AU: After his encounter with Sam, John O'Neill heads to the local shop and ends up in an unexpected situation with an old buddy
Part of my Lost and Found Universe.
Triggers: Depression, Underage Relationship, Reference to a Major Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, Foul Language, Reference to War.
Please note that this story deals with an underage character and a very mature age character. I DO NOT CONDONE this behaviour, but please remember that this is FanFiction, not real life, and the characters are Sam and Jack in other forms. While Jack's clone is 16 in this story, he is still a 52 year old man.
Disclaimer: All recognisable characters belong to Amazon/MGM. I'm just throwing them a curve ball and making their lives a little derentis!
Chapter 4:
Wednesday, 11th February 2004 – Cascade – John O'Neill
"For cryin' out loud, Carter." I huffed while pulling the woollen beanie further onto my head. God it was cold. So much for the snow coming in overnight. It seemed to have already started in a fairly constant stream in the last hour that I had been trying to convince Carter not to give up and die while stocktaking the house to see what she needed. In the end, I left her downstairs and after chucking out a bunch of wilted and mouldy food, started my walk.
It was hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago the majority of people were still getting around in standard jackets and normal boots. Winter had finally decided to stick its head up and say 'Hello! Get those snow boots and chains out, Ima here!' Well according to the weather guys anyway and we all knew how accurate they were. I guessed our coldest season had missed the memo because it was about two months late to the party. Not that I cared. I hated winter. I should've asked the old man to pack me off to Maui. Hindsight really was a wonderful thing.
Once again, I threw out to the wild blue yonder my incredible need to have a car, and a licence. So far, the promises from the old man had been just that. I'd heard nothing since.
The car was more important than the licence. It's not like I hadn't driven unlicenced before as a reckless pre-Air Force roustabout who liked to drive too fast, too many times, many of those times in cars that did not belong to me. It may have been in another life, but I still remembered.
Back in my day… yea Gods! When did I start using that turn of phrase, I huffed to myself, burying my hands even deeper in my pockets, cursing that I had left my gloves with Sam.
Let's just say I learned to drive in the wilds of Minnesota in my grandpaps old truck. My actual licence was a handwritten card with my particulars and signed by the sheriff long before the fan-dangled plastic cards existed.
If only things were still so easy.
These days there were theory tests and practice lessons, school-based lessons, and practical tests with the threat of a set number of hours supervised driving looming because somewhere, some politician with an innate dislike of sharing the road with legitimately licenced school aged drivers decided it must be so.
To hell with the licence, all I needed was the car. Even if it was Carter's.
But then, there was the upkeep and the fuel, scrapping snow off the roof and wheels, ice off the windscreen, putting chains on and taking them off again, black ice… yada yada yada versus not having frozen fingers, frozen toes, breath I could see and the prospect of carrying a goddamned huge load of food, wood and other crap back to the house if old Harry wasn't feeling generous enough to drive through this weather to make a delivery. Assuming he hadn't already shut up shop by the time I got there.
As I turned the corner, I saw Harry's classic 1946 yellow and brown Chevy pickup parked up on the freshly ploughed roadside with the beginnings of a load sitting in the back tray.
"Yes!" I rejoiced. That looked like he was getting ready for a delivery run, so I picked up the pace and powered across the road being careful not to slip arse over tit on the salted slippery surface before crunching through the slushy black pebble laced snow on the side of the road. Unfortunately, in my haste to get through the door, I forgot that sidewalks were generally not salted, meaning the thin layer of water left over from shovelling had turned to ice.
The subsequent crash into the old-style newspaper vending machine saw me on my arse with a non-functional arm that screamed dislocation and an egg on my head with a lovely cut running through my left eyebrow. Just great! Now I really was gonna look like the old codger when I grew up.
"What in the gosh darn tarnation is going on out here?" Harry called out through the door at the tangle of limbs, though his startled face was quickly replaced by concern as he stepped through the door.
"Charlie? It can't be…" He said with disbelief. My eyes went wide at him calling me by my… oh shit, good job O'Neill. Coming in here looking like a teenage version of my son, or what a teenage version of my son would have looked like if he didn't... Great move.
"What? No." I replied with a heavy wince when my arm shifted. "Name's… er…" What was my name? I supposed that Jack was common enough, as was Jonathan or John. I could go with my middle name James, but then I'd have to remember to use that in future. It was hard enough using John again after giving up on it several months ago, but Sam just refused to call me Jack, or anything other than 'Get out' for that matter.
"Well, son. What is your name?" Harry asked, his eyes boring into mine while he helped me up with my still good arm, through the door and inside before sitting me into a chair at the back of the shop.
"John." I replied with a pained smile, calling on every nuance of my former training to keep from crying out every time my arm moved. He studied me closely, being sure to catch my eyes as often as possible despite my attempts to evade his focus. I had served as his second seater briefly in 'Nam during 1972 – until we were shot down.
"Ah huh. John. That be ah… short for Jonathan, I suppose but people call ya Jack." He rumbled good naturedly while he rummaged for his first aid kit producing an old combat field kit from Vietnam. Though I suspected the innards were much newer than the 1970's.
"Something like that." I replied and leaned back into the chair Harry had deposited me on without putting pressure on my shoulder or arm.
"Somethin' like that. Hmmm." He repeated slowly as he produced an old-fashioned bottle of peroxide with a barely legible label and some gauze. I knew what I looked like. My face was halfway between a youthful Charlie and the chiselled pre-grey visage I would turn into in a few short years. "You can do better than that, I think." He added almost jovially.
"Don't know what you mean, grandpa." I replied, inserting a dig at his age as young kids were wont to do these days while making sure I kept my eyes averted from the man who I had spent a great deal of time looking at in the jungle and again in the field hospital after he had taken a bullet through the chest during our post-crash evasion of the Viet Cong.
As the gauze came into contact, I winced for effect to try to veer him off the course of recognition. Mental pain management was one of the first things we learned back in the day. It was that along with pure adrenalin that made an injured soldier get up and keep fighting. A rich laugh rolled out as he tended the cut before putting his little bottle and gauze down.
"Nice try, kid. Problem is, here ya are wincing at a tiny cut, yet ya haven't made so much as a sound about this." He said as he put one hand on my right shoulder, then deftly applied enough pressure to the back of my left to put it back into place with an audible pop.
"Ahhh, fucking Jesus Christ Harry you old bastard!" I yelled in full O'Neill style, chasing it with a grunting groan as I swallowed the down the screaming pain. "Give a guy some warning next time." I complained bitterly then focused my clearing vision on him. The sly smile on his face spoke volumes.
"Didn't last time. Why d'ya think I would this time, Jack." The smile on his face had grown. Yeah, convincing him I wasn't who he thought I was, was no longer possible. Clearly, he remembered the incident in some German bar with a name I couldn't pronounce during our 1980-something deployment to Bitburg where I earned myself a dislocated shoulder after defending the honour of a barmaid who didn't want to be assaulted. The old codger had violently reset my shoulder in much the same way back then.
"For crying out loud Harry, what…" I sighed and leaned my head back against the wall breathing out the remainder of the pain before gingerly lifting my arm to check it still worked.
"Relax. The enigmatic Colonel Jack O'Neill called about a week ago. Told me a 'friend' of his was in town and another 'friend' was coming to check up on her. Didn't say much about ya, just said, I'd know ya when I saw ya. Course, wasn't expecting a young Jack O'Neill, but here ya are." Harry admitted while packing his box of tricks away.
"How do you know I'm Jack? Unless you two finally decided to catch up, you haven't seen the old man in nine years, Harry. Not since…" I sighed a mirthless chuckle without finishing my sentence. It had been Charlie's 7th birthday.
"Yep, I know. I was sorry to hear about Charlie. He was a good kid." Harry replied morosely. "Thought I was seeing things when I saw you, then I remembered. He really was 100% his father." Harry added sullenly as he threw the soiled gauze in the bin.
"Yeah." I replied with a heavy swallow. I didn't want to talk about Charlie. Somethings never changed with the cloning. That was one of them. Loving Carter was another one.
"It's the eyes, Charlie had 'em. Thing is, you got'em too, except with more… weariness. More experience." Harry continued, pulling a bottle of very nice Irish Whisky from the cupboard behind him then looking at me with his scrutinising stare, like he was sizing me up or figuring something out. "They are the same eyes I begged to kill me in that field. The same eyes I woke up to five days later in that poor excuse for an infirmary. You don't forget shit like that, Jack." He stated as he deftly poured the amber liquid into two small glasses, then looked at me with a kind daring that said prove me wrong. Problem was, I couldn't. Hiding experiences and comradery from people who had seen you at your worst was nigh on impossible. I suspected that was why Carter was so mad because she couldn't pull the wool over my eyes no matter how hard she tried, how mean she was, how callous her words.
"No. I guess not." I replied with a heavy swallow as I tried to block out the sound of his wheezy, groaning screams while I taped a large piece of plastic cut off my raincoat over the sucking chest wound in an attempt to stop his lung collapsing. Seventeen hours I had kept him alive with makeshift solutions in one of the most inhospitable regions of the world until we got to a point where we could call for a med evac.
"So, ya gonna tell me how you came to be like this?" He asked as he handed me one of the glasses. Taking it from him, I downed it in one gulp and closed my eyes as I felt the warming burn travel down my throat and branch tendrils of delicious oaky fire into my blood stream. The good stuff.
"Don't know if you'd believe me if I told you, Harry." He merely smiled at my answer and refilled the glass.
"Try me. You ain't the only one who's seen unexplainable shit in this world. They sent me down ta Area 51 for a bit before I told'em to stick their job and came 'ere." He said, knocking back his second glass.
I snorted, "Well, officially, I'm his nephew." I replied knocking back my second, "But, since you know that Michael didn't make it home from 'Nam and I'm too young to be a pre-war road trip love child…"
"Tru dat!" He interrupted, topping up my glass again. Crap, if he didn't stop, I'd be drunk as a skunk.
"You know that crap about Dolly the Sheep from a few years ago?" I asked, knowing it would get his back up. He hated scientists even more than I… used to.
"Yep. Damned scientists should keep their grubby hands to…" He looked at me, "No way. Man, I knew ya were working in some top-secret shit Jack, but cloning? Your grandma would roll in her Irish Catholic grave if she knew." He cursed. He was right, my maimeo being a staunch Catholic would not have been impressed one iota.
"Hey! It's not like I had a choice. One minute I was asleep in bed, the next, wham in some lab decades younger with needles and doctors and stuff." I replied knocking back my third. The lie had come more easily than I expected it to since I hadn't spoken to anyone about my origins. It wasn't all fallacy. Just didn't think the parts about abduction, green lights, and little grey aliens sounded believable.
"How'd they get your ah… stuff?" He made a motion with his hand that caused me to scoff a childish laugh, though I think that was more the alcohol than anything else.
"That's a Carter question. Something about stem cells or some shit. I dunno." I replied hazily and shook my head. Definitely the alcohol. My first month or so of life found me paying close attention to human biology, stem cell research and theories on human cloning, though I wasn't sure why I did that at the time. It wasn't like Loki used any methods known to humankind. Harry merely smiled and took the glass out of my hand before screwing the lid back on his bottle.
"Carter? That's the name of the old dear in your place up the road?"
"Yep." I half slurred, eyes blinking away the fuzz in my underage brain. Just great. I was so looking forward to being able to down more than three glasses before getting tipsy. "She ah… needs stuff and wood." I fumbled the words and the list as I went to grab it out of my pocket noting the pain in my shoulder had reduced to a dull ache.
Good scotch.
"Here, gimme that." Harry said snatching the paper out of my hands and reading it. He chuckled, "Even your writing's the same, Jack."
"Mmmhuh." I groaned my answer, leaning back against the cabinet behind me and closing my eyes. What felt like a few minutes later, a bottle of water was shoved into my hand.
"Drink that ya lightweight. It's got the good stuff in it." I knew what he meant by that. The good stuff was the little sachet of magic powder from the old field ration packs used on soldiers who had yellow fever, dehydration, or were just plain drunk. "I'll get this stuff together then drop ya back to the house before the rest of my rounds."
"Thanks, Harry. I owe you one." I replied in between gulps of the magic water that tasted damned amazing to my drunken taste buds.
"Already paid in full, Jack, and you know it."