The Last Place on Earth
by Pares

There had maybe been a little town here once. Locking the rented Cherokee's door, Jack could picture shabby little wooden houses between the railroad tracks and the flat, brown bay, but Yaquina, Oregon had definitely seen better days. Maybe Daniel didn't think so, seeing as how he'd come here on his own, on purpose, but looking at the waterlogged gate with its faded sign reading Siletz Reservation, Jack didn't see any old school splendor to the place, no record of a proud nation, only the sagging fence with its rotting green, splintered logs and a single ugly totem pole badly in need of paint.

After the two weeks they'd spent at Jack's cabin, his team had scattered for more in-character vacations: Carter had tripped off to Area 51 to handle alien artifacts she hadn't yet gotten to coo over; Teal'c had rounded up Ishta and the other women of Hak'tyl and was convening a council on Dakara. Daniel had come... here.

A fat raven flapped from one fence pole, dropping to the deep rut the gate had scored in the wet ground at Jack's feet. It tipped its head at him, beady eyes all suspicion. Jack almost asked it to bring him Daniel. Xe'ls had had a knack for making things appear right before your eyes.

"Jack?"

Daniel was wearing a floppy camp hat, although the sky was overcast, and his BDUs; the knees were black with mud. He shoved the gate open just enough to let himself out from behind it and walked towards Jack, readjusting his glasses.

"Nice work," Jack told the raven.

"What are you doing here?" Concern had tugged Daniel's eyebrows together. Clearly he thought Jack had come bearing bad news.

"Just thought I'd drop by. Nice place," Jack added. Daniel squinted at him, his head canted at the same angle as the raven's.

"Uh huh. So everyone's okay?"

"Last I checked," Jack said airily. "Walter keeps me informed."

Daniel finally smiled, taking Jack's elbow and leading him back through the gate. "I'll show you what I've been working on."

"As long as there's coffee," Jack allowed.

Jack edged in sideways behind him, with a final backward glance at the raven, still staring after him.

*

A short tour of the reservation included a boathouse for modern-looking canoes and a few battered motor-boats, a muddy field full of long square pits, cordoned off with ropes, a few rows of log cabins lining the wide, unpaved track that seemed to serve as a road here and a round building that Daniel said was the meeting house for the tribal elders. A few people nodded to Daniel as he passed, and he raised a hand, but didn't stop to speak to them.

Eventually, Daniel led him to a cabin slightly bigger than the others, its windows papered with what looked like school projects: things made with glitter and glue. In front of it, a guy with glasses and a long brown braid and a pug-nosed woman with a spiky black crewcut were hunched low to the ground, pegging down an animal skin painted with thick black letters.

"Josh Brawn, Selisya Pullayup, this is my friend Jack O'Neill."

Josh shook his hand, taking it in both of his and flashing a sunny smile. Selisya only nodded at him and then returned to studying the skin.

"So you dug something up?" Jack guessed.

Daniel shook his head, pouring Jack a cup of coffee from the tin pot on the camp stove set on the picnic table nearby. "Their students painted it. Josh has been teaching classes in Salish, with Selisya. The Siletz have largely forgotten their own language, but they're related to the Salish and some of the words are shared with Yaquina. Selisya also teaches Tolowa, the common tribal language here."

"Where are the kids now?" He craned his neck but saw no one younger than Selisya. A few women with a soccer-mom air power-walking along the track in matching running suits, an old man carrying a small stack of firewood.

"They're at basketball practice," Josh said.

"We're kicking the local middle school's ass," Selisya put in.

"Go team," Jack said before turning his attention to Daniel. "Are you teaching a language, too?"

Daniel looked faintly confused.

"No," he said finally. "I'm helping them re-designate their burial grounds, and tagging artifacts for the museum they're building."

There was another animal skin tacked to the cabin wall behind Daniel. Jack perused the design and asked, "What does it say?"

Daniel turned his head and then said, "Nkswum. It means family. It comes from the Salish word for 'one fire'."

"Ah."

"Where are you staying?" Daniel asked suddenly.

"I got Walter to set me up at the Chinook Winds in Lincoln City."

Daniel raised his eyebrows.

"I thought I could buy you dinner and lose a couple hundred bucks at the craps table," Jack told him.

Josh grinned and shook his head and Selisya gave him a look of open contempt.

"Or you could stay here. The salmon are running and Kenny will be here later to hang the smoke lodge. We'll grill out tonight; Selisya here will cut you a salmon steak as thick as your arm," Josh offered.

Jack glanced around the reservation, the rain-dark buildings, the yawning bay, the pearl colored sky, the way the mist in the air made Daniel's shagging hair curl at his ears.

He nodded.

*

"Tonane would really love these guys," Jack said, shoving his empty plate away. Daniel looked amused. "I wonder how he's doing, anyway?"

"I'm sure Xe'ls and T'akaya are keeping him out of trouble," Daniel said absently. He'd turned his attention to busily writing something in his field notebook; his plate was still mostly full of salmon so Jack leaned over and helped himself to another forkful of fish.

The kids had come back, flush with victory and happy to show Jack their hook shots while dinner had been cooking. Daniel had been absorbed in ceremonial masks and wood carvings, which had bored Jack sooner than even he'd expected.

The people were nice, but Jack found the run-down feel of the place unsettling. It reminded him too much of the little villages that had just been razed by the Goa'uld--or were about to be. He elbowed Daniel and asked, "Why did you come here, anyway?"

"Why did you follow me, Jack?" He responded, looking fiercely interested in the answer, his eyes blue and shining even in the fading daylight.

Jack took his time answering, checking to see that no one was within earshot as kids and their parents cleared the long tables and the youngest children amused themselves with a shrieking game of Tag.

"You came back from outer space, where you had, you know, died. Again," Jack pointed out. "And then came out here, to what is probably almost literally the last place on Earth." Jack had little problem imagining the old steam engines following tracks that, in his mind's eye, led right into the bay. "Is there some symbolism that I'm missing? Do you miss being Ascended, Daniel?"

Daniel seemed to consider this.

"I don't miss being Ascended," he said at last.

"Could have fooled me," Jack muttered sourly.

"I did miss you," Daniel smiled. "Although, at this particular moment, I'm not sure why." He waited a beat and then said, "Did you miss me, Jack?"

For a moment Jack felt a pang, an echo of the raw ache he'd been actively ignoring until Daniel had shown up at the SGC, alive again. A naked Daniel, springing out of an invisible nowhere like a Chippendale's dancer, or a rabbit from a very gay magician's top hat: bare chest and broad shoulders, his face, without his glasses, like an open door.

"I wasn't pining for you, if that's what you mean," Jack snapped. "This time," he admitted.

There was something soft and knowing in Daniel's eyes and it made Jack grit his teeth. What had made him think that this would be a good idea?

"I have my own cabin here," Daniel said. "There's room for you, if you wanted to stay the night."

Jack blinked at him; Daniel's face was serene.

"Yeah. Okay," Jack said.

*

"Since I got back," Daniel explained, "This time, I mean, the small of my back is always cold. I don't know if it's a new thing or whether I was always cold and now I just notice it more." He had bent over to plug in a little space heater near his bed.

It was a double, with a red and white blanket woven with leaping fish and stylized birds in flight.

"There's only one bed," Jack heard himself say.

"Yes," Daniel said, taking his hat off.

Outside, it had graduated from mist to rain, and fat drops pattered steadily against the tarp patching the low, leaky roof; it smelled like wet canvas, like nights spent in tents off-world.

"You should charge more for this kind of work," Jack suggested. He indicated the shabby one-room cabin with a sweep of his hand. "Then you could afford a Winnebago. Classy," Jack said, framing an ironic OK with his thumb and forefinger. Daniel glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time himself, but didn't look perturbed.

"They needed the help and I needed... a change of pace."

"Yeah, they're not so much with the sense of intergalactic urgency here," Jack agreed. But the reservation itself still felt like a losing fight.

Daniel, sitting on the bed and tugging off one muddy boot, seemed to sense Jack's thoughts and volunteered, "You don't have to worry about them, Jack. They're doing pretty well by themselves, actually. The Chinook Winds does good business and the tribal elders are building a new school along with the museum."

"Well. Good."

He watched Daniel kick off the second boot and rub his muddy hands on the thighs of his BDUs. Even the smell of mud was making Jack nostalgic, and that was just wrong. Jack was tired in the way he'd been tired since he'd been promoted to General, but he wasn't sleepy and a glance at his watch told him it was barely nine.

"What time did you get up this morning, Daniel?"

"About four, I guess."

"You must be pretty bushed, then." It was on the tip of Jack's tongue to say he'd drive out to the Chinook Winds after all when Daniel reached out and took his hand.

"Sit down, Jack."

Jack did.

Weirdly, Daniel kept his hand in his, and for a long time they just sat next to each other on the bed, Daniel's hand curved around Jack's. He could feel the mud drying in the creases of Daniel's palms, could smell Daniel's sweat and rain-damp T-shirt, the toasting wires of Daniel's old fashioned space heater glowing lava-hot and baking their shins.

"I miss... this," Jack said. And he meant: everything. Not holding Daniel's hand; in a decade of knowing him, it was one thing he'd never done with the guy, but... having Daniel with him, some place isolated and somehow out of time. It made him wish he could hear Carter telling Teal'c one of her wholesome little jokes, made him close his eyes and picture Teal'c raising an eyebrow at her, hands folded on his staff weapon.

"I know," Daniel said, and squeezed Jack's hand.

*

In the morning, Jack woke to the sound of children repeating strange polysyllabic words in sing-song voices, with Daniel warm against his shoulder. For a moment, he wasn't sure where he was. PX4-987, maybe. They'd had a lot of kids there. Then he saw Daniel's glasses folded on the sprung two-drawer filing cabinet that served as a night table and he remembered, but found that he couldn't bring himself to be too disappointed, after all--not with Daniel as a consolation prize.

He adjusted the red and white woven blanket and fell asleep again watching Daniel breathe, his palm spread against the small of Daniel's naked back.

END

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