Send me your WIPs, your snippets, your huddled rough drafts yearning to be read.
destina wrote: But seriously, if you want to fun me up for Christmas, help me push away my yearly Christmas blues, and have my undying love forever, J/D stories are the way to go. Send me your WIPs, your snippets, your huddled rough drafts yearning to be read.

Shall Brothers Be

(An unfinished Stargate fragment posted to fun destina up for Christmas and have her undying love forever, thank you...)

“Going up to Minnesota this weekend,” Jack said. He was standing by Daniel’s desk, playing with a small metal artifact Daniel had discovered on PX-381. It had three rounded metal parts that moved round each other, and did nothing obvious.

“Yes?” Daniel was halfway through a report on PX-573: he intended to have it finished and footnoted before he left tonight. Whenever that was. General Hammond had given Sam and Jack a 96, and had ordered Daniel off the base from Thursday morning till Tuesday morning.

“You know how we’ve discussed the getting a life thing?”

“Yes, Jack,” Daniel said patiently. This was a routine lecture that Colonel O’Neill delivered to Sam and Daniel, separately, at sporadic intervals. They’d compared notes and discovered that Jack covered the same topics with both of them, but with different emphasis. He seemed to think that Sam needed to be more interested in sports. Daniel ought to be more interested in fishing and beer.

“What were you planning to do this weekend?”

Daniel turned away from the computer and fixed Jack with a bright and enthusiastic eye. “Glad you asked. I was planning to stay home and catalogue the last year’s mailings of the Archaelogy Quarterly and Egyptology News. I haven’t had a chance to do that since I was on sick leave that time when I broke my ankle.”

“Oh, come on, Daniel.” Jack took the bait. “You’ve got to get a life – ”

Daniel turned back to the computer and started typing again. After a minute, Jack stopped talking. This was far shorter than the usual get-a-life lecture: Daniel turned back to eye Jack with surprise.

“Why do I get the impression you’re not really listening to me?”

Daniel shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Want to come up to Minnesota with me?”

Daniel blinked. Jack had a fishing shack in Minnesota, near a lake, that his grandfather had left to him. Everyone knew that: Jack would disappear for a long weekend and come back looking weatherbeaten and with large tales of fish he’d caught. “To your cabin?”

“That’s right.”

“To fish?”

“Well, fishing isn’t compulsory,” Jack said. “Beer. Sitting around in the sun. You wouldn’t believe it, Danny, but there’s this thing in the sky, round and yellow, gives heat. Kind of like one of these – ” he gestured upwards at the ceiling light “ – but lots bigger.”

“I have to finish this report,” Daniel said.

“How long’s that going to take you – ” Jack said. He sounded like he was starting a lengthy protest.

“Two hours,” Daniel said, cutting him off. “If you go away now. When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow,” Jack said. He sounded startled. “Real early. I’ll come by and pick you up.”

“Sure,” Daniel said. They had a briefing they had to get back for on Tuesday at nine, and how bad could three days in Minnesota be?

A minute after he’d left, Jack’s head was back through the door. “Your place, right? You were planning to leave here tonight?”

“Yes,” Daniel snapped, and bent his attention back to the report.

When he got home, past ten at night, there was a brusque message on the answering machine telling him to be ready to go at six am. He set the alarm for 5:30 and packed as if for a dig: Jack had never specified how far away the shack was from the nearest town, but it seemed safest to assume that it was miles from anywhere and they’d be stuck there for three days.

Or else Jack was already regretting the impulsive invitation, and would simply not turn up. Daniel looked at the alarm clock and sighed.


O’Neill was regretting the invitation, or at least he was trying to. Daniel had been awake – more or less – at six: standing outside his apartment in the fresh early morning with a surprisingly small pack. He’d climbed into the passenger seat of the car, fastened the seat-belt, and gone to sleep. Getting out of the car and on to the plane had apparently represented, to Daniel, only a minor interruption in the importance of getting more sleep.

Of course, he looked awfully cute when he was asleep. Carter had pointed out this phenomenon to O’Neill a few months ago – rather absently, as if she hadn’t thought about who she was talking to. Then she’d changed the subject and started using long words about the latest advances in wormhole physics. It had evidently been one of those spontaneous remarks that the speaker promptly wishes unsaid, and O’Neill had decided not to pursue it.

Besides, Daniel did look very cute when he was asleep, even though he drooled. The fact that O’Neill found him much more attractive when he was wide awake and exploding enthusiastically about the latest archaeological discoveries was beside the point. Or when he was killing Gou’ald. Daniel in a white hate-filled rage against the Gou’ald had a certain spooky intensity that was... attractive. Compelling, even. Lethal, undoubtedly.

This was a bad idea. His grandfather’s fishing hut was one of the touchstones in O’Neill’s life, and not only because nothing bad had ever happened there. Even though O’Neill got there very seldom these days (two or three weekends a year) it remained in the back of his mind as a cool private place where the rest of the world didn’t interfere. Bringing Daniel there – bringing anyone from the SGC or the entire armed forces – meant letting some part of the outside world in.

It was his grandfather’s place. O’Neill had never seen much of his grandfather, and his grandfather had never seemed to like him much, but twice when he was a kid, and three times when he was an adult, his grandfather had shown up out of the blue and asked him to go fishing. There hadn’t ever been much talk. They’d just sat side by side and fished and his grandfather had grunted out brief remarks in response to anything O’Neill tried to say... and then he’d died – and he’d left O’Neill the shack and the patch of land it stood on, that enclosed a stretch of lake with an old boatdock. Not much, if you looked at it one way: everything, if you looked at it another.

But somehow, even though it was taking a risk, O’Neill wanted Daniel there. If it worked, it would be good. If it didn’t.... well, how bad could three days be? On Earth and in a non-combat zone, that is.


Jack had gone very quiet. It was an hour’s drive from the airfield to the lake with the famous shack: time to notice that Colonel O’Neill had gone quiet. Daniel wondered whether it would cheer Jack up if Daniel announced he was leaving tomorrow morning. Or even tonight.

The final stretch of road from the highway to the lake turned out to be pretty rough by American standards. Jack took it fast, too: Daniel hoped that he did know it as well as he seemed to think.

“Who the hell is that?” Jack said abruptly.

There was a car parked at the side of the road. Jack slid their own hire car past it and parked further up.

“Maybe there’s someone else on the lake,” Daniel said.

“This is the only cabin up this road.” Jack sounded annoyed and anxious. He slammed out of the car. “Stay put while I check it out.”

Daniel got out of the car. It was actually very nice up here: clean air, smell of water, a nice tang of woodsmoke...

Colonel O’Neill was glaring at him. “Daniel.”

“Jack,” Daniel acknowledged politely.

“What did I just say?”

“We’re on vacation, Jack,” Daniel reminded him. He hefted his pack. It was late afternoon: just right for a couple of hours sitting with a mug of coffee and watching the sun set. “The cabin’s just round here?”

He walked up the road a few steps, and out into the sunlight. After the heavy woods for the past twenty minutes, it was like coming out of doors, and he stood for a long moment just enjoying the feeling, and the fresh breeze off the lake.

“Can I help you?” someone called. He was sitting on a battered old boatdock, propped up against one of the posts, and the sun was dazzling off the lake right behind him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Colonel O’Neill – who seemed not to be on vacation after all – exploded, right behind him.

Daniel sighed. He walked over towards the boatdock, squinting to relieve the sunglare. He had packed his pair of glasses with tinted lenses, but of course they would be at the bottom of his pack. They always were. The man on the boatdock – who had stood up when Colonel O’Neill yelled – looked familiar.

“Jack,” the man said. He looked startled, and a little worried, and almost exactly like Jack. Older than Jack, and with longer, fairer hair, and he stood differently, and his accent was slightly different – California overlaying the Minnesotan twang, instead of Chicago – but overriding that, the startling, unmistakable likeness.

But that wasn’t the only reason he’d looked familiar. Daniel frowned, carefully sifting through his memories: he associated this man with archaeology.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Colonel O’Neill repeated.

The man shrugged. “I just came up for the weekend. Sorry. If I’d known you had plans – ”

“God damn you,” O’Neill snapped. “This is my place. Get the hell out of here.”

Something had to be done. Daniel cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”

Both men looked at him. O’Neill opened his mouth, to say or to shout something, and Daniel ignored him, and said directly to the other man “Haven’t we met before? I’m Doctor Daniel Jackson...?”

“Doctor Jackson?” The man came a step or two forward, frowning at Daniel. “Doctor Daniel Jackson, the – Egyptologist?” He hesitated a fraction before saying “Egyptologist” – a hesitation in which the words “crackpot” or “eccentric” would probably have fitted, but he was polite enough not to say them out loud. “Sure. The Egyptology conference in Washington, 1991?” He held out his hand. “MacGyver,” he added, evidently not expecting Daniel to remember his name.

Daniel shook hands. “Pleased to meet you again. Are you and Jack cousins?”

“Brothers,” MacGyver said, with a half-grin. “I’m the one the respectable side of the family doesn’t talk about. Jack, I’m really sorry about this mix up, but I arranged to meet someone here this evening. I need to stay till they get here.”

Jack seemed to have calmed down, but he still looked alarmingly rigid, even if he wasn’t yelling. “You had no business coming here. Harry left this place to me.”

There was a long pause. Neither of the brothers moved, and though MacGyver didn’t show it the same way Jack did, Daniel was picking up anger from him, too. When he spoke, his voice was cool and relaxed. “Well, I’m sorry you feel like that about it. I’ll be going as soon as I can.”

“There’s a motel fifteen miles down the road,” Jack said. “When your friend shows, I’ll tell him where you are.”

“Sorry,” MacGyver said, after another pause. “I can’t do that. You’ll have to put up with me for a couple of hours, but I’ll be gone after that.”

“Do I need to spell it out? Get off my property.”