Daniel is lying face-down on the bed, one knee drawn up underneath him, and Jack is fucking him with three fingers. Slow and rough, like they've got all night, like Jack isn't hard enough to pound nails. Jack's hands were built for this, built to handle guns and grenades and all manner of explosive things. Daniel's face is pressed into the sheets, where it smells like Jack's soap and Jack's sweat. He is thinking he should move the pillow, which has crashed over the crown of his head like a feather-weighted plinth come to carry him home.

Instead, he tilts his ass back and his hips up and takes his weight on his chest, pushes back against Jack's fingers, harder rougher more. He is thinking of initialized voiceless labiodental fricatives, like 'fingers' and 'fuck' and 'faithful'. Jack produces a voiceless alveolar fricative, sibilant, and twists his fingers. He reaches between Daniel's legs with his other hand, palming over Daniel's cock, which is only half-hard. Daniel swats him away.

Jack grunts (open-mid back unrounded vowel) and shoves his palm into the small of Daniel's back. He is holding Daniel still, holding him quiet, and Daniel is thinking of a small white room and reciting a litany of psychopharmacopia (clozapine seroquel valium thorazine haldol) to distract himself.

"You wanna stop?" Jack is asking, up against Daniel's neck.

There's a drop of sweat beading its way down the side of Daniel's face. He turns his head, grinds it into the sheets. "No," he says, and he is getting stronger, but Jack still knows all the places to hold him down. "Don't wanna come yet."

At all, maybe. Daniel remembers when he wouldn't have been able to say that without blushing. Maybe Jack does, too, because he is working his fingers inside Daniel's ass again, stretching, pushing, watching for every hiss and shudder he coaxes. Daniel is thinking of being cold and naked and stretched out in a tube, of a memory-pin in his temple and the way his body felt frozen through to bone. It's not cold in here. It's muggy and redolent and real. Jack rubs his other palm over Daniel's ass-cheek, and for a minute Daniel thinks Jack might strike.

It would be all right with him if Jack did, he tries to convey, by arching his back and curving his neck, but all Jack does is crook his fingers and rock them back and forth.

It isn't enough. Daniel is thinking of a scattering of alternate realities spread out across a tapestry like a handful of sand. He considers all the branches of the universe where he is dead or dying, perhaps right now, perhaps this very moment, this inhale, this exhale. Jack drags the back of his hand over his forehead and sighs, like he can feel Daniel's tick-tock overdrive. He pushes, impatiently, more roughly than he should. More roughly than Daniel knows Jack's comfortable with.

Daniel is comfortable with a lot more than Jack thinks he is. Fuck me, he thinks, shoving his hips back experimentally. Fick mich, baise-moi, "nek ni," slurred soft and raspy like the streets of Cairo he only half-remembers, and the sound of it in his ears is enough like Abydos to make him want to choke. "Hel'la," he growls, instead, to distract himself, "yal'la," and Jack is a statue behind him.

"Bastard," Jack hisses, and Daniel only has a second to realize idi-fucking-otic (the expletive infix is the only example of infixation found in English, usually occurring at the syllable boundary before a stressed syllable) before Jack is shoving another finger in without even pulling out first.

He should apologize for calling up memories, because Jack is taking care of him (Jack is always taking care of him, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen), Jack knows how to take care of him, but the twist and the burn and the stretch is replacing the part of him that knows how to speak words. Jack's fingers are filling up the empty places inside, all the dark and cold rooms where there were bits and pieces of him once upon a time. The word sarcophagus comes from the Greek root words sarx-, flesh, and -phagos, eating. Daniel is reciting the seven parts of the soul: ren, sekem, akh --

"That what you want, Daniel?"

--ba, ka --

--soft and deadly and precise against Daniel's skin--

--sheut, sekhu --

--and Jack's fingers draw back, push forward, twist into a wedge and hold at the bridge of the third knuckle, right where it's widest, right where Daniel can feel it the most.

"Tell me," Jack is saying, and Daniel feels like he's been running forever. (The Navajo have different verbs for running-to and running-from.) He verbalizes something with a lot of vowels that don't go together in any language he knows and pushes back against what Jack's offering.

"Words," Jack says, and one tiny bit of Daniel recognizes Jack wants to make sure he's still here, enough to give consent (not gonna let anybody rape you again, not even me). Daniel's hands make fists in the sheets. ('Fist' is another labiodental. Like 'failure'.)

He surfaces just enough to make sure he's got the right one of his native tongues and says "yes".

Jack holds his fingers still for a long moment, open, opening, and Daniel tries to rock back against them. Please, he is thinking, please, make me, I want you to -- but Jack moves with him, anticipating each shift and twist, drawing away as Daniel pushes towards and keeping him just at the edge. Jack is a patient man; Daniel has always known this.

He doesn't look back. He doesn't really want to see the expression on Jack's face, and he's afraid of what might be lost to him if he does. He's been looking back too much, lately, and it hasn't gotten him anywhere but right back where he started.

"Tell me what you want me to do to you, Daniel," Jack is saying, and Daniel wants to scream, because the sound building up in his throat doesn't have any other way to get loose.

Breathe out. Breathe in. He can do this.

"F-fuck me," Daniel says, two broken morphemes strung together. Verb, transitive. First-person singular pronoun, accusative case. "Your hand."

Jack holds still for a minute, and Daniel is shaking, shuddering, wondering if Jack knows what he's really asking, wondering if he's finally found something Jack won't or can't give. "Dammit, Daniel," Jack says at last, exhausted and restless, and Daniel lifts a hand to his mouth and fits his teeth into the flesh of his palm. His teeth hurt, but so does everything else but Jack up against him, and the relief he feels when Jack reaches for more lube (cold and sticky and slick) is the same kind of relief as when Amonet raised her hand and brought him to his knees and he knew that whatever happened, it was about to finally be over.

But it's all right. This is Jack. There are all kinds of love.

Daniel brings his other knee up underneath him, stretches himself out and braces his open palms against the headboard of Jack's bed, and moans a semivowel as Jack's hand slides into him, slippery and wet. It's like a sudden sharp sting, an absence of tension, the way it feels when something takes away a hurt he didn't even know he had. Phonemes form morphemes and morphemes form words and he and Jack together aren't semantics or syntax but ontology. He is breathing, breathing, dizzy and lightheaded and giving himself over. To Jack.

Jack isn't moving inside him, and Daniel almost looks back, but Jack's face and Jack's voice lie too often and Daniel's learned he has to read Jack's body instead. Jack is rubbing concentric circles against Daniel's tailbone and murmurring gentle syllables that take forever to resolve into pragmatics and semiotics in Daniel's ears, like "shhh" and "okay" and "yes". Daniel's still not hard, but it doesn't matter, because he doesn't need to be.

"Fuck," Daniel says, but it turns into "Jack" and then back into "fuck", a hyper-specialized form of lexical drift. He tips his hips, up, down, and the hot rush of Jack's knuckles doesn't feel like pain and doesn't feel like pleasure, it just feels. Jack's bedroom is hot and the air-conditioning is broken and this is what he wanted, this is everything he wanted, boiled down and burned away and reduced to the pin-point narrow burn.

Daniel is moaning, up and down on a major chord, and Jack whispers "shh, shh, it's all right," almost in irritation. Daniel wants to say yes, please and thank you and fuck me and strip me down and break me apart and put me back together the right way this time because I don't know what whole is but this isn't it but all he can do is work himself backward against Jack's hand and hope it's enough for Jack to hear.

When Jack finally breathes out and turns his wrist, brushes his knuckles back and forth against the center of heat and sensation spreading through Daniel's bones, Daniel lets his head fall and his knees slide back, letting Jack take his weight and his need and everything there aren't any words for. It's been so long since he let anyone else carry it for him that he doesn't remember what it feels like to let it go and trust someone will be there to catch him.

Jack's left hand is gentle, stroking over his ass and down his thighs, while his right hand advances, retreats, demands. Dichotomy: from the Greek dikhotomia, dicho-, "in two", temnein, "to cut". Daniel has been dichotomous for three-quarters of his life but this (this sweat this stickiness this pornographic slide of skin against skin) is the first act of convergence he can remember for a long time. "Come on," Jack says, and then Jack is fucking him with his fist, like a dare, an offering, a benediction. Daniel pushes his hands against the headboard and falls still and trembling, heart thundering in his ears and throat raw and aching and dry.

When he comes, it's like a afterthought, like a syncopated elision at the end of all his need. It doesn't solve anything. He can't even say if it helps, because it's over and like so many things he can't remember how he got here to begin with.

Jack is still again, his fingers lingering at the spot where Daniel's ass shades into thigh. It tickles, and Daniel pulls his knee up, impatiently, trying to make it stop. Jack takes it as the wrong kind of sign. "Steady," he says, and pulls out long and slow, and Daniel whines in the back of his throat, because he didn't think the emptiness would go away for good but he's not ready to let it back yet.

"Shh," Jack says, and the bed dips and shifts, and a long minute later there is a wet washcloth stroking over Daniel's ass and thighs.

"Jack," Daniel says, and "God," and "you," and all of them are encodings for grace. He is wrung out, lassitudinous, but he can still move enough to capture Jack's hand in one of his own and twine their fingers together to reassure. It isn't Jack's fault Daniel wasn't ready for him to stop yet; Daniel has always been shit at communicating.

Jack hesitates for a minute, then settles his weight up against the headboard. His other hand falls along the nape of Daniel's neck, right where it belongs, where it's been living for two years even when Jack isn't touching him at all. "You okay?" Jack asks, after the silence. He sounds like he doesn't want to hear the answer.

"Define 'okay'," Daniel says, because he knows Jack can't.

"Yeah, yeah," Jack says. Brisk, clipped. (Word-doubling is found most often in creole and pidgin dialects; when it appears in adult English it serves a number of semantic functions generally signaling annoyance or irritation.) Jack's fingers are combing through the fine hairs at the base of Daniel's hairline, over the smooth and unmarked skin there. "I didn't hurt you?"

Too much to hope for ten minutes of quiet to put himself back together, to lose himself in contemplating this mystery, but Jack means well. It's why he's still here, after all. Daniel stretches himself out, hooks one arm over Jack's knees. Jack is easy enough to placate. "No," Daniel says, finding the mask and fitting it back over his face, his body, his voice. "Thanks. I needed that."

Jack breathes out, half-sigh, half-laugh. Jack believes in giving people what they need; he's another person who'll always come after someone who's been lost to the underworld. It's what makes him a good guy. A good friend. Daniel's been running for a long time and Jack might someday even be able to figure out why.

"Welcome," Jack says, casually dismissive, the way he always is when someone calls attention to his largesse. His thumb strokes behind Daniel's ear. "Get some sleep. You're exhausted."

Daniel is, but it's all right. Not much longer now. Sooner or later, it'll be his turn to stumble into a nest of snakes, and he's already looking forward to the descent.

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