Chapter 44

Morning came and the smell of food was the first thing Dawn's mind registered. She saw Anakin making breakfast using some real MREs. Food they had paid for and gotten from the Galaxy Rangers. Musing a bit she giggled.

"What's so funny?" Anakin asked with a tired smile. He had stayed up the whole night, using only Jedi meditation for a bit of rest. He wasn't really tired, but he was so bored. A human Jedi could, with only a few hours' worth of meditation, stay awake for about a week without losing any of their mental or physical capacity, but that doesn't mean that they should or that it's healthy to do in the long run.

Dawn shrugged. "I remembered a children's TV series I saw when I was child. A group of teens that got superpowers from an alien and some power armor. White ranger, pink ranger, black ranger and …" she was interrupted by Anakin who said, "Thank you, I know exactly what you mean. Jack O'Neill had lots of fun forcing us to see that TV show." He grinned. "I think Danni liked the idea of being the pink ranger."

Dawn wondered why she didn't remember that. Oh yeah, Xander had her doing special training then. In reality, she had been too upset after the death of a whole crew on a Dagger corvette that she had accidently caused. Dawn had more or less learned the lesson to be careful with her powers and then forgotten what had really happened.

"I'll kill anybody who calls me the black ranger or Darth Vader junior," Anakin said with a smile. Even if his armor had been inspired by Darth Vader's, his helmet was more like the Mandalorian version though, except the viewer was bigger than what they used.

"If anybody has the right to call themselves a Power Ranger, it should be me," Lexa said, her voice was dry and broken. Her throat hurt like she had been screaming too much and her memory was fuzzy and bizarre. She had flashes of fighting enemies she knew were either dead or in a different dimension. Lazarus Slade was on Earth and a captive of the military.

She'd even talked to the guys in charge of questioning him, a chief of the military security, and donated some technology from her home world just to make sure he would not end up in a jail cell for life. Once they had questioned him, he would be executed, regardless of promises other people would make to him.

She had a feeling that the guy agreed with her thinking that Lazarus was too dangerous to be left alive and yet she had a fuzzy memory about killing him and other monsters the day before. "What happened yesterday?" she asked.

Dawn shrugged. "Nothing much, you got hurt a bit and we were worried, but it was nothing serious," she said, smiling a bit.

"Dawn, go for a scout outside. We might need to move Lexa fast," Anakin said. Dawn wondered what the secret was, but she nodded. "Well, if you don't want me to know something, just say so," she huffed and walked out to scout.

Anakin snorted, there was no easy way to say this. "Yesterday you had enough. The Jaffa attacked and you went berserker and you attacked the Jaffa back." Seeing her fear, he calmed her. "No, you didn't attack me or Dawn. In fact you seemed to recognize us even in the state you were in and stopped any attack coming our way."

Lexa nodded "I. went berserk?" she asked fearfully. Anakin sat down beside her and hugged her. "Alexandra, you have..." She glared at him for using her full name, but he just continued. "Slade tortured you. What you suffered was more than enough to break a fully trained adult warrior. You didn't break. Yesterday, you slipped a little and got angry."

Lexa swallowed. "I always try to control my emotions, I have to. Part of my powers can be activated by emotions. If I'm angry, things can start to fly around, out of control. Mom and dad trained me to never lose control. I failed them."

"Hey, you did not fail them. You got angry, hell you got furious, but you protected Dawn and me. Even in the middle of the rage you did not hurt us. You even let me come right up and grab you. Let Dawn help you by parrying attacking Jaffa. There was still enough control left for that, and do you really think that your mom and dad are going to be angry? Hell, they love you, no question asked, you know that. Don't you?"

Lexa swallowed. "Yes, I know that. I just don't want to disappoint them." Since she was young and it was proven that she was a telekinetic, one of the more dangerous PSI powers, they had instilled the importance of controlling her powers and not letting the power control her in her mind.

Once you mastered the ability, it could become emotion controlled during times of great stress, another reason why not even other PSIs liked Pyrokinetics.

"I understand Lexa. I talked to them about PSI," Anakin said. "You've just had a hard time and really need to talk to somebody about it," he said as the girl started to cry.

Dawn entered the cave and looked confusedly at Lexa crying. "What? It's not that bad Lexa," she said, looking at the armor. "We can fix it. We have the tech in the ship," she said, hugging her from the other side. "It's a bit foolish of you, crying so much over a broken armor." She gave a sunny, innocent smile to them both.

Somehow that made Lexa smile. "Yes of course Dawn," she said giggling. "Dawn, never change. Never." For some reason Dawn's stupid idea that it was the broken armor that she was crying over helped more than Anakin's words of compassion and logic. Perhaps it was the heart filled with innocence or just her let's be happy aura that she seemed to have. Whatever it was, it worked.

As Dawn moved away to check out something else outside, Lexa turned to Anakin and asked in surprise, "She's forgotten it already?"

Anakin nodded. "It took an hour and the whole memory started to go fussy on her. Seems your rage was so scary and…," he blushed and then continued, "Not to me, but Dawn was shocked and scared over you. She stayed by your side and watched the damn recording again and again, because she didn't want to forget, because she needed to understand. I had to use the force to make her sleep."

Lexa swallowed. "It was bad, right?" she asked, staring at him. He nodded slowly. "Yes, it was bad. Still, you seemed to know that we are friends, even as bad as it was."

She nodded, that was something at least. "Normally it takes days or weeks before a bad memory starts to vanish like that for Dawn and now this one went away so fast, " she said, afraid that Dawn might be hurt.

Anakin snorted. "She loves you, Lexa, and me. The idea that one of us gets hurt or is hurt is too much for her. Remember how her disorder works. It will not allow her to be to depressed or sad before it starts to repress such traumatic memories. Some, even a great dead, of the lesson she learned is still there, even if she doesn't remember what has happened," he said.

They nodded. Dawn seemed to be able to learn a lesson from a mistake, even if she often forgot what the mistake was or the gruesome details.

Lexa smiled a bit. "You fixed my armor," she smiled, seeing that he had had to use armor patches from both his and Dawn's armor, making her pale red armored body glove full of black and gold patches. He shrugged. "It worked at least."

She had to agree with that.

Outside, Dawn looked around. She had the strange feeling that Lexa needed unusual amounts of love and support right now. Why? She had no idea, nothing special had happened or had it? She almost started the playback on her recording, but no, if something did happen that was so bad that she repressed it already, then perhaps it was for the best. After all, she had no wish to see any of them get tortured, perhaps raped or whatever awful thing that had happen the day before. No, this time ignorance is bliss.

Dawn nodded to herself as she returned to the cave. It was a wonderful day outside and she was sure they would find SG-12 and help them. She had a good feeling about that.

+K+

Later in the morning

Anakin took the lead as the gang backtracked to their latest position.

He was careful and took a way around the labyrinth canyon and the field of dead Jaffa, all the while keeping an eye out on the radio scanner and using the force to sense danger and presences of other sentient lifeforms. "Dawn, why do you have a Goa'uld in your backpack?" he asked in astonishment.

"It's my new pet," she answered with a smile.

Anakin weighted his options. If he told her to remove it or something, she would get all huffy about it. "Cool, but if Xander lets you keep it, that would be a miracle. The chances for that aren't that great, so why bother? I'm sure we could find you some other cool pet that he'd be more likely to let you actually keep." 'One that doesn't have the ability to take over the mind and body of normal humans,' he continued in his mind.

"Hmm… I don't know, it's awfully cute," Dawn said. "And evil, don't forget that," Lexa added.

Sighing, she pulled the worm out of the jar. "Bye, bye Mr. Wormy," Dawn said as she let the worm fall to the sand to live or die on its own.

Anakin smiled under his helmet and hugged her. "You did the right thing, I think." "Yeah. Do you think I could get a lion or a tiger as a pet?" she asked, giggling. Lexa smiled, that would be cool. "The Enterprise is a small ship. Why not try for a house cat?" she said instead.

Dawn's eyes lighted up. "That's a brilliant idea and we could get an aquarium with goldfishes and crabs and other fun fish and a toy model of a crashed Enterprise on the bottom for the fish to play in," she said excitedly. She'd always liked aquariums.

Anakin decided not to ask why a crashed model of the Enterprise was needed. He knew his head would hurt from the answer. He kind of wondered which Enterprise she meant though, Xander's or the Star Trek Enterprise.

Lexa nodded. "Yes, that is so a cool idea. Wonder what kind of fish they have and if there are aquarium fishes that you can eat."

They all looked at her and she shrugged. "I like fresh fish. So what? Fish farming, aquaculture is like one of the most popular hobbies in my world." She defended herself. "Delicious catfish and carps, kingfish, even salmon were grown in aquariums and later, when they got large enough, they were eaten. Of course many hobbyists just had the fish because they liked having fish indoors.

"Eating aquarium fish?" Dawn said in shocked terror. Anakin licked his lips. "Now that sounds like a good idea. Fresh fish…" He just had to talk to Xander about that.

Dawn was trapped between being fascinatedly interested by the idea of fresh fish to eat and absolute terror over the thought of eating her pets. Then it struck her. "Do you think we could find pygmy pigs or pygmy cows?" Seeing them look at her she explained, "I like ham and love a good steak."

The gang was silent as they pondered the idea.

"Pygmy cows... do they even exist?" Lexa asked. Anakin shrugged. "Somewhere… It would be fitting if we got micro cows. After all, you girls did dress me up like a cowboy," he finished jokingly.

Giggling a bit they followed him as he continued forward in silence. They were all getting better, even Lexa.

Hours later Anakin crunched down and said, "Over that hill, I can sense them."

Lexa nodded. "So how do we do this? I suggest Dawn and I sneak up on the left side. We use a holo projector here on the hill, while you come from the right. Then we can surprise them and disarm them with minimum loss of life."

Anakin nodded. "That would be a good idea. Wait, where's Dawn?" he asked.

Meanwhile, Dawn had removed her helmet and was holding up a white flag. "Hi guys, can we talk?" Having so many guns, energy weapons and grenades aimed at her did make her nervous, but she counted on the ingrained instinct to never shoot a person with a white flag to work and it did.

Behind her, Lexa and Anakin looked in shock as SG-12 let Dawn come and talk to them. Slowly, they escorted her into their cave hideout.

"Now I'm worried," Anakin said. Lexa nodded. "Yeah, those poor guys."

The two grinned, keeping an eye out at the cave.

+K+

Twenty minutes later

Dawn and one member of SG-12 came back and invited them in for a talk.

They were nervous and they still missed one member of the team. They had attacked him and sent him away, because they suddenly didn't trust him anymore.

Dawn was joking, even making the nervous team relax. As Anakin came in he did his best to calm them using the force, while he explained what had happen and what the side effects were.

Slowly they relaxed more and more. Just the fact that Anakin, Dawn and Lexa were kids helped a lot. The fact that they saw Lexa go 'Conan the barbarian' on the Jaffa didn't do any harm either.

Much later, with a somewhat calmer team, they set off to the Star Gate. Anakin assured them that it would still be there. Now they just had to hunt down the last member of the team. Luckily, it took only a surprisingly short time.

The last member was surprisingly healthy mentally, just a bit jumpy, and had kept an eye out on what his team was doing. He knew they had gone nutty.