A/N: Okay this was going to be the end but I discovered that the final scene I had planned would actually work better as an epilogue so that's probably going to be up tomorrow. Also I know I could have written more concerning certain characters and even certain plot points but this is how I envisioned the story and it is primarily a Connor and Dawn story. Anyway, read and hopefully enjoy and I swear that there really is only one bit left. Damn, and it was a nice round number.

At the age of seven Jake realised that memory was a fickle thing.

At the age of seven Connor realised that he could kill a beast with his bare hands.

At the age of thirteen Jake got lost in the woods on vacation.

At the age of thirteen Connor got lost whilst tracking a demon though the marshes.

At the age of eighteen Jake finished high school.

At the age of eighteen Connor finished wiring himself to a incendiary device.

At the age of twenty-one Connor felt a million memories contradict his own.

At the age of twenty-one Jake could do nothing but scream.

The flash of bright light emanating from the medallion froze everyone in place for a second. As it cleared to reveal shards of metal, dotted with blood, littering the floor, Dawn felt her heart breaking as clearly as the pendant that had rested in Jake's hands.

He was leaning against the filing cabinets, his arms wrapped around his stomach, bent over as though he was in pain. His tortured gasps the only sounds in the still room. Dawn rose slowly from the floor, her face filled with worry and perhaps a touch of fear. "Jake?" she asked quietly, tears running down her face.

Jake, no Connor, or Steven. God! The names ran through his mind like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that couldn't find anywhere to fit. He thought of Jessica and then of Fred. And he couldn't work out which one he knew. He thought of Angel and Holtz and Michael. And he wasn't sure who took him fishing. He thought of Dawn and Cordelia. And he didn't know who he loved. He thought of Chris and Gunn. And he wondered if he wanted one of them dead.

He heard Dawn and wasn't sure if Jake heard or Connor heard or if there were a thousand different people in his mind that wanted to answer and kill her all in the same degree.

He raised his eyes to stare at the people around him and he didn't know who was in control of his body. Was it Jake who would use it's mind to write perfect essays? Or was it Connor who would use his legs to leap great distances? The tormented eyes of the boy, though he supposed all of the people who were him were men now, swept over the anguished faces of the other inhabitants of the room.

He stopped on Angel, knowing him and hating him and loving him and barely knowing his name. He rested his eyes on Dawn and Cordelia and felt his heart along with the rest of him try to split in two. He saw Wesley and felt anger and joy for what he had done and indifference as he had never even seen him before.

"I know you." His voice was no longer his. But whose 'his' he was unsure. It lacked the inflections and inherent cheerfulness of Jake's but also missed the darkness and anger that lay beneath the surface of Connor's. It was a strange mix of the two. A hybrid. In the same style of the body they now shared. "I know you and I don't know you and I hate you and I love you and I don't care about you." The voice stopped, it's distressed timbre stilling in the room as the others stared at him, their faces compassionate, their actions unhelpful. "I don't know!"

The final line came as a wail, almost inhuman in it's expression of pure suffering.

It was as the anguished cry made all those around him, even the unflappable Files and Records secretary, wince in pain and sympathy that the boy's body, whoever was controlling it, fled from the room.

*

"Oh my God." Cordy whispered, the first sound in the room since Connor's pain-filled scream.

"Bit of an understatement." Dawn replied scathingly, running her hand through long brown hair, an unconscious imitation of one of Jake's habits. She looked at her three older friends and couldn't help the resentment that built up inside her like a pile of burning coals. "You knew didn't you?" she spat out accusingly, "You knew who he was and you didn't tell me?"

Angel closed his eyes for a brief second. He opened them again and apparently his wish that everything had changed hadn't come true because he muttered a swear word and bolted for the door, evidently in pursuit of his son. Cordelia uttered a strangled cry and tried to follow him, Wesley's arm restraining her.

It was Wesley who finally answered Dawn after glancing away from Cordy and seeing the seething resentment on the young girl's face. "Yes we knew." Dawn rounded angrily on him and he held up a placating hand. "And what would you have done Dawn if you'd known? Told him?" He found himself spitting the words out just as Dawn had done. He sighed tiredly and released his grip on Cordelia whose attention was still fixed on the door. "I'm going to ring some people. See if we can find him. Maybe fill Fred and Gunn in."

Dawn collapsed onto the cold floor, relishing the slight warmth that Jake had left. She distractedly picked up her boyfriend's Wolfram and Hart file. She stared at the picture of him as a baby. He's only been alive a few years, she thought, at least in this dimension. Just like me. Dawn smiled wryly. Trust that to be a thing they had in common. She began to read about the life of Connor Angel, not noticing Cordelia sliding down opposite to her.

The secretary of Files and Records had just starting running a search for some obscure information on a Siberian bounty hunter who was causing some trouble in Miami when the scandalised tones of a young college girl echoed through the room. "You slept with him!"

*

Passer-bys stared at the boy as he sat on the pavement, knees cradling his head, practically rocking backwards and forwards. Some tutted sympathetically and threw him some loose change while others just shook their heads in disgust and muttered things about degenerate youth.

Jake, or Connor, or whoever, heard none of this. He barely flinched when a coin thrown benevolently hit him hard in the leg. His mind was spinning faster than his body could take. He'd tried running. He'd ran as fast as he possibly could in the hope that he could outrun the pain. But it hadn't worked, a thousand different recollections crowded his head, screaming for his attention until he felt like the physical act of movement required too much thought and he'd collapsed upon the floor, crawling within himself.

He didn't know how long he'd sat there. Too many new memories were made by opening his eyes. The birth of a new day, or the death of an old one all required space in his already too jumbled mind. He didn't dare eat in case the taste of some food was new and needed to be recorded in his thoughts. So he just sat there, letting the memories spin around each other, letting them form some semblance of order in his disordered mind.

Jake and Connor first became aware of the coldness of the concrete he was sat on. Memories had slotted into place and he felt as though his mind was watching two separate television screens playing very different shows. He'd managed to stand and walk towards a convenience store, his hand reaching for the junk food that occupied a shelf. Two separate memories bombarded him. Eating a Twinkie stolen from a vending machine in a grotty motel room and eating a Twinkie handed to him by a caring mother whilst perched on an overstuffed sofa.

The boy nearly dropped the food in his disorientation. He still couldn't work out which was real. The rational part of him, Jake, told him that Connor was real but then that same part of him cried with that knowledge. He looked around him and a dozen new stimuli called for his attention. The sound of the cashier asking if he was okay, the baby screaming in the next aisle, the strange mixture of blue and green that was the colour of the Corvette in the parking lot.

He backed away from all this, clamping his hands over his ears. Neither Connor or Jake knew who they really were but they both knew that they needed the quiet.

*

Dawn hammered on the dorm room door, her hand a balled up fist. She was just contemplating screaming for someone to let her in when the door flew open to reveal an ashen-faced Chris.

"Dawn." his voice was croaky as though he'd been yelling and he looked as bad as Dawn felt.

"Where's Jake?" she asked hurriedly, barging past him into the room. She stopped suddenly, a heavy weight falling on her chest. Jake's side of the room had always been neat but now it was unnaturally so. No books were out of order, no clothes were flung on the bed. Because there were no books, there were no clothes, there was nothing on Jake's side of the room. She span to face Chris who's hadn't moved from his position in the doorway. "Where is he?" All the anger was gone from her voice, leaving her sounding like a weak child.

Chris wouldn't meet her eyes, he just stared at the frayed carpet. "He's gone, Dawn." he looked up at her then, his eyes taking on an accusatory gleam. "Came barging in saying he needed the quiet and needed to get away and a whole load of other crazy babble and could I call his parents for him?" Chris' arms were waving frantically at her now, getting angrier by the second. "What the hell happened to him, Dawn!" he yelled the last bit, coming forward to grab her by the shoulders.

Dawn stared up at him, her shoulders beginning to shake in his grasp as tears started to roll down her face. "He's gone?" she whispered, the pathetic sound making the anger drain from Chris. He shifted his arms as she began to sob and embraced her, resting his chin on the crown of her head as, only hours before, Jake himself had done.

*

At first glance there was nothing strange about the boy who stepped off the bus in the small rural town, sports bag flung over his shoulder, duffel bag in one hand and what appeared to be a chemistry book in the other. Of course, in the small town there wasn't really anyone about to see that there was nothing strange about the boy but the clerk at the old hotel that he wandered into noticed that there was something odd about the boy's eyes. He didn't look around enough, his eyes always fixed on a point that to the elderly clerk looked completely boring. He wouldn't even look at the man who was handing him the key to his room, which in the clerk's opinion was terribly rude.

In fact the only time that this strange boy even talked was to ask to be left alone.

They probably thought I was strange, thought Jake. Connor didn't seem particularly perturbed by the idea. He was getting used to it, though it would certainly take a lot of time for the two sets of memories to be fully understand and the emotions ravelled among them finally unravelled, but he would do it. He thought of Jake's family and wondered if they would still know him and resolved one day to find out. And he thought of Angel and Jake's influence seemed to encourage Connor to find out more about him. And he thought of Dawn and Cordelia and thought that he was going to have to find out which one he, this fusion of Jake and Connor, loved. And he realised that he was going to have to decide what the hell he was going to call himself.

But right now all he wanted was to have some joint knowledge that didn't revolve around the number of the Greyhound bus he'd taken here.

With a determined shrug he dragged the heavy chemistry book onto his lap and began to learn the periodic table.