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"Pass me the popcorn, willya?"
They were entangled on the sofa in Jack's Arlington townhouse, a two-man puppy pile. Jack lay more or less on his back, head and shoulders somewhat propped up on, mostly sunken into the big pillows that cushioned the couch's already deeply cushioned arm; one hand was free, thumb idly pressing the channel-up button on the remote that controlled the large-screen television he was idly watching with the sound muted. Daniel lay half on him and half under him, canted slightly to the side where the squooshy sofa yielded to his weight, one leg tucked up bent under Jack's knees, the other stretched out straight across the couch's other arm. His head lay on Jack's belly, which made a better pillow than it used to. One of his arms was folded and pretty much squished between his body, Jack's body, and the cushions; his other arm was stretched up along Jack's chest and draped over his shoulder. Jack's other hand lay on his neck, heavy with its customary thoughtless, idle possessiveness.
The sofa was hugely oversized, the biggest you could get without going modular. In what was then a mildly arguable risk, Jack had bought it expressly for times like this. It was long and wide enough that two big men could mostly fit on it, mostly comfortably, for long, sweetly lethargic hours after big meals, or after sex, or while watching movies. (If Jack ever settled on something to watch, this would be all three.) It was also well designed for sex itself: solidly built with a frame that could take a pounding, and so deliciously, sinfully cushioned that nobody got bruised and nobody much minded that they'd left the plastic covering on, under the layers of comfy washable throws, to prevent permanent stains. Two weeks ago, Jack had said, in one of his typical oblique references to the significant with the mundane, "So you think I should take that stupid crackly plastic off the couch?" Daniel had said, "Evidentiary or not, a stain's a stain. Leave it on." They didn't have to kill themselves hiding the evidence anymore. But the couch was really comfy even with the crackly plastic, worth keeping clean for the sake of it. One thing led to another any time they were together on this couch, and the last thing Daniel ever wanted to have to worry about in the heat of the moment was making a mess. He'd worried about that enough in the last twelve years. Literally and metaphorically.
Right now the whole living room was a mess. Their street clothes were flung all over; they'd showered and changed into sweats since the wild strip-and-stumble to the sofa that had followed their arrival home, but nobody had bothered to pick up the clothes. A pizza box, empty of all but a few strips of cheese soldered to the cardboard and the white plastic table-for-two-Lilliputians that kept the lid off the pie in transit, lay on the floor beside the coffee table. The coffee table was a strew of paper plates (big ones smeared with pizza grease, small ones smeared with blueberry pie filling), empty bottles of Virgil's Root Beer, and wadded-up paper towels. Toward the near edge sat a bowl of popcorn.
Daniel didn't reach for it. "Pick a movie first."
"Don't wanna watch a movie. Pass me the popcorn."
"Popcorn only goes with movies."
"Misplaced modifier. 'Popcorn goes only with movies.'"
More as payback for the grammatical correction than as commentary on the caloric content of popcorn, Daniel got his head turned just enough to mouth up a sizable chunk of cotton-covered belly. He gave it a doggy shake-of-the-head tug before releasing it and putting his head back down to bounce on Jack's laughter. He could feel the iron abs under the wonderful padding. He loved the padding as much as the muscle -- he loved every inch of Jack -- but he'd been worried for a long time about what the padding represented. Moving to D.C. hadn't put a dent in Jack's workout regimen, but Jack was the kind of guy who stayed fit by doing an active job, and taking the Pentagon stairs instead of the elevator wasn't even close, no matter how many hours he logged with free weights and crunches, how much fighting he did in the gym to keep his skills sharp. He'd put on surgery weight while he recovered from the knee replacements, he'd put on stress weight from the political pressures of a job he loathed, and the mill-and-swills and rubber-chicken dinners he'd been required to attend the past three years had bored him into eating crap he'd never have touched even in their crappiest-takeout-food days.
"If you go into nag mode there will be noogies," Jack said, still laughing, swirling knuckles over Daniel's head in a gentle mock-threat. "And popcorn's not just for movies anymore."
"Says who?" Daniel said, not really in nag mode, more in idle, reflexive banter mode, most of his focus on the warmth and bone and padding of Jack's body against his, the bouncy goodness of laughter, the tender skin of Jack's neck under his fingertips where they'd curled in during the bouncing.
"Says the guy who just got confirmation that the Stargate on P3X-972 is salvageable."
Daniel went very still, watching the picture advance through the sports-package channels, pre-season commentary and post-season commentary and draft commentary and bowling and some horse thing and a flash of basketball that made Jack pause for an extra eyeblink before he grunted at whichever team he didn't like and moved on. The grunt bounced Daniel's head again, but he barely felt it this time. The huge high-res screen at this distance looked as clear to Daniel without his glasses as Jack's old rec-room TV had looked to him when he wore his glasses, which was really why Jack had bought it, although unlike the giant mutant couch it required no excuses. "You mean PB2-908?"
"Ernest's planet," Jack acknowledged, and threaded his fingers through Daniel's hair.
Ten years ago, Daniel would have already been on his feet, asking a million questions, turning away and turning back and pacing and thinking out loud and talking with his hands. Now he was motionless except for his heartbeat thundering against Jack's flank, but he could still feel the echo of his old self through Jack's stroking; Jack's fingers carried the memory of his long hair. "What was the condition of the castle?"
"Pile of rubble," Jack said. He'd reached the cluster of HD movie channels now, and his surfing slowed down. "But the gate's intact inside it ... and something's giving off an energy reading."
"The library device?" Daniel said, suppressing a surge of hope, feeling instead the bleak erosion of the years, all the missed chances, all the riches offered and then snatched away just as he found that they were there to be reached for, the wartime burning of all the libraries in all the Alexandrias in all the galaxies. He pressed a little closer to Jack, the one chance he hadn't let slip out of his grasp forever, the one that made up for almost all the others. No prize is worth attaining if you can never share it ...
"Could be," Jack said, lingering on TCM-HD, something in black-and-white, Myrna Loy, maybe The Best Years of Our Lives -- no, she was too young, and there was William Powell; definitely The Thin Man. "You know anybody with any archaeological training who might be interested in digging it up to find out?"
As part of his retirement package, Jack had been offered an appointment in the recently reelected President Hayes' administration, a newly created office that would allow him to supervise the integration of SGCOM and the Stargate Program into the nascent Earth Space Defense and Exploration Organization. Daniel had been offered a chair endowed in Catherine's father's name at the Zanvyl Krieger School at Johns Hopkins, a position from which he could start developing an academic infrastructure to train the diplomats and social scientists they'd be sending out into the stars. They'd been planning to take the offers. Daniel would work from offices in the Bernstein Offit Building in D.C., go up to the Baltimore campus to teach a couple of days a week.
"I thought we were going to spend the next year on this couch watching sports and movies on the wicked cool TV," Daniel said.
"We can bring it along. Built-in DVD player. Hook up a spare if that one craps out. I saved all the packaging."
"I don't think Netflix delivers out there."
"I got you all the box sets of M*A*S*H and The Twilight Zone and the whole run of Gunsmoke for me. We'll stock up on movies before we go." Jack tapped Daniel's arm with the remote. "And popcorn."
"Funding? Staffing? Logistics?"
"Langford-Littlefield'll fund it; Sabrina's already started the paperwork. I can take care of the logistics, but I'll need your help with the staffing. That's kinda why I'm telling you now. I would have liked to surprise you, but I can't set it up without you. And it all, you know ... depends on if you want to go."
"Oversight?"
"Private venture. Answerable to the Foundation, presumably licensed by ESDEO once it's up and running."
And if not, we'll already be out there. It'll be our bolthole, too. "What about the transition?"
"Paul and Hank and George and Henry'll manage. Henry keeps ragging me about this gut, and he knows the damn thing's gonna go as soon as I have some decent work to do."
Which meant that Jack could go back to eating pretty much anything he wanted to.
With a slow smile, Daniel reached out to snag the popcorn bowl, which had been within Jack's own easy reach the whole time. He pushed up on an elbow, bent his leg to lay it across Jack's thighs, and put the popcorn bowl on Jack's chest. "You're giving me Heliopolis," he said.
"I'm offering to help you dig Heliopolis out; I'm giving you the remote," Jack said, waving the remote in his face. "You're lying on my other arm and I need this hand for the popcorn now."
Daniel batted the remote away and pushed a handful of popcorn into Jack's mouth. He let his buttery fingers linger while Jack's tongue curled around the treat, then stroked a fingertip back and forth across Jack's smile while Jack chewed. "I thought you said you'd never go back to MREs."
"Not gonna," Jack said with his mouth full, then swallowed. "Asgard replication technology, naquadah generator, plenty of raw materials." He opened up for Daniel to feed him another buttery handful, and caught Daniel's fingers gently in his teeth for a second before letting them go. "Plus the place is crawlin' with wild berries, and I bake a badass alien-berry pie."
"As long as there's pie, all's well with the world," Daniel said, looking lovingly into Jack's soft, warm, happy eyes while Nick and Nora had dinner with the suspects in the movie that played silently on the screen, hooking his leg around Jack's knees and pushing in a little tighter, up a little closer so that he could kiss Jack's buttery lips. Jack let the remote slip down to the floor and moved that hand up into Daniel's hair, down Daniel's neck, under the loose stretchy collar of Daniel's old sweatshirt to stroke collarbone with his thumb and squeeze the muscle of shoulder in his palm. Daniel had timed it once: when they were home, Jack was unable to go more than five minutes without touching Daniel's bare skin, and when they were like this he always had to have a hand on Daniel somewhere that clothes weren't getting in the way. Daniel ground gently with his hips against Jack's thigh, making his response to the contact clear, and then dribbled more popcorn into Jack's mouth and said, "But for tomorrow night's movie I'm bringing you Milk Duds. And Goobers. And Jujubes."
"No Junior Mints?"
"And Junior Mints. And Twizzlers."
"Twizzlers ... " Jack said dreamily. "For that, you get to pick a movie from the guide."
"It's more fun to watch you channel-surf," Daniel said, tucking himself down, head finding the soft depression in Jack's bony shoulder where it fit just right. "And I guess we'd better enjoy live sports and broadcast television while we can."
"So that's a yes?" Jack said as they settled in, not complaining at all about the arm that was squished under Daniel now.
"Oh yeah," Daniel said, visions of administrative boredom and stuffy classrooms receding into the future that would never be, now, the compromises he wouldn't have to make to stay by Jack's side. "Big, big yes."
They fed each other popcorn until the bowl was empty and THE END came up on the movie they weren't really watching anyway. Daniel sucked gently on Jack's neck, knocking the empty bowl onto the rug by sliding his hand up under Jack's shirt. Jack put him into a sleepy trance by stroking fingernails slowly through his hair. They hovered somewhere between dozing and making out for the first half of After the Thin Man, and just when dozing seemed to have the upper hand, Jack said, "There's just one thing."
"What's that?" Daniel said, deliciously sleepy, completely unworried, softly aroused in a way that would keep until they had the energy to do something about it, his hand comfortably draped over the undemanding bulge in Jack's sweats, his lips on the tender flesh just under Jack's ear and behind his jawbone.
"I can't figure out how we're gonna bring the couch."