Walls by 6beforelunch

Walls

By: 6beforelunch

CATEGORY: Humor, UST

WARNINGS: None

SEASON/SPOILERS: Season 10

AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

http://emily.ink-and-quill.com/

"Give it back."

"Not until you admit that I'm right."

"You're not right!"

Daniel made an abortive grab for the roll. Vala jerked it away.

"Just because you won't open yourself up to new possibilities doesn't mean that I'm wrong."

"Vala, I did my Master's thesis on Stonehenge. You saw a FOX special. I think I know a little bit more about it than you do."

Jack looked at Mitchell. "Do they do this a lot?"

"Every. Single. Day." Mitchell managed to infuse exasperation into each word.

Good, Jack thought.

"They also said that the pyramids in Egypt were built by aliens. Are you saying they're wrong just because you once wrote, and I quote, 'anyone believing in extraterrestrial origins of impressive but distinctly human structures is displaying an intellectual dishonesty of the most egregious kind'?"

Daniel blinked and stared. Jack masked his snicker with a bite of his sandwich.

"Okay, first of all--" Oh, she was in for it now. First of all meant there's be a second of all and a third of all. With Daniel, there might also be a fourthly and a fifthly. Once, there had been a tenthly. "First of all, I wrote that almost twenty years ago. And I find it more than a little creepy that you've been tracking down my undergraduate papers."

Vala shrugged and took a bite of the roll. Daniel was already too deep in his line of thought to even notice.

"Second of all, the professor of Anthro 358, also called Science and Pseudoscience by the way, was not a fan of non-standard theories. I was trying to get into grad school at the time and I couldn't afford to sabotage my grade."

"Are you going to eat that?" Vala asked.

Daniel looked down at his untouched mushroom chicken and took a big bite, clearly more out of spite than hunger. Jack almost started laughing again. He'd spent years trying to figure out how to get Daniel to eat his food when he'd rather talk before finally deciding that if he hadn't starved to death yet, he probably wasn't going to do it on Jack's watch. If he'd only known that trying to steal Daniel's food was the easiest way to get him to eat it, he could have treated himself to many more quiet lunches.

"Thirdly," Daniel said, before he had entirely finished chewing. "Just because they were right about the pyramids doesn't mean that Stonehenge is currently being used as a UFO landing site."

"How do you know?"

"Because we'd know! We monitor every square inch of the space around this planet, I think we'd notice if someone was landing space ships in a tourist attraction. Jack! Tell her..."

"Cloak," Vala said, before Jack could talk. "You know I could be right."

Daniel buried his face in his hands. "Yes, Vala, you could be right," he muttered finally, almost too softly for anyone to here.

Vala smiled broadly. "Thank you," she said and handed him back his now half-eaten roll.

Jack couldn't help it, he laughed. Daniel shot him a dirty look and sulked quietly through the rest of lunch.

It wasn't that he liked seeing Daniel taken down a notch, though, of course, he did. It was that Daniel had, over the course of the decade Jack had known him, managed to come up with a set of personal defenses that made the platform in Antarctica look like a snow fort. The people like Mitchell who'd met Daniel after--after Sha're, after Oma--didn't have a clue how to breach those walls and probably didn't realize half of them were there. The people who'd come before, Carter and Teal'c and even Hammond, knew they were there, but didn't try to break past them often because they knew how pointless it usually was.

And then here came Vala, careening into Daniel's carefully constructed world, knocking into his walls with the delicacy of a sledge hammer. Jack could see the cracks in the armor starting to appear. Vala didn't even realize what she was doing.

This was, Jack thought, probably the only reason she was getting away with it.

Later, Jack walked past Daniel's office and heard Vala ask, "Do you think your wife would have liked it?"

Jack didn't know what the 'it' in question was, but he couldn't not stop to hear the answer.

"I don't know." Long pause and then, "It's hard to think about all of the things I never got to find out about her."

Jack didn't stick around to hear the rest of the conversation. It was enough to know that Daniel was taking his walls down. A little.

** The End **

Feedback to: lyasandra515@hotmail.com

Stories by Title

Stories by Author

Stories by Rating and Category

DV Archive

Home