TITLE: Wish Granted
SERIES:Colorado Springs High
SERIES #: 1.1 Clone-Jack & Xander centric
RATING: PG-13 - Language
GENRE: Crossover, AU
WARNING: Spoilers for "Fragile Balance" with SG1 & "Selfless" with BtVS
DISCLAIMERS: SG1, Clone-Jack, and anyone you recognize belong to MGM, Gekko & others that are not Scorpio. Xander & the Scooby's belong to Mutant Enemy & the "Grrr Argh" Monster, not poor underpaid Scorpio. The various original characters do belong to Scorpio, however, so don't feel too bad for her.
AN: This whole series came about due to my fascination with the situation that Jack's teenaged clone found himself in. I could barely fathom how alone he must have felt, so… veg I gave him a friend. Also, as a side note, I'm not sure where I first came across the idea of Gen. Hammond being the father of Major Sam Finn, but I liked it a lot and decided to steal it. So, kudos to whoever dreamed up that bit.
SUMMARY: Jonathan Tyler O'Neill, the teenaged clone of Colonel O'Neill, throws himself a pity party. An unexpected guest arrives.
WISH GRANTED
Colorado Springs High Series
Scorpio
Jonathan Tyler O'Neill or "Johnny" to his so-called peers watched with barely concealed annoyance and bitter frustration as Davey Harriman and Justin Metzler drunkenly gathered up the results of their supposed study session. The two teens had a good beer buzz and jostled each other and laughed at stupid jokes as they made their way towards the door.
Johnny didn't know anything about Justin's old man, but he knew that Davey better hope that Chief Master Sergeant Walter Harriman was out at Cheyenne tonight instead of at home waiting up for his wayward son. Sgt. Harriman, teasingly referred to as 'Chevron Guy' by his friends and co-workers, was the Head Stargate Technician at the SGC. It was a widely held belief that he was a good natured, generous and friendly man who was level-headed and professional to the point of being virtually unflappable. This was true – to a point. Seemingly unmoved and immune to the righteous wrath of enraged Generals and the vengeance of insane Goa'uld, Walter turned into a tough old bastard whenever he thought his youngest son was doing something that would ruin his chance to join the USAF.
"Uh…maybe I should call you two a cab."
Davey rolled his eyes, but Justin just waved his concern off. "Nah, we're good. Not like we're gonna drive or nothin'. Just ridin' our ten-speeds, man. It's cool."
"Uh-huh." Johnny's tone was skeptical, but he let it go. "You guys break any bones or get busted in any way; I'm disavowing any knowledge of where you got the beer. Capishe?"
Davey Harriman opened up the door to the wooden stairs leading from his small apartment over top of the Ferretti's garage to the driveway where their bikes were waiting. He paused a moment and then turned back to gaze evenly at Johnny over his shoulder. "I've said it before and I'll say it again, Johnny. You gotta lighten the fuck up. You're more wired than my old man, and that's sayin' something."
Justin snorted his amused agreement and the two stomped their way down the steps. For a long moment Johnny just stood there and watched them. They joked and laughed as they got their bikes and quickly made ready to leave for their respective homes. Stepping out onto the small landing at the top of the stairs, he looked up at the distant stars and frowned. Lighten up, Davey had said. Easier said than done, unfortunately. Not to mention it was still so strange to hear. He was used to both his superiors and his subordinates despairing that he would ever take things more seriously and now he was accused of being too uptight, serious and goal oriented.
Sighing, Johnny turned back to his living room and surveyed the mess that his two fellow Colorado Springs Hockey Team teammates had left behind and grimaced. When Justin had announced that he needed to pull up his science grade or risk being kicked off of the team, Davey had suggested that the three of them get together one night and have a study session. Johnny, thinking that they'd order some Chinese takeout and help out a friend had agreed. Silly him. What had actually happened was Davey ordering up a movie on pay-per-view while Justin found his stash of beer that Lou kept him stocked with. Any attempt he had made to get the other two to actually crack a book had been met with teasing and derision. Granted, the beer had only amounted to a single six-pack and the movie was filled with lots of T&A to make up for its lack of plot, but that wasn't the point.
Gathering up the empty bottles and the trash, Johnny carefully made his way outside and down the stairs to the trash cans on the side of the garage. Once that was taken care of, he found himself contemplating the stars once again and wondered if his older original self, Daniel, Sam and Teal'c were out there somewhere risking their lives for the sake of the planet.
And that, really, was the crux of his problem with being 15 years old. Again.
His body was de-aged, but not his mind. His body, while healthy, was small and weak. His reflexes were faster and his knees were better, but he didn't have the muscle memory of doing the same actions again and again anymore. Hormones raged through him and he was certain he never had this many ill-timed and inappropriate hard-ons the first time around, pimples still sucked eggs and there were days when he felt like he could eat his own body weight and still be hungry. Typical teenage stuff. His mind, though…well, that was a horse of a different color. Typical teenagers didn't spend the first several weeks of school threat assessing their fellow students, learning the entire layout of the building and all it's exits while figuring out which spots would be best to plant the C4 incase he ever needed to blow the thing up. Well, maybe that last one was a teenage thing to do, but none of the other students at Colorado Springs High had done so with the trained eye of a USAF covert ops Colonel.
His perspective was way too skewed by his intimate knowledge of death and dying to ever be as carefree and naive as his schoolmates. The biggest challenges they had faced were the tri-county hockey championship, end of year final exams and angry parents. That kind of stuff was nothing more than petty little details compared to the god-awful nightmare inducing trauma of losing a child to a gun-shot wound to the head, getting tortured by a ruthless and vengeful Goa'uld or being trapped in an underwater submarine filled with replicators bent on your destruction. Sneaking out of your house in the middle of the night to go make out with your girlfriend just didn't rate after sneaking off the planet through a high security military base so that you could blow up an enemy mothership located on the other side of the galaxy. Pondering the mysteries of some mindless singer with a cute face and a tight ass didn't have any real appeal after pondering the mysteries of some alien race of advanced beings desperately trying to fight a war against seemingly unstoppable enemies.
Homer Simpson and hockey aside, he had nothing in common with any of his so-called peers. On the other hand, those that he truly considered his peers no longer saw him as one. Even those that knew that he only appeared 15 years old due to a botched cloning attempt tended to lose sight of the fact that his mind was that of a 50-some year old Air Force Colonel. He had never been one to enjoy being talked around or down to.
Looking up at the cold and uncaring stars, Johnny attempted to put a name to what he was feeling. Upset or disgruntled didn't seem to be right, although they figured into it to varying degrees. Frustrated certainly, but that failed to cover the full scope of his situation. He was angry at the Asgard in general and Loki in particular. He was bitter that Jack had gotten their life while he was forced to do it all again. He was bored with his restrictions and impatient to get back out into the wider world and the galaxy beyond it. He was hurt by the distancing of those he considered his closest friends and confused by the swarms of seemingly mindless teens that infested his new life.
He was…trapped between two worlds, but not really a true part of either of them. He was desperately lonely for someone that could understand him and his quirks. Tired of being strung out on paranoia and hormones, he wanted to feel connected to something meaningful once again.
A dazzling speck of tiny light shot across the night sky, snagging Johnny's attention. For a second, he tensed at the thought of an alien craft on a direct course to Earth, but then his shoulders sagged with his expelled breath at the realization that a ship would be cloaked. It was a shooting star.
A touch of whimsy twisted his lips in a half smirk even through his deepening despair. "I wish I may, I wish I might have this wish I wish tonight…" Closing his eyes, Johnny ignored the slight feeling of being watched with the assumption that it was simply Lou's wife, Linda Ferretti looking out the window to see what he was up too. Clearing his throat, he continued, "I wish I had someone, anyone, in my life who understood exactly what I'm going through. Well…maybe not exactly since I wouldn't wish being a cheap copy on a person, but at least someone who knew what it was like to have secrets, fight to the death and loose, not care that I booby-trap my apartment and doesn't believe that being 15 years old means that I'm automatically an uneducated idiot. I just…wish I had a friend that really understood. That's all I want."
"Granted!"
Johnny spun around at the oddly hollow and deep voice coming directly behind him. His right hand snapped down to where his gun used to be only to hit an empty space. A tall robed alien with goat-like ears, a bunch of horns on his gray skinned head and a long white beard pulled into some sort of weird pony-tail stood before him grinning in glee. Before Johnny could pick his jaw up long enough to demand to know who the hell he was and what the hell was going on, the alien lifted up a hand and waggled his long fingers in a classic 'bye-bye' gesture. Then, in an explosion of searing flame, the alien disappeared. In his place a body materialized about six feet up in the air. With a yelp, gravity asserted itself on the body and it fell to the ground with a painful sounding thud.
Tensed and ready to fight, Johnny took a step closer and looked at what appeared to be a man in ill-fitting clothes. With a moan, the man rolled over slightly and Johnny could easily see that the man was also heavily armed, but with odd weapons that he either didn't recognize or would never think to see in a modern setting. Was that really an axe that the guy had strapped to his back?
"Ugh…what happened?"
Johnny stepped slightly sideways in order to keep the glare of the front door lights that Linda left on all night out of his eyes. He didn't want to be caught blinded by the glare if he could help it.
"You fell out of a burning hole in the sky. Missed landing on my head by three feet."
The guy moaned in pain again and started to push his way up off of the ground. Johnny tensed and rocked onto the balls of his feet, his arms swinging loose in case this first contact situation turned ugly on him and he had to fight.
Watching the stranger stand up, he noted several knives of various materials including… wood(?) and two guns, both of which were of an unknown design. And yeah, that was a single bladed axe with what looked like a metal spike or pick on the other side that was riding in a leather rig on the guy's back. Johnny also realized that his first impression about the guy's clothes was correct, they were ill-fitting. In fact, they were far too large for him, the cuffs falling past his wrists and dragging down over his shoes. Beyond that, it was obvious that it was a uniform, ill-fitting or not. Just, it wasn't a uniform that Johnny had ever seen.
"Where am I?"
With a smirk and a soft snort, he replied, "Planet Earth."
That snapped the stranger's attention and his head whipped around. Short dark brown hair framed a surprisingly young human face that wore a worn leather patch over the left eye, leaving a single brown one to stare intently at Johnny. He tensed; a hairs-breath away from violence. Then, unexpectedly, that brown eye widened in shock and the man glanced around wildly. He jerked and then stared in horrified fascination at Linda Ferretti's light blue Toyota.
"You okay there buddy?" Worry in his voice, because he so didn't need to deal with a flipped out alien teenager that was armed for war when he didn't have anything but a pair of faded Levi jeans and an Avalanche t-shirt.
The stranger looked over at him again, but he seemed pale and shocky to Johnny. "I…I…don't…"
Johnny watched as the stranger trailed off and raised a shaky hand up to his face and touched the leather patch. Swallowing hard, he pushed it out of the way. Johnny flinched slightly, prepared to see a nasty scar or wound, but all he saw was another brown eye looking at him in confused amazement. "I have two eyes."
The words were whispered in a tone of disbelief and Johnny wasn't sure what that meant or why it was such a big deal.
"Uh…yeah?"
He was ignored, however, as the young man choose to stare in appalled wonder at his own hands. After a long moment of gaping, the guy quickly ran his hands over his own body as if looking for something. Johnny distinctly heard a whimper before the stranger whispered a desperate, "What the hell happened to me? Where's my scars? My knee brace? How the fuck did I get my eye back?!?"
Suddenly, the absolute ironic absurdity of the situation hit Johnny right between the eyes. Tipping his head back slightly and slumping his shoulders he groaned with frustration, "Oh, for cryin' out loud! It's bad enough that one mad-scientist of an alien has to fuck up my life; now another crazy alien is dumping his failed science experiments in my lap. Do I have a sign over my head that says 'kick me' on it or what?"
Johnny's sarcastic outburst snapped the stranger out of his minor panic and riveted his attention back onto him again. Instantly, Johnny tensed ready for an attack. Fucked up alien lab-rat reject or not, this man was dangerous. Then again, so was he.
"What do you know?! What in the name of the Hellmouth is going on here?"
Johnny's brow crinkled in mild confusion of an epitaph he didn't recognize. "Hey! Not your enemy here. I'm just the innocent bystander whose doorstep you got dropped on. Save your attitude for the gray bearded guy with the horns that left you here."
The violence seemed to drain out of the guy as if a switch had been flipped. A tiny hint of despair muddied his brown eyes. "Gray guy? Horns?"
Johnny nodded, "Yeeeaahh…Tall, ugly, purple robes with gold trim," He gestured to his chin and dragged his hand down towards the middle of his chest, "long beard in a dumb looking pony-tail," and swirled his hand up to indicate the top of his head, "and several goatish horns growing out of his head like a freakin' forest. Ringing any bells for you?"
It must have, because first the guy went sort of pale and then he went sort of red with anger, his face twisting into a snarl. The man was so livid that he shook with rage as he flung back his head and screamed to the sky, "D'Hoffryn!!!"
A neat circle of flame erupted out of the ground a mere three feet from Johnny, sending him diving for cover in the opposite direction and reaching for his non-existent gun once again. Once the flames reached eight feet high they suddenly cut out and in their place was that same bearded gray alien with the horns again. "What the fuck?"
The stranger nodded his head and gestured wildly with one hand in a move that encompassed not only Johnny, but the whole damn situation. "What he said. What the fuck, D'Hoffryn?! What the hell did you do to me and why'ja do it? And don't give me any of your cryptic bullshit, either. We've known each other far too long for that crap."
The alien smirked for a moment and opened his mouth to obviously spout some nonsense, but then he sighed, slumped down a bit and shook his head in what appeared to be resignation. "Look Xander, what I did was simple. I de-aged you to roughly 15-16 years old, shifted you to a non-magical reality with practically no demonic links and then flung you backwards in time almost 5 decades." The stranger, Xander, gaped a moment and looked like he was about to freak when the alien, D'Hoffryn held up one long gray finger, "Aht! I did this personally in response to not just one, but two wishes. And while I don't have any doubts about your abilities to take on any of my minions and come out the winner, we both know that I'm still out of your league."
Xander slumped back against the Ferretti's garage and reached up to rub at his eyes and then startled at finding two of them. He was pensive and still for a moment and Johnny found himself asking what he knew that man wanted to know. "Simple, huh? Right, de-aging, alternative reality shifts and time travel are simple. Yeah sure, okay…but why? I mean, really. 'Cause it's just not making sense to me."
The alien looked over at him and smirked slightly before answering. "Yes, why indeed. To be honest, I was looking for a way to get an agent in this particular reality for a while now and thanks to you and your wish combined with the wish of one of his younger and less emotionally stable Slayers, I was able to bring Xanris the White Knight himself."
The stranger snorted in dark derision. "I am not now, nor have I ever been one of your agents, D'Hoffryn. Think again."
The tall alien shrugged, "Not in any formal sense, no. We have, however, had a long standing truce based on the fact that you and yours keep humanity from dying out and I don't let my minions wreak vengeance upon you and your Slayers."
The stranger gestured to himself, "Then explain this!"
"The humans of this reality are doomed, Xander. They need you."
That snagged Johnny's attention like nothing else so far had. "What are you taking about? Why are we doomed and what the hell can he do about it?"
D'Hoffryn frowned and gestured to the stars in the sky. "I don't have any details, nor any real influence in this reality. As I said, this particular timeline has very few demonic links to it. On the other hand, it's a central reality very close to the timestream core. What happens here ripples out in ever increasing waves until it hits the outer realities and effects things there. It's all very metaphysical and logic defying, I assure you. The seers of dark, light and neutrality have been frantic at the doom they see coming because it originates in a reality that they can't access." D'Hoffryn glanced over at the young man with the gobsmacked look on his face. "Until now that is."
"No!" The stranger's anger was growing again. "No, I will not be anyone's butt-monkey. No trained Xander-on-a-leash! Find someone else!"
D'Hoffryn sighed and pinched his nose tightly against a headache. "Xander, stop being an ass and listen to me. I don't know what it is that's coming. The seer's visions are too vague. Just that it's huge and it comes from beyond the stars."
Twin snorts came from the stranger and Johnny. They shared a quick glance and smirk.
"This world has no demons, or at least, very very few. Most of the threats they face are from beings from other planets around the galaxy. You see, on this world, the precursors to humanity didn't dabble in the mystical and shatter the barriers between the dimensions by creating the Hellmouths. Instead, those people turned their minds to the scientific and created a gate between planets. As a consequence, the history of the galaxy in this timeline is extremely different from the one in yours. They aren't prepared to face what's coming. You are."
Johnny was confused and starting to get more than a little worried here. The gate between planets was a perfect description of the Stargate, but apparently, the Ancients of Xander's alternate reality didn't build it. Instead they opened a gate to other dimensions. Weird, but it made sense in a strange way. It was the fact that this unknown enemy was not something that his reality could deal with without the help of this stranger that worried him.
"Why do you care what happens to us?" Suspicion reverberated in his voice.
The tall alien raised up one eyebrow and smirked. "How can I continue to torture humans if there aren't any left?" D'Hoffryn waved his hand in a lazy gesture and was swallowed up by flames once again. When they faded away, he was gone.
For a long moment Johnny stared at the empty space that had just held the tall doom-saying alien and tried to convince himself that he was drunk or insane or something. Then the strange man shifted slightly and proved that he was also still there and as such not a figment of his warped imagination.
"Fuck!"
The man snorted and looked up at Johnny, his young face pulled into a wan smile even though his dark eyes seemed to hold pain and despair. "Look, kid. I'm sorry that you got pulled into this crap. Just…" he sighed, "just go on home and forget about it ever happening. It's not something that you need to worry about or get involved in."
Johnny blinked at him for a moment in confusion until he realized that the guy was trying to protect him from what he saw as a dangerous situation because he thought that he was the kid he looked like. Johnny frowned and reached up to rub his temples in an effort to fend off the headache that he could feel starting.
"First off, before you go off and get yourself in a mess by being an alien on my world, let's have some formal introductions. That might make you understand some things. Okay?"
The guy shrugged lightly as if it wouldn't bother him to humor Johnny a bit. "Sure, kid."
A smirk twisted Johnny's lips, "Fine. I'm Jonathan O'Neill, the teenaged clone of Colonel Jack O'Neill USAF, the 2IC of the program that deals with that gate to other planets that your friend was telling you about. I'm the result of a kidnapping by an alien mad-scientist and a botched cloning experiment so I've got the full set of memories and knowledge, but only a fraction of the age. You?"
The kid in the strange oversized uniform blinked rapidly at him for a long moment as he processed all that Johnny had said and then shook his head slightly and sighed. "I'm Commander Watcher Alexander Harris of the United Slayer Army, Commander in charge of the forces assigned to the Middle East and Africa, specifically. In demonic circles I'm also known as Xanris the White Knight." He shrugged lightly, but his eyes spoke differently, "I'm actually around 56 years old and used to have thinning gray hair, one eye and a knee and hip so messed up I could barely walk without my brace."
Johnny chuckled, but it was an understanding and sarcastic sort of laugh, "Yeah. I get it." He gestured to his own head of short brown hair, "Gray and going grayer," then he flexed his knees meaningfully, "both of them were getting worse by the mission and it won't be long until they give out on my original and then he'll be riding a desk instead of in the field."
The was a long pause where they both just watched the other, threat assessing, thinking and processing what they had learned and wondering just what the hell this was all going to mean once everything had been figured out. Finally, Johnny sighed and gestured with his head to the wooden stairs leading up to his apartment over Lou Ferretti's garage.
"Come on. Let's get you inside and fed if you're hungry. I've got clothes that will fit you and you really can not wander around with those weapons. You'll be picked up and tossed in the slam until they figure out what to do with an armed kid with no papers." He shrugged and stared into the distance for another moment. "I hate to say it, but I should also contact my original. He needs to know about you and the supposed threat you're here to deal with, plus he can get you papers and set up an identity for you."
The other displaced teen tensed instantly, "Uh…I don't know. I'm not real keen on being locked up in a lab and getting dissected by a bunch of military doctors so they can figure out how I tick, ya know?"
Johnny didn't even try to tell him that something like that would never happen. If the NID caught wind of him, they would have just that in mind. "Understood. I feel the same way and I won't lie to you, there are groups out there that would find dissecting both you and me a whole lotta fun. Jack isn't with one of those. Hell, I'm a clone made by advanced alien technology and I'm not strapped to a table somewhere. And even if Jack wasn't a stand-up guy, General Hammond is."
"Hammond, Hammond." Xander glanced up at Johnny with a questioning look on his face, "General George Hammond, father of Samantha Marie Hammond-Finn?"
Johnny raised up an eyebrow and nodded, "Yeah. Him. Only, Samantha never got married in this timeline. She, um,,,she was killed several years ago in a car wreak when she was on leave up in New York." He winced and then looked back up, "Sorry."
Xander nodded and sighed, "Yeah."
There was a long awkward pause and Johnny wanted to get past that so he clapped his hands together and nodded. "Right. Let's…just get this show on the road. Or, rather, into my apartment before the neighbors decide it's time for them to take an interest."
Xander gave a bark of derisive laughter and shook his head even as he began heading up the stairs. "People are blind and stupid. They'll only get involved if it is one – safe for them, two – won't mess with their narrow vision of the world and three – will fuck someone else's life up in the process."
Johnny found himself nodding in agreement even as he smirked, "A touch on the pessimistic side, ain't'cha?"
Xander threw him a slightly amused look over his shoulder as he reached the small landing at the top of the stairs. "I was in the desert once and saved a lady from being eaten by a large reptile from a lower dimension. One that walked on its hind legs, carried weapons and growled out a fairly understandable version of the Arabic language. So, after she thanked me for killing it, she informed me that they grew their alligators real big in that area." He snorted, "So, no it's not pessimism, its realism."
Laughing, Johnny opened his front door and gestured Xander inside. "You think that's bad? Let me tell you about this one time when I was on a mission…." And then he shut the door behind them as they walked into his living room.
END – WISH GRANTED