Binge
Binge
by Wistful
Summary: Why hadn't they been best friends?
Category: Angst, Drama, POV, Romance
Season: any Season
Pairing: Daniel/Sam
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language, none
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. I have written this story for entertainment purposes only and no money whatsoever has exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author(s).
Archived on: 10/06/03
Other story notes:
Spoilers - 'Space Race' Post Episode, all seasons Website - http://www28.brinkster.com/wistfulworld/index.html Author's Note - I felt the need to take a break from the really really long Daniel/Sam adventure story that I'm writing. I wanted to say something that couldn't be said in it, so I've tried to say it here in a context where it would fit. It's short.
"You're drinking alone."
Sam jerked on her stool, throwing a hand to her heart as she looked at the intruder into her solitude. Daniel's mouth slanted up, but maybe down. Mona Lisa. She couldn't tell, but his face wasn't dark and small like the painting and when he sat beside her, there were lines around his eyes. That probably meant he hadn't been smiling. She wondered what exactly she'd said on his answering machine.
There had been cursing. Maybe.
Maybe she'd asked him a few questions she'd thought she never would.
'Hey, Daniel, why'd you go? I know I made it worse but... why'd you have to go?'
'So, is ascension all it's cracked up to be?'
'You ever think about going back?'
'Daniel... What did you do besides sort of died?'
No. Sam would never ask Daniel any of those things. But one day, he'd probably answer them anyway. It was part of his charm. It was part of why he could have been her best friend if things worked like that between them. But they didn't. There were too many reasons why she'd gone a little wild these days, and that was only one of them. Why hadn't they been best friends?
She'd ached, for a year, at the thought that they might have been.
Now he was back. And they weren't. One day she was as high as a kite just looking at his face and the next, she couldn't even look him in the eyes. Something was going on. He seemed to know it, because he kept sending these odd looks her way. Not quite intimate, but startlingly close to being so. And she hated every single moment of it.
"I'm drinking alone," she repeated, because she realized she'd been quiet for so long.
He took it as a cue to relax a little. The Juke Box was kicked on by some kid who didn't look old enough to be drinking. She didn't recognize the song.
"Always the first sign," Daniel teased, nodding toward her drink. The lines around his eyes were still there, but somehow they had shifted with his amusement. How could he do that? She'd first noticed lines on her face three months ago, and the only way they'd shifted was to go deeper.
The shot glass in her hand was cold. In comparison, Daniel was warm and real and alive and sitting right beside her on a wobbly stool in a crusty bar with his head tilted toward her. She didn't know how to feel about that. Was she moving on her stool or was that the room spinning? That could be the answer to her question.
He smiled crookedly. "Better be careful, or I might think you have a problem."
Funny. Oh, God.
"Would you mind very much if I puked on your shoes?" She asked, suddenly feeling green all over.
Daniel's face blanked comically. It was a very close call. He didn't move, but became frozen in that instinctive moment of 'fight or flight' as if he couldn't decide which he'd rather do. Sam sat her head on the bar and moaned as the nausea passed. This hadn't been a good idea. She didn't like drinking alone any more than Daniel liked her drinking alone, and that was a lot of not liking going on, but this had been a bad, bad idea. She felt his hand come up and rub her back gently to ease her pain and kept her head down. It was easier that way. Besides, the bar was cool and her face was on fire.
Up. Down. Curved around the bottom of her spine. His hand felt too good anywhere it moved. The one thing it didn't feel was like it should. Like a friend's touch.
God, what she wouldn't give to take back that slurred message she'd left on his answering machine when she'd been on the wrong side of drunk. Now she felt sober and wasted all at once. The mixed messages her body was sending her were tearing apart her stomach lining. She felt peculiarly certain that it was all his fault.
He'd never been her best friend. And now he was... something else.
Bad idea.
"So, you hate me," his voice reached her. His hand had steadily grown in pressure until it was a heavy weight on her shoulder. "Or so says the vodka."
Oh. She remembered what she'd said on his answering machine now.
She'd forgotten until then that she was angry with him. Her hands, in her lap, clenched into fists and she had to fight to keep control. Being intoxicated didn't help. She wanted to teach him a thing or two about how you were supposed to treat members of your team. Kindness and friendship were one thing. The lazy seduction that moved so slow she didn't even realize it was happening until someone else, namely Jack, slapped her upside the head with it, was definitely another.
"It wasn't the vodka," she muttered to the bar. It gleamed back at her. Did this mean she couldn't later blame her behavior on the drinking? She hoped not. Daniel's hand tensed, then slowly drew away. She had a feeling that she'd wounded him. It wasn't a good feeling, but she couldn't take back the words even though she hadn't really meant them. Okay, only a little.
"What's this all about?" he asked after a fashion.
Sam scoffed and raised her head, forgetting for a second that the bar had become her best friend. She didn't back down when his eyes pierced hers, even though it was uncomfortable to look at him so directly in such close proximity. "You. Are. Freaking. Me. Out."
Daniel blinked, wide-eyed behind his glasses. Then he backed off like she'd puffed cigarette smoke in his face. It was something she'd seen a femme fatale do to a man once in an old black and white movie. But she wasn't a femme fatale, she reminded herself. And she didn't want to be. That was the whole point of straightening Daniel out.
Her stomach grew and shrank as she waited for his reaction, for his words, for the brunt of his confusion. When it didn't come, annoyance replaced the anxiety. Once, he'd been predictable for her. "Should I be more explicit?"
He turned on her sharply, cheeks hard. "That was explicit enough." Oh, he was angry. Steaming. Face red. Eyes glittering. "How exactly have I freaked you out, Sam?"
He knew. She could read it in the defensive line of his clenched jaw.
"You know exactly what I'm talking about," she accused. Her blunt fingernail wandered over the bar, scratching wordless things into the polished surface. "Are you my best friend, Daniel?"
The confusion finally came in the form of his puckered brow. "Am I..."
'That's it, Sam. Keep him off guard. Keep him honest. Keep him away, because you suck at this kind of thing, and even Jack would have to agree.'
She went for broke. "Did you know that when we found you, you looked at me like you wanted to eat me?"
Daniel's mouth fell open. It should have been funny, but her stomach sank low into her shoes and her mouth tasted like leather. A woman walked behind her, shouldered past a couple of burly men, leaving behind the scent of cheap perfume and hot afternoons.
Sam's insides ached. She had to continue this.
"Did you know that you looked at me like that this morning when I was trying to speak with Jack about the Ion Drive?"
"I... didn't..." Daniel swallowed with difficulty and turned his face away from her. Red flags were raised on his cheeks, burning her with a hollow victory. He was still for a moment, and then jolted into motion as if touched with a cattle prod. He reached into his jeans' back pocket and took out his wallet. Slipping a few bills free, he slapped them onto the bar. "I want a beer. A good beer. Something that doesn't taste like crap."
The bartender, who had been standing near by discreetly like one of those butlers who vanished in and out of hallways immediately snapped to attention. The money disappeared off the counter; a brown bottle replaced it.
Sam didn't let his inattention stop her. "Did you know that the entire time you were gone, I kept thinking about the fact that you were probably my best friend but you hadn't been my best friend at all, and how frustrating and confusing that was for me?"
Daniel wrapped his fingers tight around the beer bottle. Took a swig. "You're drunk, Sam." He wasn't looking at her, which meant something. And she wasn't done yet.
Sam's tongue darted out, licked her bottom lip, tasting alcohol in the chapped cracks. "Did you know that Jack cornered me in my lab this afternoon and asked me if there was something going on between us?"
Daniel's head jerked up at that, guilt and fear written across his face because he knew. Oh, he knew the odd relationship she had with her C.O. "He did?"
Sam's stomach echoed his emotions. "He did. And did you know that I told him, 'No, of course not. Daniel's my best friend?'"
Her words, a repeat of the earlier conversation, tasted like salt taffy as they left her tongue.
"And?"
"He looked angry and confused and couldn't tell if I was lying."
Daniel wilted as if he'd been left in the sun all day. He seemed to melt on the stool; even his hand slipped down the beer bottle he held with a sticky squeak of flesh against glass. The peanuts in a small bowl near his hand seemed suddenly higher than his head. "I'm sorry, Sam. It's just "
"Don't tell me," she interrupted hastily. "I don't want to know. I just want it to stop."
"That's not fair," he replied quietly, head still low. He started picking at the label; the serrated edge of his thumbnail dug beneath the corner of one edge, tearing it from the bottle.
"Hate me," she said dryly, because she knew he wouldn't. Daniel was too much of a passivist to hold this against her for long. She hoped. "But that's how it's going to be. We work together on something so important that it's worth more than my life and maybe your life, but that doesn't mean I want to die or that I want you to, no matter how hard you try to." Sam knew she was rambling. She couldn't stop. "I don't want to know what is making you look at me like that because then I'd know about it and maybe I'd think about it that one second where I should be thinking about not dying. Understand?"
Her mouth had begun to feel cottony, stretching around the words with difficulty. She was suddenly positive she wouldn't remember this in the morning. It was selfish of her to be thankful for that, but she was.
"You're drunk," he said again, angrily this time. "You're not making any sense and not just because you're slurring. And Sam, I have to be honest with you, you're starting to piss me off. You're a mean drunk."
She was also an honest one. Sam dipped her chin against her chest for a moment, considering what to say next with the strange kind of loose lucidity her brain had when she was inebriated, and then faced him again. "Jack thinks you're falling in love with me and it's making him sick to death," she revealed, voice low between them. A dirty little secret. "Prove him wrong, Daniel, because I don't think any of us could take something like that. He's your best friend. My friend. You're my... You're Daniel. And something like this just might tear us all apart."
Daniel gasped, horrified. The reaction was gratifying and painful all at once. Like poking at a bruised shin. Now she was done. Her stomach rebelled and she knew she had to get out of there. Sam slowly levered herself off the stool, ignoring the curious look the bartender sent her when she sat a fifty down onto the bar and told him to keep the change. She turned and Daniel's hand wrapped around her arm, helping her keep her balance as she walked toward the exit. She didn't shrug him off.
He wasn't the enemy, she reminded herself wearily. He was just Daniel.
Outside, in the chilly night air, they stopped. She looked toward her motorcycle where it sat gleaming by the sidewalk. It wouldn't be safe there, but she couldn't take the chance of riding it drunk. They both knew he'd be driving her home tonight. He must have known it from the second he heard her voice on his answering machine. She'd known it the second she'd taken her first drink.
He didn't remove his hand from her arm. It wasn't holding her up any more, but it did make her dizzy. She could feel his attention razor sharp on her, trying to read her thoughts when she didn't even know exactly what she was thinking. Once, he would have been looking at the stars and they would have talked easily, with quiet familiarity. Sam would have smiled and patted his shoulder before bidding him goodnight. But now his fingers made small indents in her flesh and she knew he wanted to pull her closer. What she didn't know was whether she wanted him to.
The uncertainty made her that much more off balance emotionally. She could have cried, but she stemmed the tide by biting the inside of her cheek. No. She'd never been the type to cry and neither him or vodka would make her start now.
Still...
"Why weren't you ever my best friend?" Sam asked plaintively, looking at his face beneath the yellow burn of the streetlight and flickering Budweiser sign. His skin stretched tautly over his bones, forehead and hair turning blue and red as the sign's lights flashed. His hands came up to cup her face. His touch felt so good and gentle and familiar against her skin that she couldn't push him away. Daniel looked into her eyes like he was trying to force his thoughts into her head and then very gently kissed her mouth. It wasn't deep, but it wasn't chaste. It left her mouth burning when he pulled away.
"You won't remember this in the morning," he whispered, eyelids drooping. "But that's why. There's always been something, even when I thought there was nothing. And it took seeing you as a stranger just to really see you." Quietly, quietly. "I see you, Sam."
She stopped him from speaking any more by jerking out of his grasp. She didn't know why she was so mad at him. She couldn't blame it wholly on his advances; the subtle ones or the blatant ones. He'd left them behind and now that he was back, nothing was the same. It should have been the same, dammit. He shouldn't toss little looks her way that said he wouldn't mind putting his tongue into her mouth or his body in her bed.
"Saying it makes it real," Sam warned, low. She crossed her arms over her chest. "That's not something we can have. You know better, Daniel. A-and I don't think I want it anyway."
Daniel flinched, aching a little too obviously for her comfort. He pulled himself together almost immediately. Sucking in a breath, he widened his stance like a gun slinger. "Liar," he accused, maddeningly sure.
A car drove by with its radio turned up loudly. Again, she didn't recognize the song. She wondered if everyone in the world was dancing but them. In that moment, staring at the shadows in his eyes, she wanted nothing more than to swing her hands into the air and dance herself. To ask him to join her. It wasn't fair, she thought bitterly, that she wasn't allowed.
No rule said she wasn't, Sam admitted to herself, uneasy to give even that much over to the idea of being with Daniel. But there were two unspoken codes she couldn't break. For the team. And maybe more importantly, at least to her heart, for all of their friendships. They were family. And dammit, that meant something. If he'd just stop looking at her like she was a cornered animal that he had to tame, maybe she'd tell him so.
"I'm not lying," she replied awkwardly. Stiltedly. "I'm trying to be honest. I don't want to hurt you."
Daniel let out a breath on a half-laugh. "Even if you don't remember?"
"I'll remember."
"Good."
He said nothing more. A cool breeze swept over her. Her nipples hardened and her stomach contracted as if he was inside her already. She hadn't realized until then how badly she was aching. It caught her off guard when she was open and looking too closely at his face, so the quick burn was a surprise. A terrible one. Daniel got that expression again, as if he was licking his chops on the inside.
"I'm taking you home," he told her firmly. She wouldn't argue. Something rang inside her; her internal organs clanged together like a Church Bell. Her fingertips throbbed. She hadn't known that they could.
"I'll probably ask you in," Sam responded in a dead whisper.
Daniel's eyes grew distant, looking at some unknown point over her shoulder. "I'll probably say yes, but only for a moment." A smile curved his mouth. "I'll tell you that I'd like some coffee."
"I'll probably seduce you," Sam said absently, as if it wasn't the big deal that it really was. She stared at her toes but didn't really see them.
"I'll probably give in," Daniel murmured. He took her hand into his, matching their fingertips together as if he had done it a million times before. Then his fingers slipped through hers and his strong grip pulled her closer to his body. She shut her eyes when he rested his forehead against hers. It was such an intimate gesture. So tender, and from the heart. It said things he shouldn't be saying.
"Tomorrow," -she swallowed- "I'll feel bad about this. Really, really bad."
"And I'll remember what an easy drunk I am," he chuckled, his mouth very close to her own. His warm breath washed over her lips, leaving behind a slight tremble in her throat.
"You're not drunk," Sam pointed out.
"No," he answered, and his nose bumped into hers.
"And you're not going to come inside."
He heaved a breath. Regret. "No."
"That's good." Sam nodded, putting a point on it. "Because I really shouldn't invite you."
"Jack is going to hate me," Daniel muttered in growing despair.
His words surprised her, though maybe they shouldn't have. She pulled back and opened her eyes. Meeting his, she felt drunk on a whole different level. "Why?" she couldn't help but ask.
'Be careful what you ask for,' her mother's voice whispered from beyond the grave.
"Because you're not my best friend, Sam." Daniel's voice was tense. He got that line between his eyebrows. It was the one he always had when he'd finished solving a puzzle and didn't like the solution he'd come to. "You can't be. If so, it'd be a terrible loss."
It was right of her to be afraid. "Don't "
"Because I'm in love with you."
Sam froze there on the sidewalk with someone walking out of the bar, sending the door flying open, hitting the air with the sound of country music and raucous laughter. Sam was in leather pants that she probably shouldn't be wearing if she wasn't asking for trouble, and she had an eyeful of this man that should be dead. Feeling something that shocked her to her bones.
She wondered...
Sam stared at him, stricken and amazed and terribly hopeful.
She just wondered.
the end
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