daniel’s mouth back on Abydos, and stared at him in challenge. Mine, those dark eyes said.
Yours, Jack had relented with a bowed head. But Shau’ri was gone now. Sarah too. And sticky with sweat and need and an orgasm he couldn’t catch hold of, Jack’s mind goes to the dark place he rarely lets it wander to.
The place where it’s Jack on his knees. Jack holding his ass cheeks open so Daniel could split him open, slow and deep and with intent. When Jack thinks about fucking Daniel, he thinks about hard and fast. Skin slapping on skin. Bent over his desk, or his sink.
When Jack thinks about being fucked by Daniel, it’s always like this. Deep inside of him, slow circles where all he can feel is hard dick pressing inside of him. Filling him up.
With a frustrated groan, Jack turns himself over onto his knees, like he can trick his body into thinking one of his fingers is the real thing. Jack tries to focus on the thought of strong hands digging into the crease of his thighs. Holding him in place while Daniel ground slow circles inside of him.
But a finger does not a hard dick make, and Jack’s got his sweaty face pressed to the sheet. “Motherfucker.” Is it so much to ask to get off? Apparently it is these days. Jack isn’t that old.
He knows what he needs to do. And Jack is going to chalk it up to middle of the night madness that he climbs off of his bed and out into the hall, naked as he pulls the cord down for the attic.
There’s a box up there, covered in a layer of fine dust, with things he should have returned to Sarah years ago. Things that got swept up in his tactical retreat after Charlie died. One thing at the bottom of the box just happened to come out of their shared underwear drawer.
Hard and pink and slim, and Jack must be certifiable, because for a half of a second he thinks about doing it right here, kneeling in his dusty attic. But what small iota of pride he has left drags him down the stairs, where he washes the thing in the sink with cold water and pads back over to the bed, heart going so hard in his chest that he feels like he might pass out.
One finger does not a hard cock make, but a little pink vibrator does a better job of it, and Jack’s moan when he breaches himself with it might just be pathetic, but it sets him on fire again, nerve endings sharp and hot.
He sits up and back onto his heels, knowing his arm will ache soon, but damned if he cares. This is how he dreams about it when he’s pretty sure he’s going to die. When all seems lost, these are the broken fantasies he lets himself have.
Kneeling, with Daniel behind him and Daniel inside of him. Daniel’s hands gripping at the crease of his hips, holding him in place. Daniel’s voice, throaty and low and on the verge of laughter, egging him on.
Sometimes the words are in Farsi. Sometimes they’re in Ancient. The fragments of Asgardian that Jack can’t shake. Never English, but always Daniel.
Come on, Jack. You can do this. Don’t use your hands. I want you to come on me. Just from me. Keep going. You can do it.
There’s sweat dripping into his eyes from his brows and Jack’s thighs are shaking with the effort to follow a ghost’s order. There’s no one here but him, he could wrap a hand around his dick and go off like a firehose right now. But that’s not how he wants it.
Jack wants to come on nothing but the hard press of an intrusion, on feeling split open and full. He’s shaking with it, biting down on his lip. There’s a ringing in his ears that coalesces into an actual ringing, his landline ringing, but Jack can’t stop now, he’s so goddamned close-
The ringing stops, and there’s a click. Jack’s got his eyes clenched closed and he can’t content himself with grinding anymore, he’s bouncing on it now, feeling the way it catches before it pushes in, and-
Hey Jack. It’s me, Daniel.
His answering machine. His fucking answering machine because Jack is old fashioned and can’t let go of the past. But it means Daniel’s voice is filling his bedroom and the idea of Daniel is filling him up, and Jack comes with a strangled sob of Daniel’s name on his lips, folding over to press his forehead to the sheets even as he keeps stabbing the vibrator inside of him, chasing every last golden spark of pleasure.
I was going to see if you had my copy of--oh, oh it’s late. It’s really late. Sorry, I hope this doesn’t wake you. Call me tomorrow, okay?
There’s another click, and then a beep, and reality comes rushing back in, pushing away the last dregs of orgasm.
Leaving Jack a tired old man with a sore ass and a terminal case of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. Slowly, he pushes himself off of the bed. Everything after is auto pilot. A towel to wipe his stomach clean. Another to cover the wet spot on the bed. Jack tosses the vibrator in the trash in the kitchen, and grabs a spare change of clothes from the dresser.
The underwear rubs against his oversensitive dick and it feels good enough to hurt. It’s a fucked up kind of penance to endure those aftershocks as he walks his trash bag out to the can outside, and puts it in there, and then out on the curb. No take backs.
No more mistakes like this.
On his way back through his living room, Jack finds the book folded open on his (Daniel’s, Daniel is the only person who likes the ugly, overstuffed chair) armchair. It’s a recreation of something old, photocopied pages with chicken scratch notes in the margins. Jack closes it gently, and puts it on the kitchen counter.
In the morning, he’d scrub the last of the semen from his skin and the thoughts from his mind, and he’d call Daniel and tell him he has his damn book.
But for tonight, all he wants to do is sleep.
