Daniel Jackson is an anthropologist, an open-minded anthropologist, who has spent a year living in a culture that's about as far from the ins and outs of late-twentieth-century American life as it's possible to get, and yet coming back to Cheyenne Mountain, to the Stargate Program, is like stepping into a culture more radically alien than anything Abydos ever had to offer him.

After that whirlwind first month, when he has a chance to stop and think, he realizes it's because he'd expected Abydos to be unfamiliar. He'd stumbled across a hundred points of cultural differentiation, day in, day out, but he'd expected those. It's harder, somewhere he's supposed to belong: his own world, his own culture; it feels like he should find this familiar.

Except it isn't his culture at all. He can explain away every piece of the military mindset, cite historical fact and sociological theory about why things are the way they are, point at a hundred pieces of behavior and tease out the complex threads of cause and effect that make the warp and weft of the cloth he now finds himself wearing. But the military society is a closed society, tight-bonded and insular, and even though the Stargate Program is a nigh-unheard-of merging of military and civilian, working together for a common goal, there are still bits he trips over no matter how hard he tries to keep reminding himself to keep an open mind.

No matter how hard he tries to keep reminding himself that this might look like his culture, the gulf between academia and the military is so deep it feels like a chasm, most days when he wakes up and has to square his shoulders and sally forth, head into the hallways and the changing rooms and ready himself to face the day. Wondering what mistake he'll make next. Wondering what cultural tripwire is lurking for him to stumble across.

One of the bits he keeps tripping over, the one that will never stop hurting, is the scorn in some airman's voice, overheard, when explaining to another: oh, that's Dr. Jackson. He's looking for his wife.

*

SG-1 is a team of freaks and misfits. Daniel hears the whispers (the autonomous closed society evolves its own method of information dissemination), directed at Jack, wondering how Colonel O'Neill ended up with a team consisting of two civilians and an alien. The gossip isn't malicious, for the most part, but he brings it to Jack's ears anyway, sitting on the edge of Jack's desk and watching Jack initial set after set of paperwork.

"Just gossip," Jack says, scrawling his name in an illegible cipher. "Men talk. You'll get used to it."

Jack's door is closed, and Daniel knows what anyone passing by will think they're doing. It doesn't precisely bother him, but it leaves him feeling like it should bother him, the thought of hundreds of others observing him, speculating about him, thinking that they know the details of his private life. But nothing's private here, not where everyone has to count on each other so thoroughly, so completely, that sooner or later everything becomes a matter of trust and closeness.

In a culture like this one, secrets can be deadly, and he knows Jack's, the one that Jack never wanted to tell him, the one Jack confessed in a tent on a world so far away.

"I just worry," Daniel says, looking down at his hands. "Not about me. About --"

Jack looks up from his signing, pinning Daniel with a look that's fierce enough to make Daniel shiver. Don't, it says. Not here. Not ever.

Then it's gone, and Jack is looking down at his reports again. "Don't worry about it," Jack says. "Any of the men give you any shit, you let me know."

*

General Hammond treats them all the same before they step through the Gate, even Teal'c, even Sam, even Daniel: a kiss to the lips, chaste and virtuous but not bestowed in haste, a calm benediction that never becomes routine no matter how often they repeat it. Godspeed, SG-1.

After about six months, Daniel realizes he doesn't find it strange anymore.

*

Sometimes he wonders why Sam puts up with any of it.

There are fourteen women at the SGC, out of three hundred ninety-four stationed at the base. All civilian; the armed forces didn't go co-ed until a handful of years ago, and even now, the women who'd choose such a life are few and far between, kept segregated away in their own units and their own spaces. But thirteen of those fourteen civilian women are research and support, medical or scholastic, and the other one is Dr. Samantha Bowen. Ph.D. Ph.D. SG-1.

Daniel had always believed -- when he'd thought of it at all -- the liberal-academic view of the military as the last bastion of societally-accepted misogyny, but watching Sam move through the hallways, watching the men's reactions to the sight of her wearing her gear and strapping on the 9mm that she hadn't had to be taught to fire the way he had, he realizes that's not it. The men around him don't think of women as any less capable, as anything less than equal. Women are simply other here, don't fit into the rules and strictures and taboos the airmen and Marines have absorbed as easily as breathing; no matter how readily Sam adopts their routines, she'll never be anything other than a false note in the symphony, a pixel out of place.

Sam wears the skin more easily than he thought she would have. She cuts her hair short, keeps her chin held high, trades jokes and quips and teasing back and forth. But sometimes he catches her watching them, two men leaning carelessly on each other in the cafeteria, a kiss or a furtive grope in the corridors, and in those few isolated moments, he can see a cold, fierce hatred flash through her eyes so quickly he always has to blink and wonder if he's imagining things.

In their second year, she comes in one morning, eyes red-rimmed and puffy, and when he asks her if everything's all right, the sound she makes is half hiccup, half laugh. "My father died this weekend," she says, and just as he's trying to think of a way to phrase his condolences, she laughs again, closer to hysteria this time. "My mother had to find out by reading the paper."

Everything suddenly comes clear. There have always been military men who have kept secret lives hidden away, looking over their shoulders and waiting for the axe to fall. The politest term for the children born to fathers who can't ever acknowledge them is blanket babies: "born on the wrong side of the" and "blanket of silence" all wrapped up into one, and there are a hundred less polite terms and Daniel hears half of them in the locker room every day.

"I'm sorry," he says, softly. "Come hide in my office for a while, if you'd like. It's quiet in there."

She smiles (it doesn't reach her eyes) and says that she might take him up on it, and he knows that she won't; he knows she'll go down to her lab and throw herself into her work, go down to the firing range and spend an hour on the line, do everything she can do to prove to the men around her (prove to herself) that she is even more capable, even more intelligent, even more strong than they are, even if she stands alone and not as part of a band-of-brothers supporting her.

The only two people Daniel tells about her secret are Teal'c and Jack: Teal'c because he won't understand, and Jack because he'll understand far too well. Later, he sees Sam leaning against Jack, her face turned against his shoulder, as Jack rubs reassuring circles along her back and shoots death-glares at anyone who looks like they might be thinking of taking issue with it, and Daniel thinks: maybe she doesn't stand alone after all. They're SG-1. Back to back against the world.

*

Things change after Sha're's death. He hadn't realized how much Sha're had set him apart, even though there's no one left alive who'd ever met her except for the rest of SG-1. He suffers through two weeks of awkward condolences from everyone he sees, smiling vaguely and bravely through each thousandth repetition, every tiny fumbled "I'm sorry" from someone to whom his quest has never been anything more than a curiosity. By the beginning of the third week, he requests (and is granted, which he knows is Hammond being kind to him) another week's leave, over and above the week he'd taken on Abydos with Kasuf's family. He spends it in his apartment, with the shades drawn and the lights out, and he uses that time to take out every piece of his soul and examine it.

Three years with the military, living by their codes and practices as much as he could, but always still one of them. Breeder. Sha're's child is no more than another piece of evidence, and he wonders how many of the men who walk the halls with him resent him for that evidence, the life he's led that they might want for themselves, the life he's led that they'll never be able to openly acknowledge even if they, too, might have a hidden wife. A hidden child.

He's expecting the resentment to be his worst cross to bear, but it isn't. The worst part is how, three weeks after he comes back for good -- three weeks after deciding that Sha're's last charge to him is worth all of the hassle, that he's going to grit his teeth and get through this, that he can't walk away from this program he helped to build -- he's in the locker room. Changing for that afternoon's mission. Earlier than Jack and Teal'c -- he has a meeting scheduled for just before departure -- and SG-12 is coming back in while SG-5 is gearing up. Crowded in there.

Crowded enough that he bumps into Lieutenant Drake, stumbling and off-balance, and Drake catches him with easy hands and sets him right before he can fall on his ass. "Easy, there," Drake says, his teeth flashing in a grin, and his hands stay on Daniel's hips for a minute longer than they should, easy and comfortable. "Don't hurt yourself before you get out there. Jack'd kill me."

This close, Daniel can smell Drake's clean skin, warm and damp from the shower, and he's painfully aware that Drake is leaning into him, just a little, enough for it to be a pass if Daniel wanted it to be. He steps backwards as soon as he has his balance back. "I'm okay," he says. "Sorry. I tripped."

"S'all good," Drake says, still cheerful, his eyes going up and down Daniel's towel-clad body with an automatic assessment. "Don't worry, Doc. Nobody expects you to be as fast as one of us. We'll take care of you."

Daniel can't remember what excuses he mumbles to get himself out of there, out and away, because Drake's words set fire to a fuse that Daniel thinks has been waiting for a match for a damn long time. It isn't until later, while the four of them are tromping over hill and dale on a planet whose star isn't even visible from Earth, that he realizes why. We'll take care of you. Like he's a child to be protected, a liability to be guarded, an outsider to be sheltered and tended and coddled. Perpetually set apart, by his own choices, by his points of difference from the rest of them.

Whatever he's thinking must show on his face, because Jack throws him a sidelong glance. "You okay, Daniel?" Jack asks, and it's the same kind of careful solicitousness Jack always uses whenever they're on the other side of the Gate, and it makes Daniel see red.

"I'm fine," he says, brisk and abrupt, biting, and puts on a burst of speed. He can feel Jack's eyes boring holes in his shoulderblades. He ignores it. He's perfectly fucking capable of taking care of himself.

*

A month after that, Major Kovacek makes a very careful, very low-key pass at Daniel, so subtle that Daniel doesn't even realize he's being cruised until ten minutes after they've parted ways. A week after that, Airman Wells does the same. Daniel notices that one a hell of a lot faster, but he pretends that he doesn't.

By four months after Sha're's death, three-quarters of the SG teams have indicated, in some way, shape, or form, that they'd be honored if Daniel should choose to share their beds, like they were just waiting for the chance to ask.

He supposes he should feel honored in return. After all, it must be a sign that they're starting to forget that he's a civilian.

Two months after that, he overhears someone in the mess hall grumbling that he's behaving like he's too good for them. The speaker doesn't mention names, but Daniel knows damn well they're talking about him.

All blades have two edges.

*

He supposes he should hold more of a grudge against Teal'c than he does, but he can't. Sha're's final message to him had been an order to forgive, and if he believes in the rest of the message sent -- and he does -- he must believe in that as well. As time goes on, he finds himself gravitating to Teal'c's quarters in the evening, sitting on the uncomfortable floor, practing kel'no'reem and stillness as the flicker of a thousand candles plays across their faces and the minds of a thousand airmen outside conjure pictures of what they must be doing inside.

"You are troubled, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c says one night, when Daniel can't seem to calm down enough to reach the point of stillness inside himself he's been learning to hear.

Daniel opens his eyes at the sound of Teal'c's voice. "Yeah," he says, with a shifting sigh. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be distracting."

"It is all right," Teal'c says. "Perhaps I may be of assistance with whatever is troubling you."

Daniel closes his eyes again and sighs. The candles play across the outsides of his eyelids, their light magnified by his glasses, transforming the velvet blackness behind his eyelids into midday. "Yeah," he says, and then sighs again. "Or no. I don't know. I just ..."

He trails off, not even knowing what he's trying to say, and Teal'c reaches across the space between them to close a hand around his wrist, warm and reassuring and somehow completely asexual in a way nobody else here can ever manage to be, even when they're just touching for comfort. Every touch is a loaded rifle; every gesture has its own agenda. But Teal'c is just Teal'c.

He wonders, suddenly, if Teal'c is sleeping with anyone, if Teal'c has been sleeping with anyone, and he knows he doesn't have the courage to ask.

"It is difficult, for an outsider," Teal'c says, quietly and with great dignity. "And yet, for a man to acquiesce to practices he finds distasteful, just to keep the peace, means that he has submitted himself to a slavery that is no less profound for the fact that it is willingly chosen."

"Yeah," Daniel says. "But at least he gets the peace."

*

When they wind up getting stuck in the Goa'uld Palace of the Light for three weeks of slow detox, one of the things sent through, with the pallet of supplies, is a box of condoms. Jack stares at it for a good five minutes while he's unpacking everything, turning it over in his hands like he's contemplating something. Eventually he realizes Daniel is watching him; his cheeks redden, just a little, and he puts them down like they're radioactive and goes back to unpacking.

Daniel catches up to him later, sitting on the plaza just outside, barefoot with his toes digging into the white sand creeping up onto the flagstones. He sits down next to Jack, close enough to be inside his orbit -- not so far as to be an insult -- and not so close that it's a come-on. He's learned how to control his body language so carefully. "Hey," he says.

"Hey," Jack says, ducking his head, not meeting Daniel's eyes. "Sorry about the ... thing."

The little hand gesture he makes is intended, Daniel knows, to stand in for "sorry about the fact that the entire SGC thinks that we're probably fucking like bunnies". It's been a rumor for a while, Daniel knows. It's part of what's won him even the small acceptance he has. He knows Jack is so careful to keep up appearances, to give the impression that he's fucking Daniel and Teal'c and isn't ever touching Sam. Daniel can only be sure of one of the three, but the fact that one is false means that he has to wonder which of the other two premises are false as well.

"It's all right," Daniel says, even though it isn't, not quite. But Jack is only trying to help, he knows, trying to win him some small token of in-groupness, trying to ease his life and his burdens. It's the sign of a real friend, a true friend, and he does appreciate the motive even if he's a little creeped out by the method. No matter what, he has to believe Jack cares for him. For all of them.

"They mean well," Jack says, after a minute of silence. "You've probably figured out that it means they're willing to accept you. As one of them, I mean."

"I know," Daniel says. He ducks his head, concentrates on pulling off his shoes and socks, one after the other, slowly. Stripping in front of Jack, even this tiny bit, makes the pit of his stomach turn somersaults. He blames it on the distance from the light. He doesn't know how Jack can stand being this far away from it. "And I get it. I really do. You've been working really hard to make sure that everyone thinks I'm just -- picky. I do appreciate it."

"Part of my job as your commanding officer," Jack says, and he tries to make it light and casual, but Daniel can hear the strain underneath.

He turns his head, just enough to look at Jack's profile, strong and sure. "How much shit have you been getting about the fact that I don't --" he starts, and then trails off. Jack will know what he means.

And sure enough, Jack doesn't pretend that he doesn't. "Some," he says, then makes a face. "A lot. But it's nothing we can't deal with. I've been taking care of it this long, I can deal with it a while longer."

The edge in Jack's voice makes Daniel want to hit something. "You shouldn't have to," Daniel says, sharp and pointed. "This whole system is fucked up. You should have said something before this. I don't want you to have to take shit because of choices I've made." He watches Jack's jawline, the way it tenses and then eases again, and four years of Jack taking care of him -- taking care of them all -- flash in front of his memory in between one heartbeat and the next. "If it would make things easier on you if I --"

"Don't be stupid, Daniel," Jack says, sounding weary and exhausted. "Of course it would make it easier. That doesn't mean you have to, and it doesn't mean you should. It's not -- You didn't sign up for this. For --" Jack makes another little hand gesture, one that Daniel can't read and would kill to be able to. "We all went into this knowing exactly what the score was. You didn't. It's not what you want, and it's not what you're wired for. Don't push yourself. I can take care of things."

"You shouldn't have to," Daniel says, quietly, but Jack is pushing himself back up to his feet, dusting bits of sand off his pants.

"I'll be inside," Jack says, looking at the flagstones, not at Daniel. "Been out here too long. I'm starting to get itchy under the skin again."

Daniel can relate.

*

When they come home, Jack flashes a grin at Major Benton, who's making cracks about how lucky Jack was to get stranded offworld with the rest of the team, carefully not looking at Sam, who pushes past them all on the Gateramp, her lips pursed into a thin line, the only sign that she can hear them. Jack slings an easy arm around Benton's waist and pulls him in close, nuzzling his neck. It looks perfectly natural.

Daniel wonders how long it took Jack to make those gestures look natural, whether Jack actually wants to be doing what he's doing, whether it's a choice Jack's learned to live with or one he actually wanted to make. He wonders about Jack's ex, the woman who probably would have been his wife if Jack had met her after the Active Duty Marriage Act had been passed, if the ADMA had been passed before the death of the child Jack has never told anyone but Daniel about. He wonders what choices Jack has made that he's learned to live with, and what choices weren't choices at all, and what things Jack does because he can't think of any other way to get around them.

He thinks about all the things Jack has given him over the years, all the tiny small ways Jack has shown his affection and his care, all the ways Jack has smoothed his path and made his life easier. For all of them, really. SG-1. We merry few, we band of brothers, bonded and eternal the way fraternitas is intended to create, a group of people who'd live for each other and die for each other and do it all out of love.

There's all kinds of love. He's starting to finally realize that.

In the locker room, Captain Ryerson snaps a towel at Daniel's ass as he's coming out of the shower. The same kind of flirtation that half the base has stopped offering up to him, a mildly-raucous gesture that says I'm not going to push, but if you're interested --

Daniel catches the towel just before it's about to snap against his skin, the same way he always does, the same way Ryerson was no doubt expecting him to. Then he takes a deep breath, and instead of yanking the towel out of Ryerson's hand and dropping it on the bench, the way he usually does, he tugs on it instead. Gently, like it's a leash, and Ryerson takes a startled step forward and right into Daniel's space.

"There's easier ways of getting my attention, you know," he makes himself say, low and warm and just a little flirty, and Ryerson's face is startled and just a little bit awed as Daniel steps forward and kisses his collarbone. Behind them, someone whistles. "You could just ask."

He can feel Jack watching them, his gaze hot and heavy, but when he looks up, Jack only smiles, tinted with a faint sadness. It makes Daniel want to comfort him, but he doesn't know how, so he just smiles back before he turns away.

*

The little faint frown-lines fade from around Jack's eyes after that, and it's enough of a reward. It isn't that bad, anyway. Maybe it never would have been. It doesn't take long before he starts wondering what took him so long.

Daniel Jackson is an anthropologist. He knows how to blend.

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