Gigi Sinclair

"Daniel?"

"Hmm?" Daniel shook his dying pen and wondered if it would be possible to requisition one of those astronaut models, the ones that could write upside down without drying out.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Hmm." Maybe, Daniel thought as he flipped onto his stomach and propped the journal up on the bedroll, he could get a whole package of the pens. After all, it was a justifiable expense. A hell of a lot more justifiable than the fussball table in the commissary, anyway. "Recreational stress therapy" my ass, Daniel thought scornfully. He'd always been skeptical about that, and not just because he was at the bottom of the carefully organized in-house league. Mostly because he'd been paired with Teal'c, who refused to make a decent effort when it was their turn to play because he saw the plastic figures as indentured servants. "'Chained together like slaves,'" he muttered, "Right. He didn't have that problem when he and Sam were in the shuffleboard pyramid."

Jack gave him a Look. "What?"

"What?" Daniel blinked at him.

Jack shook his head. "So can I ask you this question or not?"

"Yes." Daniel wondered if he should take note of Teal'c and the fussball situation, but then decided he was tired of fighting with the pen and put it and the journal in his pack.

Thanks to the rough camping terrain, Sam and Teal'c's tent was a good hundred yards away, and it was windy enough to make hearing difficult even when you were much closer than that. Jack still glanced around furtively and lowered his voice before he said, "Do you…I mean, are you… "

Daniel glanced over to see Jack staring at the ceiling, hands fiddling uncomfortably with the blankets. "Yes?" Daniel prompted, when nothing more seemed forthcoming.

"Do you ever want to act gay?"

Daniel opened his mouth, closed it again, and furrowed his eyebrows. Jack stared resolutely upwards, like the secret to defeating the Goa'uld was hidden in the olive green nylon.

Given what they had just done, and given what they'd been doing, rather well if Daniel was any judge, on as regular basis as possible for the past three months, Daniel would say that acting gay was the least of his problems. In fact, he thought he would be hard-pressed to act any other way.

"Jack…"

"I mean," Jack continued, obviously aware that his question was, to say the least, oblique. "You know. Gay."

As a linguist, Daniel knew tone of voice was at least as important as vocabulary when it came to expressing meaning, and often more so. He'd used inflection and speech patterns countless times to differentiate between friendly natives who wanted SG-1 as honoured guests, and less-friendly natives who wanted SG-1 served up beside the squash puree at the harvest feast. He still couldn't begin to fathom what Jack meant by that strangulated emphasis on the word "gay."

"What are you talking about?"

"You know," Jack repeated, although Daniel clearly didn't. Jack rolled over to face him. "The Cher and antiques thing."

"Ah." Oblique or not, that was at least understandable. Daniel narrowed his eyes. "You know I don't like Cher." Daniel was, in fact, convinced she was a secret Goa'uld, or at the very least a Tokra. It was the only theory he could come up with to explain her remarkable preservation. Jack knew of this theory. He had even advanced the possibility that coloured contact lenses could hide the glowing eyes, and the feathers could hide the symbiote pouch. "Daniel, I'm asking if you ever feel like camping it up, OK?"

The beginnings of annoyance crept in as Daniel thought about saying that they camped all the time, and were, in fact, camping at this very moment. "Why? Do you think that's how I should be?"

Jack shrugged. "I don't know. With that haircut you used to have, a lot of people were surprised you didn't swan around complaining the fatigues clashed with your manicure."

The annoyance grew into irritation. "And what if I had? You'd have told West to fire me and you'd have ended up dying on Abydos because of homophobic spite?"

"No!" Jack sounded genuinely surprised Daniel would suggest such a thing, but Daniel wasn't appeased.

"What are you saying, Jack? That if I was 'stereotypically' gay, then you wouldn't want to know me? That I can only be your friend as long as I 'act straight', whatever that means, and ensure your precious masculinity isn't tainted by association?" Daniel couldn't believe this. After seven years, and three months, he thought he knew who Jack really was, but clearly, he didn't. Jack was obviously just as shallow and narrow-minded as Daniel had originally assumed.

"What I'm saying, Daniel," Jack snapped back, clearly just as irritated, "is that I wouldn't want you to hold back around me because you're afraid what I might think. You might have to do that in public, but you don't have to do it here."

"You are pathetic, you know that, Jack? I…" Daniel trailed off mid- rant as his larynx caught up with his eardrums, and his brain intervened somewhere in-between. "What?"

"I don't know about things like this, Daniel. It's all kind of new to me." He gestured, rather sheepishly Daniel thought, between the two of them. "I know you, but I'm used to certain people acting certain ways. And I'm just saying if you did want to, you know, sometimes talk about hair gel or Broadway musicals or…" He winced a little. "Britney Spears or something, it's OK. You can be that person with me. It won't change the way I think about you."

Daniel took a moment to process this. "I don't want to talk about Britney Spears," he finally ventured, with only a vague knowledge of who she actually was. Someone Cassie liked and Janet didn't, as far as he could remember, but he wasn't sure why. "And I don't think I've ever worn hair gel. But if I suddenly started…"

"Wouldn't matter to me." Jack's eyes went back to the ceiling, and Daniel resolved to one day ask him what was so interesting about it. "And if anyone gave you trouble about it, I'd go to bat for you." Literally, Daniel assumed.

"Oh." Daniel thought this was quite possibly the most bizarrely romantic thing Jack had ever said to him. He also knew that if he mentioned that, Jack would be embarrassed beyond all rationality. So instead, Daniel leaned over and kissed him, long, hard and expertly, if Daniel did say so himself.

Jack apparently agreed. "What was that for?" He blinked at Daniel and gave him the smile he only ever brought out in private moments like these. That was fine with Daniel. He felt no desire to share any aspect of Jack with anyone ever, but unfortunately Jack had reacted badly to the idea of being kept in seclusion as Daniel's personal sex slave.

"No specific reason, Jack. And you can," he suppressed a smirk. Jack was being serious, after all, and that didn't happen all that often. "Camp it up too, if you want."

"Yeah, well." Jack grunted and slung an arm around Daniel, pulling him in close. "There are some who would say liking opera means I'm halfway there already."

He reached over to turn off the lantern, and Daniel smiled in the darkness. "Does this mean we're going to start watching HBO instead of ESPN?"

"I wouldn't go that far," Jack replied, and Daniel moved to listen to Jack's heartbeat beneath his ear. "Although Ferretti has told me good things about 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.'"