Title: Waking Dreams
Author: Paradigm Shifter
Feedback: Yes please! :-)
Rating: R.
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When the airmen ushered Xander Harris into the briefing room three minutes later, he had eyes only for one person.
Not in that way: he didn't swing that way, and neither did the Colonel. But there was a connection neither of them could dismiss: a connection forged by common understanding, and common pain.
It was caused by one ghost from the past: Kowalsky. Jack missed his friend. Xander has his friend, embarrassing anecdotes and all, in his head – although Jack didn't want to admit that.
For Jack, Xander had the exact look in his eyes that Kowalsky had had when things went south and all they could rely on was their team and each other. For Xander, it was being able to put a human face to the memories that Kowalsky had forced him to relive every night. It was different from the glimpse they had had from opposite sides of the cell Xander had been put in. There it had been impersonal – separated by reinforced glass and the weight of animosity.
Now, it was painfully evident that neither of the men were really prepared for the emotions that they suddenly experienced.
Xander shook himself out of his shock, and ripped off a textbook salute to the General, which he returned with surprise warring confusion on his face. Jack noticed the slight angle of the hand: one of Kowalsky's trademarks: one that Jack had tried for years to rid him of, but had never succeeded. If this guy was a plant, he was a damned good one – he had the physical mannerisms down pat. Xander nodded to Carter and Daniel, before his eyes came to rest on Teal'c. Kowalsky's almost physical horror at seeing the Jaffa – even though he knew the Jaffa hadn't caused his death, not really – was a blow under which he almost staggered.
Teal'c's implacable gaze wavered, and he looked away for a second. Both men – via silent consensus – would not meet each others eyes again during the revelation this meeting was sure to be.
Hammond gestured at a chair the other end of the table from him. "Sit down, son. There's no point in you giving us a crick in the neck each." Xander smiled humourlessly at the small joke.
"Where shall I start?" he asked after sitting down.
Janet smiled at him; the emotional support she offered was plain. "Wherever you feel comfortable starting."
"I guess you know my name, right?" On the looks he received, he ducked his head. "Stupid question." He took a deep breath. "First, I don't like Alexander... makes me think of days I'd rather forget. And Mr. Harris is my father. I don't want to be associated with him if I can possibly avoid it." There was a barely concealed terror in his words: what concealed it was loathing.
"I'm from Sunnydale, California. I have Kowalsky in my head... in some ways; he's as much me as I am, now. But to understand how he arrived there, you need to know something more about where I used to live:"
He paused, and looked all of them, bar Teal'c, in the eyes. He had an audience that was riveted to the spot... or their chairs, whatever.
"It used to be called, 'La Boca del Inferno.' Do any of you know what that means, ladies and gentlemen?"
Daniel nodded. "Yes: the mouth of Hell."
Xander grinned. "Right on the money, Danny-boy." He grimaced. "Sorry, I didn't mean the familiarity... that was Kowalsky coming out again..."
Daniel shrugged. He didn't mind. If this boy did have... or was Kowalsky, they would all be seeing a lot more of him in the future.
"The mouth of Hell... correct. But what the settlers didn't know when they named it, was that they called it right. It is. Literally."
He expected denials, people calling him crazy... he hadn't expected the thoughtful nods of the people in the room. He wasn't prepared for it, and it freaked him out.
"Hey, I was expecting denial, you know? Maybe a bit of 'you're crazy!' You know; one of the classics! I'm disappointed."
Hammond spoke for himself, and the five other people in the room. "If you do have Major Kowalsky in your head, son, you realise that we're living and working in another thing that may not be considered 'possible'. So we're not denying it."
Xander tilted his head in silent salute of the reminder that the SGC faced things just as hidden – and just as dangerous – as the vampires and demons he had faced nightly. "Y'know, I never thought of it like that. I guess you're right. Sir. I accepted the SGC when Kowalsky explained it to me without so much as a denial or... yeah. But I never think anyone will believe in demons. I guess it's a remnant of the blindness in my hometown: people going missing – and worse – all things getting attributed to 'gangs on PCP'..."
Hammond smiled slightly but it didn't reach his eyes at all. Xander realised he was torn between having him 'vanish' as a security risk, or genuinely finding out what had happened and why he was there. Or what help he could be.
"The Hellmouth is a gateway to Hell... literally. I don't think there isn't one week that goes by without someone wanting to end the world by opening the damned thing..."
He didn't notice the horrified looks that SG-1 shot him at his flippancy.
"...I don't want to get my friends in trouble with this... I mean, we did kinda have to blow up the school... it was the only way to stop the Mayor, after all."
Blank looks met his worried gaze, and he blushed. "Oh, sorry. Guess I'd better start from the beginning, eh?"
"Good place to make a start, son." Hammond shot a glance at Jack, who had gone from pale when Harris walked in to a strange purple colour as he forgot to breathe. "Colonel?"
Jack jerked out of whatever daze he had been in, and shook his head to clear it. "Sorry sir, I just... uh." He scowled at his lack of ability to communicate acceptably. "Never mind."
Xander started at the beginning, and his mind played twin images as he relived his past. The past of himself as one image, and Kowalsky's – a far longer history playing more faintly underneath it. "I was born and raised in Sunnydale, California. When I was five, just like everyone else, I started school. I met two people that for the next ten years would be the closest friends I ever had. Until... she arrived..."
"Who?" Janet asked gently.
"Buffy Summers. The stereotypical cheerleader type... only... she had a destiny. She was the Slayer, whether she wanted to be or not, she was 'it'."
"What's a Slayer?" Sam asked with a frown.
"Oh. Sorry." Xander blushed. "Giles, you should have been here for this... I'll tell it the way he did; when we found out... when I found out that the 'new girl' was something more than 'just a girl'."
He sighed. "In every generation, there is a Chosen One. The 'One Girl' in all the world who is destined to beat back the forces of darkness: the demons, the vampires, the bogey-man in the closet..."
Jack snorted.
"Vampires are real, and are drawn to the Hellmouth. If you don't believe me, then go visit for yourself. Take a moonlit stroll. If you come back, then tell me I was wrong!" Xander's carefully enunciated verbal savaging made Jack swallow. It reminded him all too well of Kowalsky when he knew he was right, and that someone who should believe him, didn't. Still, it got Kowalsky in a lot of trouble sometimes.
"Calm down, son." General Hammond waved back the airman who had been approaching Xander from behind, his pistol drawn.
Daniel nodded, and put a hand on Jack's arm. "You know, Jack, it isn't entirely impossible... I mean, if we though the Goa'uld are Gods, and the Norse gods are the Asguard... is it so impossible that aliens have been mistaken as demons?"
Jack nodded grudgingly. "OK, so Danny has a point. But I still don't see how that ends up with you here!" He glowered accusingly at Xander.
"To understand that, I'm going to fast-forward a bit through time... to Halloween, 1997. A Chaos worshipping mage decided to get revenge on an old friend... we still haven't worked out why... or rather, Giles won't spill, but we got turned into our costumes..."
"Still not getting it," Jack muttered moodily.
"I went as a soldier. But the fatigues I got second-hand were from the Air Force." He noticed their horrified looks. "What?" he whined, "I had ten bucks to make an entire costume! With my father drinking any money I got almost as soon as I had it in my hand, I never had much of anything. Cut me some slack, already!"
Daniel snickered. "It's not that, they're horrified about, uh... Alex... it's the fact that you went as a soldier in Air Force fatigues."
Xander blinked, not fully understanding. Then comprehension dawned. "Oh. Right... OK." He snickered too. "It is kinda funny, when you look at it like that..."
He continued, "But anyway, I didn't just get the soldier deal... I got a specific person. The person those fatigues had belonged to. An Air Force Captain, by the name of Kowalsky. The guy you know. The guy who died because a slug decided to chow on his brain." Xander looked and sounded angry as he said that, then visibly forced himself to calm down. "Who, by the fact that he was dead, gave me everything rather than just the memories up to that point. So Kowalsky was a Major, rather than just the captain he had been when wearing those fatigues. I think Giles hypothesised once that we would gain the memories of whoever the clothes had been up to the point the clothes were discarded. If the wearer had been the Devil himself when he threw the clothes, then that is what you would become: whether he later reformed or not... but that is something of an academic consideration, and I'm not too good at them." He gave a self-deprecating smile, "once they no longer had a connection to that person, they stopped being that person."
Jack raised his hand, and butted in. "Anyone else confused?" This drew a grin from Daniel, and a 'humour the Colonel' look from Carter.
"OK, so I'm not too good at the explaining thing. I guess that's something I'll always be pretty poor at. Whatever." Xander pulled a face as he struggled with explaining something which, to him, was as normal as breathing. To everyone else, it would be a nightmare.
"Because Kowalsky was dead, he didn't leave when the spell ended. He didn't leave, because his mind, lacking a physical body, had nowhere to go back to. So rather than get lost in the ether, he stayed. I still have him up here, sort of."
"Do you or don't you?" Jack interrupted again. He was getting sick of the half-truths and evasive answers this kid was giving them. For someone 'explaining everything', he was doing a bang up job of confusing the hell out of everyone in the room.
"I said I do, and I do, Jack," Xander shot back, "but it's beyond merely having two minds... and don't worry, it's not a form of schizophrenia or anything. I worried about that at first, but... anyway, not important now. Both Kowalsky and I have come to that much of a conclusion. I became Kowalsky that night, and Kowalsky became me. If he had still been breathin', I bet you would have had Kowalsky suddenly acting like a teenager in the middle of you..."
Xander took a deep breath, preparing for what he knew was still painful. "We... merged. I have his memories... most of them, anyway. I can't remember stuff he can't, so a lot of the 'little' things are gone – I can't, for example, tell you what he had from breakfast, lunch and dinner two months before he joined the SGC. But I can tell you things he considered important, and tried to remember: that is how I ended up here. Once the possession was gone, and the 'military' aspect retreated a bit, I had a wonderful couple of weeks remembering little other than that damned snake taking me... uh, him over..."
Xander was physically shaking as he spoke now, his voice terrified, and his eyes leaking even as he blinked the tears away. "It was... it was. It was goddamned horrible. I've never felt anything like it. If Deadboy felt like that in Hell, then he got what he deserved..."
SG-1 frowned at that, but no one spoke, not daring to break the spell of the scene in front of them.
"I wasn't me any more. Instead of Kowalsky, who to be honest was kinda nice about his situation in my head, the Goa'uld railed against it. I found myself doing things I would never do... all unable to control it. Kowalsky was no help, not really. He remembered the pain too much to do anything other than scream. It turned out it was nothing more than a memory of the pain he had been through, but it was enough. I didn't have another rider in my head; I just had a sort of phantom reminder of what happened to Kowalsky. Knowing that the Goa'uld killed twice... and nearly killed Sam over there..."
Xander looked at her guiltily, and she saw that whoever was in there was deeply sorry about something he had not done. She shook her head slowly, before looking away. "I guess I was lucky that in the grip of Kowalsky's physical memories I didn't kill anyone."
"When Kowalsky stopped remembering those times, those few hours, that stopped. He'd gone back to those times since then – at my request, even – but that's never come back. Kowalsky helped me. He helped me stay alive; he helped me gain some confidence in myself. He's dead; I've never met him, and I still owe him a debt so large I will never be able to repay it."
Xander's arms were wrapped around himself as he rocked in the chair; watching him fall apart at the reliving of the terrors two men had been through was like watching a train wreck: you could see what was going to happen, you knew you should look away; but for some unknown reason, you just couldn't.
Xander suddenly bolted out of the chair, and was through the door before his guard could so much as blink. The response was immediate: Janet practically flew through the door after him, Sam following without giving a reason, and Hammond was bellowing into the PA that he should be stopped, but must remain unharmed.
Jack sat at his place, Daniel at his side and Teal'c sitting opposite.
"Well." He said.
That was all he could say.
Neither Teal'c nor Daniel could disagree with him, either.
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I'd like to thank all my reviewers for both this story and Wake As Me. I know this didn't exactly answer all the questions, but that's kinda the idea. Further revelations and questions will appear throughout the length of this fic, and Jack and Xander/Kowalsky are soon going to have sparks flying about the 'truth'...