Hey guys. To start; I'm so sorry for not updating in forever. I started University in September (yay!) and have been so very busy. Coupled with the fact that I don't like this chapter very much and was trying to think of ways to improve it but couldn't… you know how it goes. I'm not going to promise to update regularly, but I will try to write when I can. I do get to write an original story as an essay for my science fiction module though, so that's likely to take the foreground. Sorry!
Secondly, thanks to Vinnet and Sheryl for helping me with this chapter. :)
Jack wasn't entirely sure when he went from being deeply asleep and dreaming to being awake and thinking in endless circles but at some point he realised that he was awake and currently occupied in the over-active thinking of someone with a lot on his mind.
His usual tactic of ignoring things and hoping that they'd go away had failed him as his subconscious started to examine the last few years of his life before his conscious mind took over. Realisations and ideas that he'd been repressing ever since he became a clone suddenly surfaced, and he found himself unable to sink them again.
He'd gone from deep, almost suicidal depression over the death of his son to an acceptance of the facts of life to a lust for life and living with his new adopted family – his team - to having nothing but a scrawny undersized body and a determination to fit in.
Without the support and anchorage of his team – his family – he'd defended himself against the depression, despair, and loneliness by completely separating himself from everything that he had been, everything that had reminded him of what he'd lost. He'd thrown himself into school not academically but socially; whatever it had taken to fit in and be accepted. The latest fashions – no matter what the little voice in the back of his head said about the utter ridiculousness and impracticality of Velcro-fastened sneakers – the most popular music. He was a member of the high school football team, he wasn't the most popular or the best football player – he'd always been a hockey man before – but he was admired by half of the school; he never did assignments, he never paid attention…he didn't need to. He was on the football team, he'd pass either way. Mostly, anyway. Although there were some of the teachers who insisted he at least turn something in, and show up for the tests.
He had become a completely different person.
The turn that his thoughts had taken made him restless, and he pushed himself stiffly off the floor, careful not to wake Karrena, and glanced outside. Although it was clear and bright outside after the storm, the air had a definite chill to it and, seeing the puffs of white mist escaping both his and Karrena's mouths, he set about rebuilding the fire to warm them and continue to dry their clothes.
Karrena shifted a little when the warmth of his body left her but remained asleep, allowing Jack to continue his increasingly disconcerting musings as he stared at the leaping flames of the fire.
He thought about the people who were his friends at high school. Many of them made fun of the 'geeks' of the school; the Dannys and the Carters and especially the Felgers of the high school. As Colonel O'Neill, he'd prodded at and generally wound up his geeks, but he'd never done it maliciously, and recently – well, before he'd been cloned anyway - he'd stopped doing it much at all. Even when Felger touched him. Sure, when he'd first met Danny, he'd been a bit of a bastard, and when he'd first met Carter…but a lot of that was because they had an education that he could never understand.
Until now. Now he had an opportunity to go back and do that; he could learn those things that secretly interested him, and he was wasting it. He had occasionally wished that he'd taken a more academic route with his life, but when he thought of all of the people he'd saved through his battle training, he wasn't so sure. And now he had the perfect opportunity to go back and do both.
But he was wasting it on being popular and trying to forget the past.
He'd thrown himself so heavily into proving that he was a different person to his older incarnation that he really had forgotten about his team, his family, what was out there. And it wasn't even as if he was The football jock; he'd been following the crowd like one of the mindless sheep that he'd always mocked.
Feeling restless and faintly disgusted with himself for who he'd become, he abruptly stood up and walked outside into the cold air, folding his arms across his chest and staring into space, wholly occupied with his thoughts.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been standing there thinking when he felt Karrena's tentative touch on his shoulder. "Jack? What are you doing out here? You're shivering!"
"What?" he looked at her and frowned. He hadn't even realised he was cold.
"Come and sit by the fire; you'll catch your death out there." Seeing the puffs of white from her mouth as she scolded him it finally registered in his brain, and he noticed that he was shivering, having left the warmth of the fire without a cloak or anything to keep him warm.
He could've sworn that it was the end of summer a few days ago.
Folding his arms across his chest and shoving his hands into his armpits, he quickly followed her back to the warmth of the fire. Almost immediately, he began to warm up, and he soon found a cloak being placed around his shoulders before Karrena sat herself down next to him.
"What were you doing out there?" she asked quietly, mimicking him by staring into the fire.
"Thinking."
"What about?" She pressed on with her questions, deciding that whatever he'd been thinking about must have been fairly monumental to have completely distracted him from feeling the cold. She was also glad for the distraction from her own worries and thoughts.
"Who I am."
She paused for a moment, hoping that he would carry on without being prompted. "So who are you?" she finally asked when he remained silent.
"Nobody. Nothing. A clone." His face remained completely impassive throughout the exchange.
Karrena frowned. "Obviously, you are someone; you are here, talking and breathing-"
Jack cut her off with a shake of his head. "I've been trying so hard to prove that I was different to my original – the man I was copied from – that I became nothing. Just a copy of everyone else instead…" He gave a wry laugh, " A dedicated follower of fashion."
Turning to look at Jack, her forehead wrinkled in confusion, Karrena asked; "Many people follow the fashions…I've seen it a lot in court at Cair Paravel. It is taking pride in your appearance."
Jack shook his head. "Taking pride in your appearance means wearing things that look good and are smart but are also things that you like, not just mindlessly following the trends and copying what everyone else wears because someone in a magazine said that it was cool."
"That makes no sense. Why would anyone want to wear the same clothes? People would laugh."
The corner of Jack's lips quirked in a slight smile. "That's the difference between Narnia and where I come from. The only way to be cool is to wear the same as the celebrities."
She paused, trying to puzzle out what Jack had said before giving in and asking, "What is a celebrity?"
"Oh…uh, someone who's famous for acting, or singing, or for being president or something… kind of like your courtiers."
Nodding slowly, she mulled this over for a few minutes. "And you were one of these people who followed them?"
She received a brief nod in reply.
"But how does this make you nobody?"
He continued to stare at the fire as he sighed and answered her. "I had no personal identity. I was just one of the crowd; people wouldn't remember me for who I was but for what group I was in."
"But what about your family? Surely to them you were someone."
Family… Jack looked at her sharply, horror spreading across his face. Oh God, Charlie!
"Jack, are you well?" She cut in, a look of guilty alarm on her face. "I did not mean to upset you…"
"No-" He paused to clear is suddenly blocked throat. "It's not your fault. You just reminded me of someone is all. Someone important, who I'd forgotten about." His gaze had returned to the fire now and harsh lines of pain were evident in his face.
"Who?" The question slipped out of her mouth before she'd realised it, and she instantly wished she could take it back, that she wouldn't cause Jack pain.
Jack was silent for long enough that she didn't think he was going to answer her but, eventually, he spoke. "My son, Charlie."
Karrena frowned, a slight look of horror on her face. "You are not old enough to have a son." She stated bluntly.
He rolled his eyes at her, "I used to be."
Seeing her shake her head at him, he realised that, although she'd accepted what he was on a superficial level – at least as far as she understood the idea of a clone – deep down, she hadn't really grasped the weight of what had been done to him.
He turned to her and met her eyes. "Karrena, I used to be over 6 feet tall, I had a job, I was married, I had a son…" he faltered slightly. "I was nearly three times your age, for crying out loud! My son, Charlie died when he was a kid..." He couldn't bring himself to tell her how he died.
Karrena tore her eyes away from his. Although she had accepted that he had been created rather than born – after all, Aslan himself had no problem with that – she suddenly understood just what had been done to him; that he'd had everything stripped from him all at once. And she also understood that he was old enough to be her grandfather and some of the things that he had done made a lot more sense; inside that tiny little body was a seasoned warrior and a man who had lost everything.
She resisted the urge to edge away from him.
Meeting his eyes again, she said the only thing she could think to say; "I'm sorry."
He snorted, "Please, save the sympathy." He barked, seeing both pity and revulsion in her eyes. He looked away from her and returned to his dark musings.
Leaving Karrena to wonder about the man-child sat next to her.
It was only after a long, drawn out period of silence that Jack finally snapped out of it. "Geez," he finally exclaimed, suddenly rubbing his hands across his face as if doing so could rid him of all of the dark thoughts that had occupied him, determined not to fall into the bitter pattern of darkness that he always found so easily.
Not expecting the sudden noise and movement, Karrena jumped, her heart suddenly pounding in her chest.
Seeing this, Jack gave a bitter bark of a laugh. "Look at us! I just realised that I don't have a clue who I am anymore, and you're convinced you're going to be mobbed because some distant, far removed ancestor was the wicked witch of the west."
"It was the white witch-" Karrena began in a small voice but was interrupted by Jack.
"I know; it's a reference to an old film, uh… play where I come from."
"Oh."
"Yep." He paused for a moment, brow creased in concentration. "So what do we do?" he mumbled to himself.
"I do not know."
"What?" Jack looked at her in confusion for a second. "Oh, no I was talking to myself. First sign of insanity." He gave her a weak smile but she just looked slightly puzzled.
He contemplated the situation for a moment before deciding to return to what he knew; something that he knew was a part of him, clone or not. Assess the situation.
"Right. We know that someone is executing attacks against settlements in Narnia, and that the enemy seems to appear a short distance from their target as if from thin air."
Karrena stared at him for a moment as if he really had gone insane but quickly realised that he was listing what he knew so far. A small hope flared inside her, and she dared to entertain the idea that he was going to save Narnia from this newest evil.
Jack paused for a moment before grudgingly adding, "Which seems to be by magic."
His sceptical comment made Karrena smile – few people who didn't believe in something would allow for the fact that others did.
"When they arrive, they take out any guards and observers, even when they're well hidden and protected, so they obviously seem to have some sort of inside information on these things.
"The only people who seem to be directly attacked are the Talking Beasts, the dwarfs, the tree-people, the fauns—the non-humans?—any humans who're injured or killed seem to be either defending the Talking Beasts or are caught by accident; someone is trying to get rid of all of the Talking Beasts."
A frown appeared on Karrena's face. "But why would anyone do that?"
Jack shrugged. "You said it yourself: there are people here who don't believe that Talking Beasts are people… was it the Calorie-men?"
She raised an eyebrow at his mangling of the name, "Calormen. But the Soldiers who attack are not from Calormen; they are all fair skinned like the people of Narnia."
Jack paused for a moment, his brow furrowing. "I dunno about that. People were saying some strange things…" He stopped again, unsure about whether or not he could really believe what he'd heard.
"…what kind of strange things?" Karrena asked nervously.
He looked at her for a second. Hell, he finally thought. If I'm going to believe in magic, why not believe in demonic creatures too! "They were saying that they'd seen other…things. Someone said they'd seen a 'minotaur' and 'the spirit of a poisonous plant' running with the attackers." He used air quotes to show his scepticism but the gesture was lost on Karrena, whose face paled instantly.
"The minotaur and the evil tree spirits have long been the friends of evil."
"Ookay… but why would they be any different to the talking beasts, or the good tree spirits or any other non-human."
Karrena frowned. "I do not know."
Jack sighed, guessing that the principles for evil were the same here as anywhere else. "So long as they're useful, they'll be kept around, I guess…" He didn't need to voice what would happen once they weren't useful.
A long silence followed, in which Jack turned over all of the information he'd picked up along the way and began to consider tactics and ways to beat the resident bad guy. Unsure of himself as he was now, there was one thing he knew for certain: he couldn't turn his back on this now, the same as he couldn't turn his back on the people of Abydos or the Tok'ra or the Kelownans or even his own people, regardless of how ungrateful and generally…irksome the latter three were. And there was no way he was going to leave Karrena behind in all this.
"We need to figure out who's behind all of this."
Karrena looked sharply at him. "You are going to save Narnia?"
He threw her a slight grin. "Well I don't know about that but…I'm definitely gonna go kick some bad-guy ass!"
The confused and lost expression appeared on Karrena's face within seconds, and Jack resisted the urge to smack his hand against his forehead. "I'm not going to actually kick a donkey…it means I'm going to go and fight as hard as I can." He improvised, not wanting to have to explain why kicking someone in the butt would be relevant.
She gave him a bemused smile – he hoped at what was, to her, his strange way of speaking – "Then I, too, will…'kick some ass'."
Jack grinned and resisted the urge to laugh. Somehow, in her very proper English-esque accent it didn't quite sound the same. At the same time, however, he was glad to see her behaving more like the confident, faintly mocking woman he'd met back at Cair Paravel.
"Anyway," he continued, "Whoever it is must be using magic to do it, right?" Or something, he silently added.
Karrena nodded her agreement, a slight shadow crossing her face as if she had sensed what was about to come.
"Now, I don't know how this magic thing works, but is there any way that you can…sense this?" He resisted the urge to cringe. He'd either been watching Star Wars or Buffy the Vampire Slayer too much. He blamed Teal'c.
"I don't know," she told him, frowning and she pondered the question. "It's possible but…I've never tried anything like it before. Except…" She paused and a reminiscent smile lit her face "I did used to use my magic when playing when I was a child, before I knew it was wrong. We used to hide from each other and I'd always be able to find Corrin because he was the Prince, and he was so pure…" She snapped suddenly back to reality and flushed, the smile disappearing rapidly. "That was a long time ago, but it's possible that it could work, with a little practice."
Jack raised an eyebrow at her comments but didn't say anything about it. "Well, anything is better than nothing. At least then we'll have a destination to head towards, and once we know where they are then we will be able to form a plan of attack."
Paling slightly at the prospect of an attack somewhere in the near future, Karrena steeled herself and nodded faintly before correcting him. "I won't be able to tell you of the specific location; it's more like I'll be able to tell you which direction and whether we're close or not. It's not precise, and sometimes it doesn't work at all."
Shrugging it off, he gave her a half-grin. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
She nodded, for once understanding an analogy he'd used.
Please tell me what it was about it that was just a bit blah…I can't figure it out myself:)