Chapter 11: Debriefings

Dawn let herself be quickly hustled off to the infirmary, where she was put through a battery of tests just as intense as her first physical examination. She didn't expect that they would find anything that they hadn't found the first time that they had examined her, other than her rather obvious reduction in physical age. Buffy and Willow hovered around her throughout the entire process, not letting her be left alone with any of the SGC personnel. The SGC people didn't leave her alone with Buffy or Willow either until after the examination was done.

She was finally left alone with Buffy and Willow in the medical centre when Dr. Ramsey left to look over all the test results. Buffy looked toward a security camera that was pointing their way. "Can we talk?" she asked.

"The camera is only transmitting video," said Willow. "Looks like they're giving us some privacy. Look away from it if you want to be sure they aren't reading your lips."

"So, what happened?" asked Buffy.

"When I entered the Stargate, the spell binding the Key to my body was released," said Dawn. "I was freed, but I got stuck in the gate network instead. Now I'm back." She looked down at herself in the hospital gown that she'd been given to replace Colonel Carter's shirt. "Even if I am a kid again."

"So, why are you a kid again?" asked Buffy.

Dawn wasn't really sure of that herself. "I think it's because I didn't want to tweak the spell that made me, too much," said Dawn. "I just made sure that this time it wouldn't suppress all my memories, or mess with anyone else's, and a couple of other things. I forgot that the spell made a fourteen year old girl."

"You remember what happened?" asked Willow.

"I remember everything!" said Dawn. "I remember being the Key! It's incredible! I'm older than we ever imagined. The Monks of Dagon didn't create me, they only imprisoned me! I'm aware of so much more now!"

Buffy seemed to shrink into herself. "So, you aren't my sister anymore."

"Oh, Buffy, don't be a dope! Of course I'm your sister!" said Dawn. "Okay…maybe I'm adopted, but I still love you, and I know you love me. I still remember everything you've done for me. I still remember Mom."

"Um…about the Key," said Willow. "We kinda had to tell Jack, and a few of the others about that."

Dawn wasn't surprised by that. She'd known that Buffy and Willow would have had to tell the SGC something, to get themselves inside so quickly. "How many others?"

"Seven," said Buffy. "Carter, Daniel, Teal'c, Ry'ac, Phillips, Ramsey and Davis."

"That's not too bad," said Dawn. "I think we can trust them." She wasn't so sure about Phillips. He'd sometimes gave her the impression that he knew more about her than he let on to anyone else.

"They all promised not to tell anyone else," said Willow, "and their auras said that they were telling the truth, at the time, but I'm not sure that will hold, if something comes up that makes them think that the Key will be useful to them. I don't know them well enough."

"What about Lieutenant Phillips?" asked Dawn. "I sometimes thought that he knew something about me, even before this happened."

"He used to work for Riley," said Buffy. "I met him once a few years ago. I get the impression that he was put here to watch out for anything that falls under Riley's jurisdiction, without telling Jack about it. Jack didn't look too happy to find out about it."

Buffy glanced back toward the camera, making sure she knew where it was before she looked back toward Dawn. "Willow's got some Lethe's Bramble," she said quietly. "We can make them all forget, if we have to." She didn't sound at all happy about it.

Dawn looked at Willow. She knew what doing that spell could cost her. She shook her head. "I trust them," she said.

"Are you sure?" asked Buffy.

"I'm sure," said Dawn. "They're good people Buffy. What they do here…they remind me of the old Scooby Gang." She grinned. "And besides, forcing me to do anything for them won't be nearly as easy as it was for the Order of Dagon to imprison me. I know what to watch out for now."

"I'm more concerned with them wanting to lock you up in a tiny room, and run experiments on you," said Buffy.

"And the people here are only a small part of the military, and the government," said Willow. "What happens if they decide to replace General O'Neill with someone who doesn't have his scruples?"

"Willow, you've felt the Key before, haven't you?" asked Dawn.

"Yeah, a couple of times." Willow looked at Dawn curiously, wondering what she was getting at. Dawn looked back at her. She let some of the power of the Key leak out of her.

"Whoa!" Willow suddenly took a couple of steps back. "That was— That was— Whoa!"

"What?" asked Buffy.

"I let her feel a little of my power," said Dawn.

"That was just a little?" asked Willow.

"Yeah. I am—the Key is—magic. Pure, unadulterated, magic."

"What's that mean?" asked Buffy.

"Once, back in Sunnydale…" Dawn stopped. She wasn't sure if she wanted to remind Willow about that.

"What?" asked Buffy.

"It was right after Tara died, when I found Willow at Rack's," said Dawn reluctantly. "She told me then that she was the magic, and threatened to turn me back into a ball of green energy."

Buffy looked sidelong at Willow, to see how she was reacting to this. The last few years, mentioning Tara usually got a sad smile from her, but they still tended to avoid talking about the events immediately following her death.

"That power in Dawn," said Willow quietly. "It could have so smacked me down, if I'd gone through with it."

Dawn felt uncomfortable as she entered the conference room. She'd been allowed to change into her own clothes, but they were a few sizes too big for her now. She had her belt drawn in a couple of extra notches to keep her pants from falling down, and their cuffs were rolled up to keep them from getting caught under her heels. Her shoes felt like they would fall off if she wasn't careful about how she walked in them. Buffy and Willow followed her through the door.

General O'Neill was seated in his usual place at the head of the table. Colonel Carter, Dr. Jackson, Teal'c, and Dr. Ramsey were seated along one side of it.

Jack waved a hand at the row of empty chairs along the other side of the table. "Please, everyone, have a seat."

"Thank you, Sir." Dawn sat in a chair in the centre, with Buffy and Willow flanking her.

"Well, now that the gang's all here," said Jack, "let's get one thing out of the way, right away." He turned to Dr. Ramsey. "Talk to me Doc. Is this Dr. Summers?"

"As far as we can tell, except for some tiny variations, her DNA is identical to Dr. Summers' DNA," said Dr. Ramsey. "It's her."

"That's what they said about Mini-Me," said Jack.

"But the difference is different," said Dr. Ramsey. "Your clone was missing his telomeres—the part of your DNA that controls how often it can replicate—even though he looked fifteen, genetically, he was more like 120, and his body would have quickly deteriorated because his DNA couldn't properly replicate anymore. Dr. Summers now has the telomeres of a fourteen year old. It seems to be a complete rejuvenation."

"So it's really her," said O'Neill.

"As far as I can tell," said Dr. Ramsey. "Of course it's possible that someone could have created a double. We know that the Asgard are capable of doing something like that, but if they had, why make her look fourteen? I don't see them repeating Loki's mistake."

"Uh…let me get this straight," said Buffy. "You've got a clone?"

Jack grimaced. "Yeah. A few years ago, an alien mad scientist tried to make a copy of me, and kinda messed it up. Wound up creating a copy of me that looked like a fifteen year old kid."

"What happened to him?" asked Dawn, genuinely curious. How the SGC had dealt with having a younger copy of their C.O. could give her an indication of how they would react to her.

"General Hammond—the SGC's C.O. at the time—couldn't stand the thought of having two Jack O'Neills under his command, so we set him up with a new identity," said Colonel Carter. "He wound up pursuing a hockey career."

"Jon O'Neill is your clone?" asked Willow. "I always figured he was your nephew or something."

"What?" asked Buffy.

"Jon O'Neill," said Willow. "He plays centre for the Colorado Avalanche. They won the Stanley Cup last year."

"I didn't know you were a hockey fan," said Dawn.

"I'm not, really," said Willow. "Kennedy is, but I'm sure you've seen him in that Levis commercial: the one with all the close-ups of his butt."

"Oh!" said Dawn. "Him! That's why he looked so familiar!" She noticed that Sam and Daniel seemed to be suppressing laughs. Teal'c had an expression on his face that hinted at a smirk.

General O'Neill was scowling. "We're not here to discuss Mini-Me's butt. We are here to discuss what we are going to do about Dr. Summers."

"I can fix this!" said Dawn. "You just have to let me use the Stargate again!"

"No way!" said General O'Neill. "I'm not letting you near it!"

"But Sir!"

"No!" said General O'Neill. "You vanishing once on us was bad enough! I'm not letting it happen again!"

"I won't vanish this time," said Dawn.

"We don't know that," said O'Neill.

"I know that," said Dawn. "I know what I'm doing!"

"It's too risky!" said O'Neill.

"So you're going to leave me stuck looking like this?" asked Dawn. "What about my life? Joe was talking about coming for a visit over the Christmas break, and he's not a pedophile."

"Ah…I didn't need that mental image," said Jack.

"Ditto," said Buffy.

"So let me use the gate."

"Buffy will have my head if you disappear again," said Jack.

"Tell Jack you won't hurt him, Buffy."

"I don't know. I kinda side with Jack on this one," said Buffy. "I don't want you going into that gate again."

"Nothing will happen to me this time."

"So what happens?" asked Carter. "You go back into the gate network, and Willow pulls you out again, as an adult?"

"Uh…no…we won't need Willow," said Dawn. "I changed a few things. I should be able to go through the gate just fine now."

"What did you change?" asked Daniel.

"Uh…it's kinda hard to explain," said Dawn. That, and she really didn't want to explain parts of what she had done, to anyone yet.

"Try," said General O'Neill.

"Well, part of it is that I've got back all my memories that had been suppressed, and I can use the Key's power now," said Dawn.

"How much power?" asked O'Neill.

"Uh…I'm not really sure," said Dawn, "and I'm not really sure what I can do with it, yet."

"Has not the Key had this power for a long time?" asked Teal'c "Shouldn't you already know what it can do?"

"Uh…power isn't really the right word for it," said Dawn. "There is power there, but it's more a change in my awareness. The Key is energy, and until ten years ago, I looked on the whole universe as just that: energy; the interplay of different forces. I wasn't really aware of the material universe, per se. Things like planets were just distortions in space-time, caused by their gravity. I was aware that there was life, but again, I sensed it as interactions of forces." She rapped her knuckles against the table in front of her. "The idea that there is solid matter in the universe is pretty new to me. As Dawn Summers, I'm aware that I'm sitting here with you, in this conference room, half a mile underground. As the Key…I can sense all of you, as sparks of energy. I can feel the electricity flowing through the wires in the walls, but the table, the walls, even the mountain over us are barely there."

"That must be a novel way of looking at the universe," said Daniel.

"Yes and no," said Dawn. "As the Key, I'm used to seeing the universe as energy. As Dawn Summers, I'm used to looking at the material world. Trying to reconcile the two world views is kinda funky. I know how I can affect the energy universe, but I'm not sure how that will manifest in the material one."

"If you're so unsure about your affect on the material universe, how can you be so sure that you can use the Stargate to correct your age?" asked Colonel Carter.

"The Stargates convert mass to energy," said Dawn. "And energy is something that I understand very well. I also spent a week inside the gates, watching how they worked. I can do this."

"Then why couldn't you just pop yourself out it, the last time?" asked Jack.

"Because I was trapped inside it. The Stargate network isn't large enough. It was like trying to play a piano while wearing a strait-jacket. I could barely pound out chopsticks with my elbows."

"So, how will it be different this time?" asked Carter.

"I'm not bound to my body anymore," said Dawn. "Most of me will stay out here in the rest of the universe, where I've got room to work. Please Sir, I can do this."

Daniel pushed his glasses up his nose. "Um…I've noticed that when you talk about the Key, sometimes it's as something separate, and sometimes it's as a part of you."

"I'm still trying to work that out, myself," said Dawn. "In some ways, it's like there's two parts to me. There's the Dawn Summers part, who's twenty-four years old, and has a sister, and friends, and a great job. Then there's the Key part, who's as old as the universe, and can remember watching it evolve. The two experiences are so different, it's hard not to think of them as two different entities, but they are both me. I can't separate the one from the other."

Dr. Ramsey frowned. "It almost sounds like a Dissociative Identity Disorder."

"A what?" asked Jack.

"It used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder," said Dr. Ramsey. "In extreme cases people have exhibited multiple distinct personalities. Often times each personality is completely unaware of what has happened to the other personalities."

"I was thinking of the Tok'ra," said Carter. "Where the host and the symbiote share the one body."

"From what we've heard, the first few years of your life as Dawn Summers were fairly traumatic," said Dr. Ramsey. "You lost your mother, and several friends. You were kidnapped, and held prisoner, more than once, and you were tortured on at least one of those occasions. That is the sort of thing that can result in dissociation, separating yourself from all those painful memories."

"But I'm not separating myself from them," said Dawn. "I still remember everything; I don't have two different personalities, and I'm not two separate entities, sharing one body," she added to Carter. "There's just…me. And I am a fourteen billion year old entity of pure energy, who is currently a twenty-four year old woman, stuck in a fourteen year old body. Please, let me take care of at least that last complication."

"I'll think about it," said Jack.