Author's Note: A fic for the friend who introduced me to Stargate: SG1 a few years back. Hopefully others will enjoy it as well.

Disclaimer: Jack, Daniel, and their universe do not belong to me.

Don't You Know My Heart is on the Line?

By Catherine Graham

One day Jack wakes up to find he's old. The military issue alarm clock on his bedside table is blinking 7:30, and despite decades of days that began at least two hours earlier, he's so tired he thinks might never get up. Down the hall, the heater groans, kicking on, and Jack echoes the sentiment. He shifts in his king-sized bed, his knees creaking a little beneath the sheets.

It shouldn't have been able to sneak up on him like this, he thinks, all his years coming down on him at once. How was he to know last night, pulling on a gray tee shirt whose arm had been left snaking out from underneath the bed, that he would wake up feeling like his was a hundred years old?

Jack squints his eyes against the V of sunlight warming up one side of his face, splays his fingers across his eyelids when that doesn't help. It figures. God, he could sleep.

Behind his eyelids, a kaleidoscope of hot reds and oranges pulses up against his fingertips. He can almost feel the heat, sparks traveling up his forearm and to his elbow, but that's probably just a reminder that he slept crushing his right hand last night. It's been a long time since he felt the heat of an electrical impulse, a long time since the force of a Zat knocked him flat on his back.

Time has dulled the memory of it, every neuron on fire before the slip into unconsciousness.

The sheets are cold on the unoccupied side of the bed. (Despite the fact that his years with the Stargate program have ensured that he'll never be hard up for money, Jack turns the heat down at night to save on electricity. It's one of those habits that comes with age.) Briefly, Jack presses his face into the crispness of untouched linen and wonders why the phone hasn't been ringing off the hook, someone from the office demanding to know where his lazy ass is – usually he's been there for a few hours by now– then remembers that there are still some perks to being General. There should be, he thinks, if it means feeling as old as he does right now.

He wishes there was coffee, that he could hear the soft sound of it percolating somewhere in the direction of the kitchen, but the house is silent under groaning of the heater and the cough of a neighbor's car turning over.

He thinks he might retire, for real this time, and the thought makes him age another 20 years.

Jack's got a cabin up in northeastern Minnesota, right on the lake, pretty as a picture. Contrary to popular belief, he's even seen a fish there a time or two. (Although he'd never admit it, he's always been a catch and release kind of a guy.) When he bought the cabin all those years ago, Jack had been thinking about retirement. Minnesota had seemed a good place to be when it was all done, although the thought of that had been about as foreign as the cold cucumber and yogurt soup he'd eaten while on his tour in Iraq.

Now, he's not sure he'll ever go. He thinks of the miles of woodland on either side and the cabin he can see from across the lake (during an impromptu visit last spring, Jack learned that its owners are a young, yuppie couple who waved enthusiastically from the shoreline), and he feels a pervading sense of loneliness.

He feels it here in D.C., too. There's no point in going all the way up to Minnesota when he can feel it everywhere.

The house is so goddamned empty, every corner of it full with Daniel's absence. And that's the crux of it.

After Charlie died and Sarah left him – after he pushed her away – Jack had dreaded retirement for a long time, until the day he didn't. Until the day he realized that the sounds he imagined filling the cabin were no longer Sarah's.

Jack can't be sure when what he wanted changed so drastically. All he knows is that, by the time he'd recognized it for what it was, he'd imagined at least a thousand times the surprise that would register on Daniel's face when Jack bent him back for a kiss ten years in the making. (Even in his fantasies, Jack always knew he wouldn't be able to put words to this thing, this thing that began on Abydos, and lasted through Shau'ri, and death, and grieving, and so much hurt, and more lives than either one of them should have lived.)

Because if he and Daniel had one thing going for them, it was time. Daniel had proven that cats weren't the only ones to have nine lives, and Jack had gotten uncomfortably close to the Grim Reaper a handful of times himself. So for Jack – and for Daniel, too, Jack supposes – there was always tomorrow, or next month, or the next time I come this close to losing him. Back then, he was comfortable with the idea that there would be that indeterminate day when he would tell Daniel how he felt.

Jack wasn't always a patient man, but for this, he told himself, he could be patient.

Then Jack had been called to Washington, and there had been a moment when he almost did it – almost kissed him, visible right through the glass in the gate room. Daniel, being his idiot self, ready to jump into a mission to another galaxy, for cryin' out loud, a mission that was certain to end in disaster (and it did end in disaster, Jack prides himself on having predicted it).

But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and Daniel still doesn't know that when Jack went to Washington, he bought a house big enough for two and never once considered the idea that it might always be half empty.

When the heater clicks off and the expanse of bed under his body becomes too huge to ignore, Jack sits up and shuffles his feet on the hardwood floor in blind pursuit of his slippers, feeling the lack of cartilage in his knees as acutely as if there was an X-ray machine letting him see bone rubbing on bone. It's always worst on mornings like these. He sees the use of a cane in his very near future and thinks that once, that would have upset him. But he doesn't put as much stock in physical prowess as he used to. Outrunning aliens is a young man's game, and thanks to the SGC – and, in no small part, to himself – it's not anyone's game anymore.

As Jack mixes instant coffee into lukewarm water straight out of the tap, he considers the idea that Daniel might be fucking Vala, then rephrases the thought. 'Daniel' and 'fucking' just don't sound right in the same sentence. But Jack's pretty sure he's sleeping with her. Sleeping with her – yeah, that sounds better.

Just the thought of it should make him want to spit his coffee down the drain, but he's surprised to find that it doesn't. She's all wrong for him; Jack knows that almost intuitively, but he can't blame Daniel for wanting to sleep with her. He's been alone for so long – and Jack sometimes wonders if part of that is his fault, if he kept Daniel, always so goddamned loyal, waiting for all these years while he tried to get his act together – and Vala is made up entirely of legs up to here and leather touching skin in all the right places and just the type of pointed banter to keep Daniel's interest.

She's a little like Jack in a leather thong, except Jack wouldn't look all that good in a leather thong, anyway. (Which, of course, means Jack's all wrong for him, too. But Jack's known that since Daniel pulled out that 5th Avenue bar on frickin' Abydos, and that hasn't stopped him from buying a house that's just waiting to have Daniel fill it.) Hell, given the choice between himself and Vala, Jack knows who he would choose.

But here's the kicker. He's pretty sure Daniel would pick him. He's pretty sure that, had he bent Daniel back for the kiss – had he done it with an entire gate room full of people as an audience or all alone in Daniel's kitchen or crouched down behind a rock with the sound of zats firing overhead and Teal'c looking on, muttering, "Indeed" – the surprised look on his face would have melted into one that said, "Shit, Jack, finally. You've been holding out on me for a decade."

He's pretty sure that, had he bent Daniel back for that kiss, he wouldn't be drinking instant coffee alone at a dining room table he'd picked out with Daniel in mind.

And maybe Jack never had been patient; maybe he'd only been a coward.

Sipping at his lukewarm coffee, grounds making a ring around the bottom of the mug, Jack can almost feel the way Daniel's fingers, careful and calloused and solid, would curve around his wrist. Can almost taste the Starbucks Sumatra Daniel always kept at home and sometimes snuck along on missions. Can almost see how Daniel would move himself into the tiny spaces of his life. Without trying, Jack knows both how Daniel's toothbrush would lie next to his and how his hands would fit at Daniel's hip and shoulder. (This last thing Jack knows from experience. He has held Daniel once before, forehead to forehead, his grip achingly tight, trying to keep Daniel from shaking apart as the Sarcophagus withdrawal wracked his body. It somehow seems wrong to Jack that he can remember the one time he held Daniel as only a blur of fever and sweat and vomit.)

There's a yellow sticky note on the cordless bearing Daniel's cell number with the words "Just in case you ever forget," printed underneath. As if he could forget. It's number one on his speed dial, but he didn't tell Sam that when she stuck the note there during a short visit a few months ago.

Jack is old, but his hand is on the cordless before he registers that he has made the movement to get it. The phone is slick with the sweat off his palm.

There are a number of ways this could go. Worst-case scenario: Vala could answer the phone, sleep in her voice, or breathless exhilaration. (Her narrow hips writhing beneath Daniel's just moments before her hand flies out to catch the phone. God, how does Daniel know he won't break her?) Or Daniel could hang up on him before he even gets a word out, check the LSD screen and silence the call, effectively shutting Jack out of his life the way Jack has done so many times to him. God knows it's what he deserves.

Or maybe – and Jack can hear Daniel's voice in his head like it's his own, the same voice that tells him not to have that second donut because his cholesterol's high already – a soft, "What took you so long?"

So many ways it could go; so many ways it could go wrong. But nothing's right now, anyway. He's here in D.C, and Daniel's back in the Springs, itching to get on his way to Atlantis. (Jack is suddenly hit full force with the idea of a Daniel not two thousand miles away, but lightyears, galaxies away. Irrevocably lost to him, the cell phone number on the cordless a mockery of untraversable distance.)

In that instant, the miles of highway between D.C. and Colorado shrink until they seem to disappear. Two thousand miles away, Jack knows, Daniel is just waking. He is cursing the alarm clock – Daniel has never been much of a morning person – and knocking his glasses on the floor when he grabs for them on the bedside table. In a few minutes, the coffee maker will turn on; a healthy portion of Sumatra blend will be scooped into an expensive filter. Later, he will drive down streets so familiar to Jack that they should bear the threads of his tires, alternative music Jack doesn't know pouring from his Toyota's speakers (the only decent thing about that junker, Jack thinks).

There is no reason – except for maybe every reason – that they should not do these things together. Both of them are much too good at doing them alone.

"Daniel," he breathes into dead air, the dial tone an intrusive hum. There is a half empty bed down the hall and a half empty Chevy Avalanche in the garage and a half empty life Jack is living.

He presses the numbers before he has a chance to think about what he is doing.

End.