brainofck

Title: Serial Rediscovery, December 14
Author: muck_a_luck, posting in brainofck
Pairing: Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill
Rating: PG for most parts, NC-17 eventually
Summary: Daniel has a run-in with the NID, and can't remember anything about the SGC, particularly not SG-1
Content/warnings: I feel a strong need to warn for amnesia!fic. Cause it is SOOOOO lame. But it's also fun. :)
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only. muck_a_luck and brainofck


For my loyal rugbytacklers, I have done a Stargate crash course located here.

Previous chapters located here.

---

December 14

Daniel woke up in a strange room and tried to get his bearings. Hotel, he remembered. But why was he in a hotel? He remembered leaving his apartment in a hurry and driving around finishing his grading in the back of a van...

His heart started skipping beats. Oh, God, he couldn't believe it. They had come back for him. Agent Morrison and the others had said they might come back for him, and they had. He peered through slitted eyes into the darkness. One person was sleeping in the other bed. A second person was sitting in the chair. Daniel knew by listening to his breathing and slight movements that the man wasn't asleep.

"Daniel, are you awake?" the man asked. He had barely whispered the question. Daniel muttered as if in his sleep and turned over to face the other direction.

It was unlikely that he could get out the front door, but he noted that he wasn't bound in any way. Maybe that meant that they trusted him enough that he could get up and go to the bathroom on his own. If there was a window in the bathroom, maybe he could get out that way.

There were odd gaps in his memory. He couldn't really piece together what had happened yesterday. He couldn't remember how he had ended up in the van with them, or exactly how they had gotten here. Maybe they had drugged him, and that was why he hadn't been restrained.

Well, only one way to find out. He seemed to be sleeping in his clothes; all he needed was shoes. He sat up with a grumble, and put his feet right where he expected his shoes to be. He felt them with his toes. He slipped his feet into them and shuffled off to the bathroom, as if half-asleep. The man in the chair didn't even move. Not a very good guard, Daniel thought. His attention seemed focused on the door and the window.

"Daniel," he whispered. Daniel grunted in reply. "I'm going out for a little walk. I'll be back in ten."

OK, that was a surprise. Daniel just grunted again and closed the bathroom door behind him. He heard the door to the room open and shut. Apparently the man was gone.

What had happened yesterday?! Had Daniel convinced them that he was traveling with them willingly? Well, it didn't matter. There was no way out through the bathroom, but now he could just walk out the front door. He quickly tied his shoes, went back out into the main room, grabbed his coat from the top of his duffel, counted to 30 just to give the man time to walk a little farther, and slipped out the front door into the night.

He didn't have to go far. It was winter and he was on foot and all he really needed was a phone and witnesses. He headed for the truck stop by the hotel.

---

"Dr. Jackson! We've been very worried. Are you all right?"

"I'm not sure. There's definitely something wrong with me. Maybe I've been drugged? Anyway, I think I was kidnapped from my apartment yesterday. I'm at a diner on..."

"We've already got the number and address off caller ID," Agent Morrison replied quickly. "We can have people there within the hour. Are you-"

A long arm reached around his shoulder and broke the connection.

"Whatcha doin', Daniel?"

Daniel flinched and hung up the phone. The man from the room.

He rounded on him. "Back off," Daniel said loudly, drawing a curious look from the waitress reading a magazine behind the counter.

"Come on, Daniel," the man replied quietly, stepping away and giving Daniel more space. "I thought we worked this all out yesterday. Did you just call the NID on us?"

"Yes," Daniel said shakily, even though he had no idea who "the NID" were. If the man was scared of them, so much the better. "They're on their way." He resisted glancing at the clock over the counter. Better to look confident, like they'd be here in minutes and not an hour from now.

The man swore under his breath. His patient confusion was quickly moving to anger. "Dammit, Daniel, you know who we are! We went through this yesterday! You were perfectly fine with me when you went to bed last night." Daniel felt like there was a meaning to that last statement that he was missing, but he ignored it.

"Fuck you," Daniel hissed, "Whatever you did to me yesterday worked great. What did you drug me with?"

He went and sat at the counter, in plain sight of the door and windows and closer to the waitress. She sauntered over and handed him a menu, then another to the man, who sat next to him. The man ordered coffee for both of them. The waitress set it in front of them and went back to her magazine.

"We didn't give you anything! And you certainly remembered enough last night. You scribbled in your notebook for an hour before you shut off the light and let me sleep."

Daniel thought about that. The man was right. Daniel did remember sitting awake in the dark, writing for a long time in his journal by the light of his penlight, with his sidearm on the table next to him, keeping watch in the night. He had drawn the first watch...

He turned to the man next to him in shock.

"What's happening to me? You're right. I remember last night. I remember I was on watch, then I went to bed. Why was I doing that?"

The man was eyeing the clock and the door anxiously.

"How long did they say it would take them to get here?" the man asked.

Daniel suddenly felt unreasonably guilty.

"Within the hour," he admitted.

"That's ten minutes gone already." The man paused in thought. "Daniel, we aren't kidnapping you. I don't know what NID did to your head, but yesterday we showed you proof that we are your friends and you believed us. You came with us on this little road trip of your own free will. If you will trust me, come with us a little farther. Look over your journal from yesterday. Look at the pictures. If you aren't convinced, we'll let you out at the next good spot and you can call NID to come pick you up."

The man's eyes were dark and tired. Worried. Daniel felt like an idiot. Because for some reason, Daniel did trust him. In fact, Daniel wanted to tell this stranger that everything was going to be alright. Of course Daniel would come with him. Daniel wanted him to lay his head in Daniel's lap so Daniel could rub his scalp and tug at his hair, and smooth the worried lines from around his eyes...

Daniel blinked at this surprising thought. Some of his daydream must have shown on his face. The man was looking at him hard. Then, he swore again, got up, and headed toward the door. There was a van parked with the motor running just outside, a blonde woman at the wheel.

"We're all checked out, sir," she announced as the man opened the door. "What's going on?"

"I think we've got a bigger problem on our hands than we initially thought," said the man, who turned to see if Daniel was following him. Wondering if he was losing his mind, Daniel opened the sliding door, took a deep breath, and climbed in.

---

Daniel read it all. Right down to the line, written in a language that he knew was Ancient, where he had mused to himself, I wonder what he would do if I kissed him? In the dim light in the back of the van he looked at the pictures that his journal told him he had looked at yesterday. He had also gone back several days in his notes, trying to find out if this memory problem affected other things in his life. All he had found was the encounter two days ago with a blonde woman on the quad who seemed to know him, though he couldn't place her. She had talked about "the Colonel," whom he assumed must be this Jack person, now sitting in the captain's chair by the sliding door.

"This is insane," he said. "I know this is my journal. I remember writing this. But I'm reading these words that I wrote yesterday and I can't remember any of it. You think this 'NID' did this to me because of some project I was working on?"

"You were working on a translation," Sam said. "You thought it was a code."

"It was one of the things you were working on when you disappeared," Jack continued. "They tried to clear out all your current notes, but they couldn't take everything."

Jack went to the back of the van and reached over the seat into the storage crates in the back. He pulled out more spiral binders, similar to Daniel's journal.

"These were in the bottom drawer of your desk."

Daniel opened them curiously. He certainly didn't remember them, either, but they were clearly his. He must have wanted the contents to remain private, because he had used his own strategy for disguising the content. A sentence per language, approximately 26 languages and counting, including three that were only spoken by seven other people on the planet. Not a code, per se, but it would be a mess to decipher. Definitely his.

"I like where you write in cuneiform, French, hieroglyphs, and Chinese, all in the same paragraph," Jack said with a grin.

Daniel smiled back absently, already absorbed in his notes. They were his observations about a dig site – PX3-982. Apparently the work had been rushed, due to the site being in enemy-held territory and likely to come under fire, but he had been very pleased with some of the artifacts he had found, including one that reminded him of something Nick had found years ago in Belize…

"So what do you think? Were you close to an answer?" Jack asked.

Daniel looked up. "No, I don't think so. For some reason I was very happy that this artifact was connected back to something Nick found, but I can't imagine why that would be important to a military operation…"

"Daniel," Jack said in exasperation. "Can we focus here?"

"Sorry," Daniel replied, though he was mostly annoyed to be interrupted. He began paging through the notes, not letting his eyes hang on the more interesting passages, looking for references to translations, trying to find one about a code.

"Not in this notebook. Where are the rest?"

---

Daniel spent all day in the back of the van, first reading his notes on his earlier work on the code, then puzzling over the printout of the original document. It was about forty single-spaced pages. He agreed with his notes. It was definitely a code and the underlying language was almost certainly goa'uld. Of course, he couldn't imagine why anyone writing in goa'uld would bother to encode their text, as it wasn't a language spoken on this planet as far as he could tell.

That was beginning to really bother him, actually. He had discovered today that he spoke not one, but two languages that he had never heard of before. And that he did some kind of fast and dirty archaeology with military applications in a field unit that regularly came under enemy fire.

"What the hell is it that we do, anyway?" he said aloud, tossing the notebook aside to take off his glasses and rub his eyes. He was getting too old to try to do serious work on three hours of sleep in a night.

Sam was asleep in the seat behind him. Jack looked up at him in the rearview mirror.

"If I told you the truth right now, you would never believe me."

"Come on, Jack. What does an archaeologist and linguist do for the US military?"

Jack was quiet so long that Daniel thought he wasn't going to answer him. Fine. Daniel began sifting back though his notebooks to get to that first one. He could read his own notes.

"The planet Earth is being threatened by aliens," Jack said, breaking the long silence. Daniel blinked at this strange announcement. "We have discovered very powerful alien technologies on Earth, but nothing that we can use to defend ourselves. You were one of the people who figured out how to use the most important alien artifact we have found to date, and you continue to assist the Air Force in its attempts to explore previously undiscovered archaeological sites for defensive or offensive weapons to use in our conflict with the goa'uld."

Daniel stared at Jack in the rearview mirror. Jack was watching the road. He looked serious, but calm. Not at all what Daniel would have expected a raving lunatic to look like.

"That sounds completely insane. You realize that?"

"Look at your own notes, Daniel. You'll see everything you need to see to prove that what I'm saying is true, and that I haven't even told you the most outrageous part."

"What could possibly be more outrageous than the Air Force using archaeologists to find weapons to fight aliens?"

"Well..." Jack paused. His eyes flicked up to meet Daniel's in the rearview mirror. Daniel thought he looked like he was about to laugh. It looked good on Jack. Happiness. Humor. Daniel had a sudden overwhelming desire to taste the corners of those twinkling eyes.

Daniel took that as final evidence that he must be completely losing his mind.

"No. Don't tell me," Daniel said. "I think I'm too tired for any more revelations like that right now. If you try to tell me anything crazier than that I will probably just think I'm hallucinating."

"You should sleep, Daniel," came Sam's surprisingly alert voice from behind him.

"I can't fall asleep in here. If I wake up in the same state I was this morning, you'll never convince me I'm not being kidnapped and taken back to Peru."

"He's got a point, Carter. I just passed a sign for a Comfort Inn. Why don't we stop early. We could all use a little extra sleep after last night."

---

Carter had gone for Chinese at the place across the street. Daniel was writing in his journal. Jack lay on the other bed, dozing to the little sounds Daniel made, flipping pages of his various journals and writing down his thoughts about the day.

"If we go on like this much longer, I'm going to have to do the Cliff's Note version," Daniel said softly.

"Mmmm," Jack hummed non-committally, half asleep.

"I kissed you last night, didn't I?" Daniel asked, just as quietly.

Well, that was an interesting way to wake up. "Hmmmm?" Jack replied, trying to sound like he wasn't even listening.

"Quit pretending to be asleep, or I'll do it again," Daniel threatened. He sounded like he was tempted to laugh.

Jack sighed and sat up, rubbing his eyes.

"Daniel, we're not having this conversation."

"Why not? You said we were just old friends. That I was feeling the connection of how long we had worked together, all the sacrifices we had made for each other. But I know that's not what I'm feeling now. There was more. Or something different. I don't understand why you won't tell me what."

"No, Daniel. There wasn't any more. And that's why we're not having this conversation. Because we've never had this conversation. Not ever, in the whole time we've known each other. You've never tried to kiss me. You've never expressed the slightest interest any guy, as far as I know. If you feel like you do, and we never had this conversation, that means you thought this conversation was a bad idea. And once we unscramble your brain, you'll remember why you didn't want to talk about this with me. So we're not doing this."

Jack watched Daniel as he made his little speech. He was sure he was right about this. He could see Daniel listening. Thinking. And he saw the moment when Daniel decided Jack was wrong and Daniel was right. Jack groaned inwardly and waited.

"That's a lot about me, and nothing about you," Daniel replied. "This is the only me I have right now. Maybe the only me that will ever be. And I know there were times today when I wanted to touch you so badly I felt like it was turning me inside out. If that's the person you have now, what do you want?"

"It doesn't matter, Daniel. If we can't fix your memory – if the "you" you are now is the only "you" that will ever be - you'll be going back to your new professorship. You can't wake up every morning and read your notes from the day before. What would you write? 'I know you don't remember that you're gay. But that guy sleeping with you is Jack and he's your lover.' It's ridiculous to even think about."

"And you think that if we can fix my memory, you're right back where you started from? I'll remember whatever it was that stopped me from acting on these feelings, and we'll go back to being friends?"

"Exactly," Jack said, relieved that Daniel understood.

So why was Daniel looking at him like that? Why was Daniel suddenly standing over him?

"Daniel?" Jack had meant it to sound admonishing, but it came out as a confused question.

"You still are saying a whole lot about me, and nothing about you." Daniel was looking at him thoughtfully. Jack swallowed hard.

"Maybe what I should do is take advantage of the freedom I have now to try for something I clearly want, but am too much of a coward to pursue?" His voice was a low growl, unlike any voice Jack had ever heard from Daniel before. Jack knew he should move, protest in some way when Daniel climbed onto the bed with him and straddled his lap.

"Tell me that you don't want me, and I'll believe you," Daniel whispered, reaching out to cradle Jack's face with both hands. "I'll even write myself a little note about it. 'You're totally hot for Jack, but he's just a friend. Don't come on to him and make him turn you down again. He hates it.'"

Jack was sure that he should say something, but he couldn't figure out what he was asking. He was hypnotized by the movement of Daniel's lips, the flow of his voice, completely lost in the heat of the touch of their thighs together. He was alarmed at the blood moving to places where it shouldn't, but then Daniel was kissing him, holding him still, pinning him to the headboard of the bed, and he really couldn't remember the argument anymore. He was tired and Daniel wanted to kiss him, and what was wrong with that, exactly? He groaned and Daniel laughed, and Jack let his arms wrap around the warm body above him.

After what seemed like forever, he became aware that someone was knocking on the door of the room.

"Guys! Food! Can somebody let me in?"

Jack began to shift away to go to the door, but Daniel didn't let him. And if Daniel didn't want him to get up, Jack wasn't going anywhere. He was happy to let Daniel think for both of them.

"Sir? Everything OK?"

"Sorry, Sam! Hang on!" Daniel shouted back to her, jarring Jack out of his daydreamy state. How could Daniel sound so completely normal? Daniel slid away from him, out of his arms, and was suddenly back on the other bed where he had started, surrounded by his notebooks, scribbling away in his journal, oblivious and lost in his work, just as Daniel should be.

Leaving Jack to deal with Carter alone. Bastard.

He got shakily to his feet, shifting to rearrange himself before he frightened Carter by looking deranged and sex-crazed.

"Kinda cold out here, guys," Carter said, sounding distinctly annoyed.

Jack yanked the door open.

"Keep your pants on," he said crankily.

OK. Possibly not the best thing to say. She took him in with one sweeping glance, and her grin said she knew exactly what the delay had been.

"What are you smiling about, Major?" he growled. He saw her repress laughter.

"Nothing, sir," she replied.

"You know, out of respect you could try to make that sound a little more convincing. I am your CO, you know," he took the bags from her and thumped them on the small table in the corner of the room.

"Colonel, retired, sir," she reminded him.

---

Despite the fact that he was exhausted, Daniel couldn't fall asleep. They had made arrangements for the morning, one of which involved Daniel's arm being lashed to the headboard with one of those plastic self-locking restraints like riot police used in mass crowd arrests. Sam had suggested that he would sleep better with the restraint around both ankles, but Daniel had pointed out that he needed to see his note to himself immediately, and the best way to insure that was for his attention to be drawn to the restraint on his arm. Sam's pocket knife was under the note. The plan was that he would see the note, find the knife, free himself and follow his own instructions to read his notes to himself before he panicked. It seemed like a good plan. Except that it was impossible to fall asleep like that, one arm awkwardly extended above his head.

The other two lingered over the remains of the Chinese food, talking softly. His back was to them.

As he settled down and willed himself to be still and fall asleep, they must have thought that he had.

"I think we should split up tomorrow," Sam said. "The two of you can keep heading north, and I'll go back west to the mountain. We need to let the general know what is going on."

"There's no way to know that he's not being monitored," Jack replied.

"I was thinking that I could buy a couple of those disposable cell phones. I could drop one off on Walter's porch with instructions and have the general call the other one from an off-base location. I think that would probably be enough to avoid the NID."

"Hmmm," Jack sounded like he was considering the idea. "Maybe he could get T back for us? It would be nice to have a reliable third."

"And he could see what he could learn from his contacts about what the NID might have done to Daniel," Sam sounded tired.

"Sounds like a plan," said Jack. "But I think I should head back to the mountain and you should stick with Daniel."

Sam laughed quietly.

"Scared of him, sir?"

"You wipe that smug little grin off your face, Major, or I'll bust you back down to non-com so fast it makes your head spin."

Sam snorted. "Retired, sir. Plus, the general would never let you."

"It's not funny, Carter," he insisted.

"Well, I don't think the fact that you're scared to be alone with Daniel should change our basic strategy. Daniel's the NID's target, not us. I'm not trained for this kind of mission, sir. Defending a civilian target in a civilian setting from another black ops group… Not really my thing."

"I have every faith in you, Carter," Jack replied. Sam snorted.

"So I think we should all sleep til checkout time tomorrow. Maybe Daniel can take a morning watch after he wakes up, then we'll go our separate ways," Sam said.

"And you'll collect T, and rendezvous with us at Mark's cabin?"

"As soon as I possibly can," Sam said reassuringly.

"I can almost guarantee it won't be too soon," Jack replied grimly.

December 15



For anyone interested, my other stories and fiction recommendations.