What Best Friends Are For, 1 and 2

by Read300300

~

This story is an abuser's dream and kinda in a class by itself. Told in first person, we have Jack and Daniel's points of view in two separate fics.

Summary: Jack rapes Daniel and Daniel tries to excuse his behavior. After all, he beats the shit out of him on a regular basis, so why not?

Story 1, Jack's POV:

At first you think you're reading some sappy, over-worded, heavily-flowered harlequin love letter. Then... it gets creepy, then scary, then you realize you're dealing with a sick mind.

I love you, Danny. Your beautiful eyes, roving about the room, taking in everything at a glance, pausing briefly at the smallest of objects… Your lips, smiling and gentle, as if made only for prayer and all things holy…

Jack describes how he loves everything, from the way Daniel writhes during sex to the way he screams, begs, and cries for release as Jack "batters" the most intimate parts of his body.

Not too bad. "Batters" could mean anything, right? Except it means exactly what it says because we suddenly get this:

Then, too, the way that you look as you rebel against me in that last second before I grasp the sword of control from your hands and plunge it through your soul… that look sets me ablaze almost as much as the quiet, gentle submission that follows without fail. It’s as though you realize in that moment each and every time how much I really control of your life.

Yes, once more, we have Jack O'Neill portrayed as a control freak. But he's also a stalker and a rapist:

The rapist part:

The last that I remember of those moments was the sound of your head as it hit the wall and the groan that accompanied my hand grasping your dick; everything after is just a blur of dueling hands and tongues, at least until I forced you to your knees.

That I do remember, and I’m sure that you do as well. The harsh panting… the look of insubordination in your eyes as you tried to rise, attempted to shove yourself upwards even as my hands held you down… those same eyes flashing in distress and horror as my hand connected with your face… the anxious, uneasy way that those white teeth sunk into your lip scant seconds before I grabbed your hair and forced your mouth onto me….

The stalker part:

Yes, I remember. And the next morning? I remember that too. You showed up at work seconds before the briefing, and you had gotten your hair cut. A few minutes before work was over for the day, I heard you telling Sam that I had finally given you a good enough reason to convince you to remove those long locks, but when she pressed you, you just pretended that you had to be at a friend’s house in a few minutes and had no time to talk.

The above is a perfect example of delusional thinking. Daniel has a date, and he's probably cut his hair for that date but used Jack as an excuse to cover his ass.

Wasn’t it fortunate that I happened to be in the vicinity so that I could confirm your story about this little party at ‘Adam’s'? Although… I’m not quite so sure that you remembered I was on the guest list. And wasn’t it even luckier that Sam walked out with us and when your car refused to work, I was there to offer you a ride to the little ‘get-together’ along with the promise of calling a tow truck for your car once we got there? Yes, luck was in your favor that night, just as it will be tonight, though I’m not so sure that the guards will ever catch the person that keeps stealing the distributor caps off of your car. But you can rest assured, Daniel… I’ll always be there to give you a ride home.

After all, what’s a best friend for?

Like I said. Stalker. Rapist. And he sets Daniel up to feed his sick need for violent desires.

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Story 2, Daniel's POV.

Daniel contradicts almost everything I've just said, but in a co-dependent, seriously messed-up way. He fears Jack, and has learned to play by Jack's rules, to do what he says, what he wants, and to never once realize that what he's doing is wrong.

He's always been harsh, too rough for me, too dark in his desires; our first time together, he took me too far, hurt me too much, and I didn't think I could ever forgive him. I mean, he hit me, for Christ's sake! He hurt me because I wouldn't do what he wanted, and I let him, not that there was anything I could have done to stop him, or so I thought. He touched me like no other man had, made me do things to him that I had never believed I could do. And I thought that I hated him for it.

But then Daniel starts to make excuses for his abuser, as every victim will recognize:

But that's not what I really remember of that night, not what upset me the most. I needed for him to hit me, to show me what I could do once I got over myself; that wasn't what hurt me the most. What pissed me off was that he left me when I was a sobbing wreck of crumbled emotions, curled into a ball in my hallway, unable to understand what had just happened. I mean, we had just been talking and heading to my living room to watch when he just snapped and jumped me... I'd never thought of him in that way, rarely considered what a relationship with another man could do for me, but once he began, I couldn't find the words to tell him to stop. By the time I was on my knees, I had nearly found my voice, but he took my control away from the situation and then left me before I could regain my sense of self.

Daniel's never considered the word "Stop." No. Not believable. In any universe. Sorry, ain't happening. But here, we're supposed to swallow this bullshit. Daniel's a virgin where men are concerned and he's just been raped. What Daniel is doing is excusing what happened. There was likely a little pleasure involved and biologically reacted to it in time-honored fashion: he got hard. But a rape is a rape is a rape. He didn't say "No." But he was thinking it, wasn't he? And so too scared to say it, he's now beating himself up about it, blaming Jack for the wrong thing. Daniel is acting like a severely depressed, dysfunctional woman, not a man. In the next paragraph, we have more of this hiding from reality as Daniel the victim goes so far as to turn the rape into a "Jack just fucked me and left" rationalization. Then...

The next day, I went to work, new hairstyle and all, in direct defiance of him;

"In direct defiance of him." So Daniel has no control over his hairstyle. This means that Daniel has deluded himself into thinking he ever had any power to begin with. Instead, Jack has systematically taken it away, and so much so that Daniel doesn't even see it anymore. Daniel expects that Jack will retaliate, and we know that Jack does by his own POV in the previous story.

Daniel says he's letting Jack think he's conceding victory by getting into Jack's car, and thinks he's really the one with the victory, that he's just earned favor in Jack's eyes. Somehow this defiant act with his hair is a victory. Sadly, the truth is that Daniel has just condoned every control freak behavior Jack has pulled.

Nothing apparently happens when Jack takes Daniel home because there's no mention of it. Or of this mysterious "Adam" that Jack mentioned in his story, so we're led to assume, long after the fact, that this was someone that Daniel had mentioned to Sam just to piss Jack off.

In the next paragraph, it's a few weeks later. There's no intermediate area where we learn that this "relationship" has been going on a while, but it's clear by the *end* of the story that it has. This is another *bad* mark the writer earns, though they keep piling up.

So, a few weeks later, and Daniel thinks of his "relationship" with Jack as a game to be played. Daniel has discovered that the type of *sex* Jack used on him is what he should expect to get, so he should act just as irrationally. He doesn't say this in the story, of course. He's playing a game, thinking it's fine that Jack pulls this abusive shit on him.

Daniel plays this game by bringing to work another distributor cap that will enable him to fix his car when Jack sabotages it again. After this happens, Daniel thinks it's funny when his car starts and "some some stupid bastard who shall remain nameless found that his own engine had been toyed with." What's this mean exactly? That Daniel fucked up Jack's car. Problem is, this isn't clear and having Daniel be coy about it is stupid storytelling--although maybe that's par for the course, given this entire story.

So, it's Daniel's turn to take Jack home. And they have "a long discussion" because they're in Daniel's territory now. Which means, they're in his car. Big deal.

After all, we were on my territory now and there wasn't much he could do to avoid the conversation, other than beat the shit out of me. Actually, that had seemed to be what he would have done at the time since any insolence or disobedience on my part always earned punishment, but for some reason, he acted almost... normal. The conflict of what appeared to be two distinctly different parts of him interested me, and I eventually told him how I felt about what he was doing, sans anything that would have shown him just how much I was manipulating him.

Aside from tense switching, which pisses me off, now we have more information on just how abusive Jack is. "Punishment" is not defined, but "beat the shit out of me" seems clear that's probably it. Daniel has come to accept this abuse as something he deserves instead of fearing for his life at every single moment of the day. Does this make him a coward? Maybe. A survivor, definitely, but he's completely fucked-up in his behavior. He acts as if this is no big deal, that it's normal.

Does this track with what we've come to know about Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1's series? No. He wouldn't tolerate this any more than he'd allow Jack to rape him.

Moving on the Weird Daniel, he goes on to say that Jack surprises him with this nugget of information:

he informed me that all I had ever had to say was 'Stop' or something similar, and he would have complied. In the times that we had been together, I hadn't considered that, hadn't realized that underneath the hard persona that he took around me when we were alone, my best friend Jack was still there. For a man with multiple PhDs, I can be pretty dense sometimes.

So, Daniel saying that he *did* think about saying "No!" is suddenly forgotten about? Am I, the reader, supposed to forget he just said that at the beginning of his story? Apparently. And just as apparently, I'm being fucked with right along with Daniel. As for Jack, that man--given his behavior to date--would not have complied if Daniel had told him to stop. "My best friend Jack was still there" indicates that Daniel has never consented to any of Jack's behavior, but has been too damn afraid to say "no." But again, he rationalizes because, after all, Jack *is* giving him attention. Not the attention he really wants, but the attention he thinks he "deserves."

In the end, we decided to keep up the game, if only because it was what we both needed. With Jack, I have found that what I thought were my boundaries before are merely pale shadows of the true ones, and I have also discovered that I need for someone to take me to the line of what I can handle.

The last part of that, "take me to the line of what I can handle" is a mis-used BDSM phrase and has no place here. This story is *not* BDSM. There is no honesty and trust, which is what BDSM practitioners live on. What's more is that the scene at work isn't BDSM, either. They are *not* acted out at work unless the entire work place is into the BDSM lifestyle.

The last bit caps Daniel's screwed-up dysfunction:

As far as Jack goes, there are times when the person that I have come to know as my best friend appears in our bedroom as well, times when he has taken me with such caring and gentleness that I thought I would scream from the love bubbling over. He seems to know what I need most of the time, whether it's the indifference or love on his part, whether I need to hate him or hold him... He knows that I'll always listen to him...

And I know that he'll listen to me as well, which is all I could have ever asked.

If Jack ever truly listened to Daniel and given him what he wanted, none of the above would have ever happened. And don't I wish that were true.