Title: Please Hang Up And Try Again (five phone calls Daniel Jackson never got)
Author's LJ/DWJ: abyssinia4077 / abyssinia
Categories: Angst, AU, Five Things, Drama, Team, Daniel Jackson
Warnings: language, off-screen violence
Author's Webpage: Masterlist of fanfiction
Link to story: Please Hang Up And Try Again

Why this should be read: This wonderful fic is a collection of brilliant and heart breaking au snippets, interspersed with voice mails left for Daniel while he was ascended. I'm not usually a fan of angst - no matter how brilliant it is, I usually can't bear to reread. (Because I'm a wimp.) Maybe it's the au elements that make this one different, but I have had no problem reading it many times.

Daniel got a lot of phone calls over the years. Here's five he didn't.

Hey, Daniel. I know you can't get this message and I feel silly leaving it but Colonel O'Neill refuses to talk about you and Teal'c is being Teal'c and General Hammond told me yesterday that I'd learn to live with not knowing where you are or…what. And I guess I just got too used to you being there for me to talk to. And…okay, maybe this wasn't my best idea.

**

Daniel was enjoying a rare, lazy Sunday. Descending had been easier the second time – he remembered everything and he'd fallen back to mortality in Jack's office rather than some planet SGC had never explored. It was easier, except when he had to write the report and when he knew Sam had read it and then they both knew how he had died this time.

But today it was bright and sunny and they were facing an SGC that almost didn't know what to do with itself with no more Goa'uld and no more Replicators and the thought that they might get to go back to doing actual exploration was enough for him to shake off the latest second chance life had granted. Plus he'd been to the grocery store and Sam was coming over for lunch to talk about Area 51 and Atlantis and everything that might be next.

He was halfway through the salad, pasta boiling on the stove, when Sam let herself in and, without words, grabbed the carrots by his elbow and dug his peeler from the drawer next to the sink. They were just sitting down when his phone rang. Expecting maybe Jack wanting to watch a game or Teal'c with some new movie he wanted to see, Daniel answered around his mouthful of spaghetti.

"I can't talk long," his own voice said from the earpiece. "Samantha would kill me if she knew I was making this call – something about risking the collapse of both realities. I had a hard enough time convincing her to come to this time at all."

"What is this?" Daniel asked into the phone. Covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he shared a glance with a bewildered-looking Sam and angled his head to send her to the other phone in his bedroom.

"You recognize my voice?"

"Well, yes, but…"

"I don't have time to go over the autobiography, but I promise you'll find it very familiar." Daniel recognized the exasperation his own voice reached whenever Jack was being a little too dense. "Don't go to Egypt."