Airman Harris 16
Apr. 18th, 2012 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_galSTOP! This is the second chapter in two days, so get 'em in order.
Airman Harris
Chapter Fifteen
Rated: Adult
Pairing: Xander/Daniel (and who the hell knows where this is going)
Jack O'Neill is really trying to figure out where he missed something, because he's having to do some quick reevaluation
Previous chapters: One : Two : Three : Four : Five : Six : Seven : Eight : Nine : Ten : Eleven : Twelve : Thirteen : Fourteen : Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Looking at Harris now, Jack wondered how he had missed all the signs. The kid was a chameleon. Either that or Jack was getting too old to do a proper assessment. Harris was sweating, his eyes on the ground like he thought he was walking to the grave, yet his eyes kept darting around, and when Jack walked too close, there was a tenseness, a borderline panic that Jack recognized.
He glanced back at Teal'c who had their six. "We clear?" Jack asked. He really did not want to get surprised by any more sword-wielding idiots. Actually, they'd been fairly nice nutballs until Jack had made some quip about the slayer, and then they had lost their minds. Those three should be waking up from the zats any time now, but Jack didn't have the manpower to manage prisoners, so he couldn't do anything about it.
"We are," Teal'c assured him.
Jack nodded and pulled out his phone. He suspected this conversation wasn't going to go well, and he wanted to make sure they didn't get interrupted by any more drama. He hadn't been joking about one thing--he definitely wasn't the strangest person in this very odd little town.
The phone rang on the other end, and Danny picked up within a second. "Did you find him?"
"Yes, I found him," Jack said as calmly as he could. He hadn't seen Daniel this worked up since the snakeheads had taken Sha're, so any thoughts that this was a sex-induced infatuation had pretty much vanished. "And yes he's fine, and yes, he's in trouble, and no, I'm not going to just ignore this, and no, you can't come rescue him from the big bad colonel," Jack added before Daniel could even ask the questions. The man was predictable.
"Jack." The harsh tone made it perfectly clear that Daniel was reaching a breaking point, but Jack had been dealing with Daniel and his breaking points for years. They weren't as nerve-wracking as they used to be.
"Daniel," Jack shot back in the exact same tone.
"He's a kid, Jack."
Jack doubted that Harris had been a kid for a very long time, but he wasn't about to debate Daniel over the phone. A wise soldier knew when he was outgunned and he retreated.
"I will handle this. You and Carter join us at the secondary site in the morning."
"The morning?" And that was a Daniel-squawk, a sure sign that Daniel was about to start swearing in obscure languages.
"Yes, the morning," Jack said firmly. The conversation he needed to have with Xander wouldn't be pretty, but the boil needed to be lanced. Daniel, however, would try wrapping Harris up in cotton and protecting him, which was exactly the wrong tactic to take. "Daniel," Jack said in a softer tone, "trust me."
The silence at the other end spoke of fear and of a certain disbelief that Jack could handle things diplomatically. Jack did appreciate the irony that Daniel was judging Jack based on a facade Jack deliberately constructed. He could do diplomacy. If he couldn't, he wouldn't have risen through the ranks. However, he'd had others betray him often enough that he didn't like to do diplomacy because his trust levels were a little unpredictable. Harris wasn't the only one with battle scars that were more emotional than physical.
"Don't do anything to hurt him," Daniel finally warned him. Jack sighed. That really was the last thing on his mind, but given the way Harris was flinching at shadows, achieving that goal wouldn't be easy. So Jack just closed the phone without answering. Daniel would torture him for it later, but right now, Jack didn't have any reassurances.
"Let's head for the hotel. Harris, are there any particularly dangerous corners between here and the Griffin hotel?"
"All of them?" Harris said with a derisive snort. That answered one of Jack's questions--Harris was damaged enough that he couldn't rank relative danger. All dangers appeared extreme. Part of Jack wanted to file the paperwork for an honorable discharge and put the man in therapy. God knows that's exactly what MacKenzie would do.
"Teal'c, take point. Harris, stay sharp. If we have more adversaries on the field, I really don't want to end up dead. I'd never hear the end of it from the general." Pulling his weapon, Jack held it out for Harris.
Harris looked at him with alarm. Yep, that was alarm. His gaze darted down to the weapon, up to Jack's face, down to the weapon. He was going to pull an eye muscle at this rate.
"Go on. I know you passed your small arms test with flying colors. Just do me a favor and avoid shooting any bystanders. It's hell on the paperwork." Jack lifted the weapon, and slowly Harris reached for it. From the kid's scores, Jack trusted him to hit what he aimed at. From the raging case of PTSD, he really did worry that Harris might startle at some six year old and shoot her. But with active enemies on the field and only three of them, Jack wasn't about to disarm one-third of his forces.
"Stakes work better. Vampires don't really care about getting shot. Well, they do, but it's more of a 'hey, you shot me, you bloody idiot' sort of way," Harris said, his humor starting to reassert itself. Harris had a strong core in him, even if the edges were fraying a bit.
Teal'c spoke up, his calmness probably doing more good that Jack's irreverence would at this point. "I have little experience with vampires. What vulnerabilities should I target, Xander Harris?"
Xander shifted his grip on the weapon and tucked it into a pocket as he straightened up. "Knees and eyes. If they can't see you, they're pretty much helpless, and without knees, they are definitely not up to chasing you. Despite popular mythology, they do not turn into bats."
"Sounds like solid strategy," Jack agreed. "And we have enough tree limbs around here to finish the job. Why would vampires live around all these trees? I would think New York City would be a lot more comfortable for people with a wood allergy."
"Yeah, well don't expect them to be all that bright. We had a big bad around here once who liked psychological torture. His big thing was to kill Willow's fish. It was really sad."
Jack didn't answer, but it did reassure him a little. If these kids had to fight on their own, at least they weren't fighting Apophis or Ra levels of evil.
"Of course then there's the Master who actually killed Buffy and I had to bring her back with CPR, but it turned out that he was so old that he could be resurrected from his bones, and normally vampires don't leave bones behind, so that was different. This whole group of vampires pretty much kidnapped everyone to use them in a ritual sacrifice."
And there went all of Jack's reassurance. Crap.
"But Buffy saved the day. She does that a lot. She's one of the oldest slayers ever, you know." Harris kept right on talking, but Jack and Teal'c exchanged their own concerned looks. Summers was a baby, in Jack's book. She was barely out of high school, and compared with him or Teal'c, she couldn't even be considered full grown, but Harris said she was one of the oldest slayers. Soldiers and airmen and sailors that age fought every day, but they did it under the protection of older, more experienced fighters who would protect them from their own mistakes. Whatever fucked up situation had developed here, Jack was making it a personal mission to make sure that it ended here and now.
"Finn thinks highly of her," Jack said carefully. The written briefing Finn had provided made it abundantly clear that Summers was competent, irreverent, and damn hard to kill. It was a good combination. It also suggested that she was oblivious to certain military truths in life, and after seeing Harris in his native environment, Jack agreed. Harris screamed PTSD. The red-head looked pretty damn twitchy, too. Although oddly, Summers was alert without giving any of the panicky signs of someone on hyperalert. The dynamics here were more than Jack could make sense out of.
"Riley was a good guy. Okay, so he started on the wrong side and he was a little clueless with the whole unconditional trust of the military thing, but he was a good guy, and he made Buffy happy. She deserved a little happiness after all the not-happy she's gotten. And on the subject of Buffy not-happiness, I'm pretty sure that the doctors didn't clear Joyce to leave the hospital, and she's going to kill me for saying that, but I'm worried about her."
"That's Buffy's mom?" Jack asked.
Harris nodded.
"Why would she take her mom out of the hospital if she wasn't ready?"
That got another snort. "Oh, you have no idea the things that wander the Sunnydale Memorial Hospital. Vampires go there for bagged blood, there are ghosts in the halls and sometimes the nasty sorts of demons hunt there for easy prey. When Buffy was deathly sick, she had to fight this creepy guy who could turn himself invisible... sort of... but anyway, he fed on sick children, sucking out their lifeforce. If you get shot in town, I would really recommend just letting it bleed until you can get back to LA."
Jack's threat assessment nerve was twitching, and he was starting to wonder if Harris was hypervigilant or just being reasonably afraid given how strange this town was.
"If we need to, we can use the Army base."
"I wouldn't," Harris warned. "That's the place where I pretty much took whatever weapons I wanted and then there was the case of the vampire master who tried setting up a nest inside the base using a couple of officers he turned into childer, and it was a big mess and Buffy complained for a week that she tore her pants on the barbed wire, climbing it when the base alarm went off. And considering that we live in town, we really shouldn't have been that hard to find, but no one came looking."
Jack rubbed a hand over his face. "Great. The police?"
"They usually try to arrest Buffy."
Jack was starting to think the whole town should be bulldozed. A tactical nuclear strike might be the best option. Unfortunately, the higher-ups frowned on nuking their own world, and wasn't that ironic considering how quickly they decided to nuke Abydos?
"SG3 is on call, and I think I'll call," Jack said wearily. He had expected fucked up, but this exceeded even his levels of pessimism.
Teal'c reached the drive to the Griffin hotel and stood in the drive on full alert. In any other town, a giant black man at full military alert in the middle of a driveway would catch some attention. Here, no one even seemed to notice.
"We have rooms 403 and 405," Jack said as he urged Harris to keep walking. Jack wasn't surprised at the flinch when his hand touched Harris' shoulder.
"Only two rooms?" Harris sounded on the verge of hyperventilating. Jack suspected that he was afraid of being trapped in the same room, of being penned in. Too fucking bad. The boil needed to be lanced before a discharge was the only option available.
"Never divide your forced when you're outnumbered, which, given the circumstances is always."
"You and Teal'c left Daniel and Carter behind," Harris pointed out. For someone who liked to play dumb, the kid was too sharp for his own good.
"Well funny enough, I thought we were in friendly territory."
And Harris answered with another snort.
"You know, a lot commanding officers don't appreciate the attitude, Harris."
"Pretty much none of them do," Harris answered. So the kid knew he was annoying, and he kept it up. Either he really didn't care or Jack could add self-destructive to the list of symptoms. After that, they fell silent as they rode the elevator up, Teal'c standing between them and the doors as though they were in enemy territory, but then Jack had that same feeling. Sunnydale definitely didn't give off the warm and fuzzy vibes.
They reached the rooms with Teal'c peeling off to room 403 while Jack pulled Harris toward 405. They'd already swept the room, set up their own security and unlocked the connecting door; however, Jack still moved into the darkened room on full alert, checking the steadily blinking beacon for confirmation that they were the first life forms to enter the room since he and Teal'c had left.
"You want to give me my sidearm back?" Jack asked. Harris handed it over without a second thought, so he definitely wasn't planning to try and fight his way out of any messes. If he was, he'd be smart to make a move while Teal'c was in the other room. "You have any weapons of your own?" Jack asked, just to be sure. Harris shook his head, and Jack tended to believe him. He also thought that wandering around Sunnydale unarmed was about as self-destructive as anything he'd ever seen a serviceman do.
"Where's Daniel?" Harris asked as Jack turned on the lights and gave two knocks on the connecting door to let Teal'c know his side was secure. One knock answered him. All clear.
"He's at the Seaside Inn about forty minutes outside of town. You have any stories about that place?"
Harris shook his head. "Most of the bad guys stick close to town because the hellmouth is under the old school."
"The one you blew up?" Jack clarified.
Harris looked at him with eyes so wide that Jack could see the whites around them.
"Riley told you?"
"Riley showed me," Jack corrected him. "The footage was pretty grainy, but it gave me a fairly good idea of what went on at graduation. The snake as a nice touch. Blowing it up was even better."
Harris started breathing faster. "Look, Colonel, I know you don’t like me."
"Don’t tell me how I feel, Harris," Jack said, cutting him off. He had no idea was was in Harris' mind, but it was wrong. Jack may not want to like Harris, but he had to respect a man with the balls to pull off what Harris had.
"Okay. You have an expression on your face that makes you look like you just stepped on a bug whenever I get too close. See? I didn’t mention your feelings at all." Xander gave a totally insincere grin.
"Yeah, well looking in a mirror is never pretty, especially not at my age," Jack pointed out dryly. He was actually starting to have a little sympathy for the many commanders he'd annoyed with irreverent humor.
"What?” Harris was confused out of his self-hate.
"You. I saw the footage from your graduation. That was a military action."
Harris shrugged like the whole incident was nothing. "Stuff happens."
"Stuff?" If Harris really thought that a full-scale military maneuver with resulting casualties was stuff, he was insane. However, Jack suspected that Harris was just avoiding the real meat of the subject to avoid feeling the pain.
"Yep." Harris turned around and headed for the window. Sweeping back the curtains with his hand, he looked outside. A little voice in Jack's head screamed about sharpshooters and backlit targets, but everything he'd read suggested that sharpshooters weren't part of the problem here, so he ignored that crawling fear in his own gut.
"Like friends dying when they’re following your orders?" Jack asked. It was time to lance this boil before Harris put another numbing layer on top. Right now he might feel raw, but Jack needed him to feel a whole lot more.
Harris whirled around. "Hey, I am not the sort to give orders."
Jack sat carefully on the edge of the bed, watching Harris' body language. A man could only be pushed so far before he snapped, and Jack wasn't fool enough to discount Harris' abilities. Teal'c thought enough to train him, and Harris was half his age, so Jack wasn't discounting him as a threat. "Buffy might be the general, but you were the one on the field directing the action," Jack pointed out.
"You’ve confused me with someone competent." Harris gave a pained laugh.
"You’re right that the man on that field was competent," Jack said mildly. Harris' body had tightened up like an overwound spring, and Jack could almost hear the cracking as the facade started to slip. "From a military perspective, I can say that the man on that field managed to meet a superior force, handle a flanking maneuver from a new enemy on the field and keep his troops in formation the whole time." The compliment might be true, but it wouldn't make Harris feel better. When people complimented an action, it felt like a slap in the face, every damn time. Jack knew that feeling all too well. If he was so damn good, why had people died? Yeah, Jack knew exactly how Harris would hear his words. Sure enough, Harris turned an alarming shade of white.
"And yet people died."
"People do that," Jack agreed. It was cold comfort, but he wouldn't lie to Harris.
"Yeah. So I hear." Harris backed up until his pressed himself to the dresser before going for a quick change of subject. "Look, if you’re going to arrest me for desertion, I’m not even going to fight the charge, but you make sure that Buffy has backup. She doesn’t ask for help, not even when she needs it, and Giles spends all his time explaining exactly why the slayer has to handle everything. And I am not suggesting you can take over because I don’t care how many aliens you fought, you don’t have her instincts or her prophetic dreams or her weird ability to quip and asskick at the same time. You can’t do her job, but she can’t do it without help, and everyone always tells her that she shouldn’t need help. It’s killing her, and it’s killing Willow because she’s pushing herself way too hard just so that Buffy isn’t out there alone."
Jack blew out a breath. Okay, the kid surprised him. He hadn't expected that much insight out of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. Xander might play stupid, but he had a better handle on the truth than Finn had given him credit for, and Finn had clearly liked him. "You want to be arrested, don’t you?" Jack asked.
Harris jerked as though hit by an electric charge. "What? No. I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I’m not looking forward to bending over in the shower for my soap."
"If you were in a cell, you wouldn’t be responsible for any of this," Jack pointed out.
Harris was quick to spit out his response. "You’re full of shit." However, Jack could see the shadowed doubts in Xander's eyes. He didn't know if he wanted to be arrested or not. He was at least considering his own illogical reactions.
"You’re so caught between wanting to run away and wanting to back up Buffy and protect her from her own mistakes that you can’t see straight. I bet there are nights that you wake up in a cold sweat, terrified that you’ve forgotten something. You look at people and you find yourself constantly trying to figure out if they’re a danger, and when you catch yourself doing it, you try to stop. But when you stop, you feel this cold panic like the woman who just passed you in the cereal aisle is going to turn around and shoot you in the back."
"What? No." Harris might have insight, but he was clearly the worst liar Jack had ever met.
"You suck at lying, Harris."
"I don’t… I’m not the one who has to carry the weight of being the one girl in all the world."
"Hey, maybe she’s even more screwed up. I haven’t talked to her enough to know for sure. But right now, I know that you’re falling apart. Have you gotten to the stage where you start looking at alcohol and wondering if it would dull some of the pain? That’s the next step, you know.”
Harris stared at him with a barely disguised panic raging just below the surface.
"Harris, do you really think you’re the only man to be this fucked up? Hell, after my first tour in Iraq, I couldn’t sleep in the same room with my wife because I’d wake up and panic at the feeling of another person touching me. It took a lot of therapy for me to get over that, and I was older than you. I was older, and I had officer training behind me, so I knew what to expect. I knew the psychological toll of war, and even that couldn’t protect me from feeling it."
"You couldn’t sleep with her?" Harris' voice came out thin and strained, like he was struggling to even speak or maybe he was struggling to not scream. Jack had been both places as he tried to get his own balance back.
"Nope. That happen to you?" Jack asked softly. This wasn't some raw recruit doing something stupid, like going AWOL to visit a girl. This was a battle weary soldier with too much pain to make any sort of rational decision. And it didn't escape Jack's attention that Harris' instinct had been to run for the war, not away from it. He just ran for the war he knew.
Harris gave a reluctant nod. “I moved into my basement because when my mom would get up to go to the bathroom, I would panic and think that someone had gotten in the house or that she’d been turned. I would spend the rest of the night checking the locks and clutching a cross."
"That’s normal, Xander."
The explosion came, but Harris stormed across the room instead of attacking. Jack leaped up to keep Harris from running out into the hall, but Harris reversed direction and ended up back at the window, his body trembling. "How can that be normal? I feel like I’m always waiting for the next person to try and kill me."
"Let me tell you something Captain Finn said."
"Great," Harris said, self-hate coloring his voice. "I bet he said I was a real basket case."
"He said you were traumatized. You didn’t have the support you needed to fight this battle. He also said you were less damaged than anyone else in your group." Jack was really hoping that he was dead wrong on that. If Harris was the least damaged, they were going to need a whole squadron of psychiatrists. However, Jack suspected that Harris had effectively hidden a lot of this damage from his friends. The fact that he had hidden it from a field commander with training in psychology didn't say much about Finn's skills, though. A kid should not be able to bluff an officer.
"God, I hope that’s not true. If they’re more damaged than me, we have a problem," Harris whispered, his voice utterly defeated.
"The only problem is if you don’t get help, Harris."
"I don’t…. I can’t….” Harris lost the pattern of breathing and seemed to flail for a moment.
"You can, Xander. It’s hard. It’s hard facing your psychological demons, but that’s what we do in the military. We face them."
Harris rubbed his eyes even though Jack couldn't see any actual tears. Yet.
"Who died that day at graduation?"
Harris stopped breathing.
“Just one. Remembering won’t change anything, and it can’t hurt you unless you let it, unless you lock it up and let it fester. Come on, Airman, cough up a name. Who died?”
“Larry.” The name seemed to slip out without Harris' permission, and the moment he said it, Harris just froze. The guilt almost leaked from him, and Jack so wished he could pull out every bad memory and toss it away, but that's not how it worked. Xander had to find a way through this pain. And he'd have to find a way over and over and over until he figured out how to have a life without the pain ruling him. Jack waited, not sure how Xander would react and he really didn't want to get punched.
A wordless cry followed, and Xander seemed to crumple to the ground. Jack darted forward, trying to catch Xander's head, but it thunked against the dresser with a hollow sound. However, the second Jack touched him, Xander grabbed his shirt, the raw desperation circling like a low-lying fog. Jack caught Xander by the back of the neck and pulled him close, holding him as tight as he could, but Xander still clung like he was afraid someone was going to pull him away. After the first cry, Xander fell silent, but Jack could feel the trembling ripping through his body. His breathing turned ragged and then the real tears came.
Jack ached for him. He'd spent his own time trying so hard to push his pain way. He'd wanted to die after losing his son. But his pain wasn't Xander's and he couldn't do anything to dull Xander's pain. He could only hold on as Xander struggled to feel everything he'd spend years trying to avoid.
The connecting door opened, and Jack looked up as Teal'c stood in the doorway, silently watching. He had no censure on his face, but he stood as a mute witness as Xander's cries gradually faded. It took over an hour, but eventually the stiff muscles and hard tremors faded until Xander lay limp in Jack's arms, either asleep or too worn out to keep grieving. Jack didn't fool himself. This was the first step in a long journey. But at least Harris had the balls to start down it. Plenty of men could never face their own fears.
"You want to give me a hand?" Jack asked softly. Teal'c moved into the room, a silent shadow as he walked over and knelt down to scoop Harris up. Harris was really out of it. His eyes didn't even flicker as Teal'c lifted him and took him into the other room.
Jack sat on the floor feeling nearly as exhausted himself. Watching Harris fight through all the pain made his own wounds feel more raw than they had in a while. Losing people. It wasn't easy. And the officers for whom it became easy weren't worth their spit. Mostly, those bastards joined the NID.
Teal'c reappeared at the connecting door, and Jack made a production of standing with his stiff knees. Usually he was exaggerating when he talked about his old legs, but Xander had put his weight onto Jack's left leg, and he had a raging case of pins and needles. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Jack rubbed his sore leg.
"He has endured much," Teal'c commented.
"Yep."
Teal'c nodded but he didn't say anything more. Jack figured that neither of them needed to talk about it because both of them had seen their share of men struggling to carry the emotional burdens the world required them to carry. Really, Daniel should have found someone with fewer scars.
Airman HarrisChapter Fifteen
Rated: Adult
Pairing: Xander/Daniel (and who the hell knows where this is going)
Jack O'Neill is really trying to figure out where he missed something, because he's having to do some quick reevaluation
Previous chapters: One : Two : Three : Four : Five : Six : Seven : Eight : Nine : Ten : Eleven : Twelve : Thirteen : Fourteen : Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Looking at Harris now, Jack wondered how he had missed all the signs. The kid was a chameleon. Either that or Jack was getting too old to do a proper assessment. Harris was sweating, his eyes on the ground like he thought he was walking to the grave, yet his eyes kept darting around, and when Jack walked too close, there was a tenseness, a borderline panic that Jack recognized.
He glanced back at Teal'c who had their six. "We clear?" Jack asked. He really did not want to get surprised by any more sword-wielding idiots. Actually, they'd been fairly nice nutballs until Jack had made some quip about the slayer, and then they had lost their minds. Those three should be waking up from the zats any time now, but Jack didn't have the manpower to manage prisoners, so he couldn't do anything about it.
"We are," Teal'c assured him.
Jack nodded and pulled out his phone. He suspected this conversation wasn't going to go well, and he wanted to make sure they didn't get interrupted by any more drama. He hadn't been joking about one thing--he definitely wasn't the strangest person in this very odd little town.
The phone rang on the other end, and Danny picked up within a second. "Did you find him?"
"Yes, I found him," Jack said as calmly as he could. He hadn't seen Daniel this worked up since the snakeheads had taken Sha're, so any thoughts that this was a sex-induced infatuation had pretty much vanished. "And yes he's fine, and yes, he's in trouble, and no, I'm not going to just ignore this, and no, you can't come rescue him from the big bad colonel," Jack added before Daniel could even ask the questions. The man was predictable.
"Jack." The harsh tone made it perfectly clear that Daniel was reaching a breaking point, but Jack had been dealing with Daniel and his breaking points for years. They weren't as nerve-wracking as they used to be.
"Daniel," Jack shot back in the exact same tone.
"He's a kid, Jack."
Jack doubted that Harris had been a kid for a very long time, but he wasn't about to debate Daniel over the phone. A wise soldier knew when he was outgunned and he retreated.
"I will handle this. You and Carter join us at the secondary site in the morning."
"The morning?" And that was a Daniel-squawk, a sure sign that Daniel was about to start swearing in obscure languages.
"Yes, the morning," Jack said firmly. The conversation he needed to have with Xander wouldn't be pretty, but the boil needed to be lanced. Daniel, however, would try wrapping Harris up in cotton and protecting him, which was exactly the wrong tactic to take. "Daniel," Jack said in a softer tone, "trust me."
The silence at the other end spoke of fear and of a certain disbelief that Jack could handle things diplomatically. Jack did appreciate the irony that Daniel was judging Jack based on a facade Jack deliberately constructed. He could do diplomacy. If he couldn't, he wouldn't have risen through the ranks. However, he'd had others betray him often enough that he didn't like to do diplomacy because his trust levels were a little unpredictable. Harris wasn't the only one with battle scars that were more emotional than physical.
"Don't do anything to hurt him," Daniel finally warned him. Jack sighed. That really was the last thing on his mind, but given the way Harris was flinching at shadows, achieving that goal wouldn't be easy. So Jack just closed the phone without answering. Daniel would torture him for it later, but right now, Jack didn't have any reassurances.
"Let's head for the hotel. Harris, are there any particularly dangerous corners between here and the Griffin hotel?"
"All of them?" Harris said with a derisive snort. That answered one of Jack's questions--Harris was damaged enough that he couldn't rank relative danger. All dangers appeared extreme. Part of Jack wanted to file the paperwork for an honorable discharge and put the man in therapy. God knows that's exactly what MacKenzie would do.
"Teal'c, take point. Harris, stay sharp. If we have more adversaries on the field, I really don't want to end up dead. I'd never hear the end of it from the general." Pulling his weapon, Jack held it out for Harris.
Harris looked at him with alarm. Yep, that was alarm. His gaze darted down to the weapon, up to Jack's face, down to the weapon. He was going to pull an eye muscle at this rate.
"Go on. I know you passed your small arms test with flying colors. Just do me a favor and avoid shooting any bystanders. It's hell on the paperwork." Jack lifted the weapon, and slowly Harris reached for it. From the kid's scores, Jack trusted him to hit what he aimed at. From the raging case of PTSD, he really did worry that Harris might startle at some six year old and shoot her. But with active enemies on the field and only three of them, Jack wasn't about to disarm one-third of his forces.
"Stakes work better. Vampires don't really care about getting shot. Well, they do, but it's more of a 'hey, you shot me, you bloody idiot' sort of way," Harris said, his humor starting to reassert itself. Harris had a strong core in him, even if the edges were fraying a bit.
Teal'c spoke up, his calmness probably doing more good that Jack's irreverence would at this point. "I have little experience with vampires. What vulnerabilities should I target, Xander Harris?"
Xander shifted his grip on the weapon and tucked it into a pocket as he straightened up. "Knees and eyes. If they can't see you, they're pretty much helpless, and without knees, they are definitely not up to chasing you. Despite popular mythology, they do not turn into bats."
"Sounds like solid strategy," Jack agreed. "And we have enough tree limbs around here to finish the job. Why would vampires live around all these trees? I would think New York City would be a lot more comfortable for people with a wood allergy."
"Yeah, well don't expect them to be all that bright. We had a big bad around here once who liked psychological torture. His big thing was to kill Willow's fish. It was really sad."
Jack didn't answer, but it did reassure him a little. If these kids had to fight on their own, at least they weren't fighting Apophis or Ra levels of evil.
"Of course then there's the Master who actually killed Buffy and I had to bring her back with CPR, but it turned out that he was so old that he could be resurrected from his bones, and normally vampires don't leave bones behind, so that was different. This whole group of vampires pretty much kidnapped everyone to use them in a ritual sacrifice."
And there went all of Jack's reassurance. Crap.
"But Buffy saved the day. She does that a lot. She's one of the oldest slayers ever, you know." Harris kept right on talking, but Jack and Teal'c exchanged their own concerned looks. Summers was a baby, in Jack's book. She was barely out of high school, and compared with him or Teal'c, she couldn't even be considered full grown, but Harris said she was one of the oldest slayers. Soldiers and airmen and sailors that age fought every day, but they did it under the protection of older, more experienced fighters who would protect them from their own mistakes. Whatever fucked up situation had developed here, Jack was making it a personal mission to make sure that it ended here and now.
"Finn thinks highly of her," Jack said carefully. The written briefing Finn had provided made it abundantly clear that Summers was competent, irreverent, and damn hard to kill. It was a good combination. It also suggested that she was oblivious to certain military truths in life, and after seeing Harris in his native environment, Jack agreed. Harris screamed PTSD. The red-head looked pretty damn twitchy, too. Although oddly, Summers was alert without giving any of the panicky signs of someone on hyperalert. The dynamics here were more than Jack could make sense out of.
"Riley was a good guy. Okay, so he started on the wrong side and he was a little clueless with the whole unconditional trust of the military thing, but he was a good guy, and he made Buffy happy. She deserved a little happiness after all the not-happy she's gotten. And on the subject of Buffy not-happiness, I'm pretty sure that the doctors didn't clear Joyce to leave the hospital, and she's going to kill me for saying that, but I'm worried about her."
"That's Buffy's mom?" Jack asked.
Harris nodded.
"Why would she take her mom out of the hospital if she wasn't ready?"
That got another snort. "Oh, you have no idea the things that wander the Sunnydale Memorial Hospital. Vampires go there for bagged blood, there are ghosts in the halls and sometimes the nasty sorts of demons hunt there for easy prey. When Buffy was deathly sick, she had to fight this creepy guy who could turn himself invisible... sort of... but anyway, he fed on sick children, sucking out their lifeforce. If you get shot in town, I would really recommend just letting it bleed until you can get back to LA."
Jack's threat assessment nerve was twitching, and he was starting to wonder if Harris was hypervigilant or just being reasonably afraid given how strange this town was.
"If we need to, we can use the Army base."
"I wouldn't," Harris warned. "That's the place where I pretty much took whatever weapons I wanted and then there was the case of the vampire master who tried setting up a nest inside the base using a couple of officers he turned into childer, and it was a big mess and Buffy complained for a week that she tore her pants on the barbed wire, climbing it when the base alarm went off. And considering that we live in town, we really shouldn't have been that hard to find, but no one came looking."
Jack rubbed a hand over his face. "Great. The police?"
"They usually try to arrest Buffy."
Jack was starting to think the whole town should be bulldozed. A tactical nuclear strike might be the best option. Unfortunately, the higher-ups frowned on nuking their own world, and wasn't that ironic considering how quickly they decided to nuke Abydos?
"SG3 is on call, and I think I'll call," Jack said wearily. He had expected fucked up, but this exceeded even his levels of pessimism.
Teal'c reached the drive to the Griffin hotel and stood in the drive on full alert. In any other town, a giant black man at full military alert in the middle of a driveway would catch some attention. Here, no one even seemed to notice.
"We have rooms 403 and 405," Jack said as he urged Harris to keep walking. Jack wasn't surprised at the flinch when his hand touched Harris' shoulder.
"Only two rooms?" Harris sounded on the verge of hyperventilating. Jack suspected that he was afraid of being trapped in the same room, of being penned in. Too fucking bad. The boil needed to be lanced before a discharge was the only option available.
"Never divide your forced when you're outnumbered, which, given the circumstances is always."
"You and Teal'c left Daniel and Carter behind," Harris pointed out. For someone who liked to play dumb, the kid was too sharp for his own good.
"Well funny enough, I thought we were in friendly territory."
And Harris answered with another snort.
"You know, a lot commanding officers don't appreciate the attitude, Harris."
"Pretty much none of them do," Harris answered. So the kid knew he was annoying, and he kept it up. Either he really didn't care or Jack could add self-destructive to the list of symptoms. After that, they fell silent as they rode the elevator up, Teal'c standing between them and the doors as though they were in enemy territory, but then Jack had that same feeling. Sunnydale definitely didn't give off the warm and fuzzy vibes.
They reached the rooms with Teal'c peeling off to room 403 while Jack pulled Harris toward 405. They'd already swept the room, set up their own security and unlocked the connecting door; however, Jack still moved into the darkened room on full alert, checking the steadily blinking beacon for confirmation that they were the first life forms to enter the room since he and Teal'c had left.
"You want to give me my sidearm back?" Jack asked. Harris handed it over without a second thought, so he definitely wasn't planning to try and fight his way out of any messes. If he was, he'd be smart to make a move while Teal'c was in the other room. "You have any weapons of your own?" Jack asked, just to be sure. Harris shook his head, and Jack tended to believe him. He also thought that wandering around Sunnydale unarmed was about as self-destructive as anything he'd ever seen a serviceman do.
"Where's Daniel?" Harris asked as Jack turned on the lights and gave two knocks on the connecting door to let Teal'c know his side was secure. One knock answered him. All clear.
"He's at the Seaside Inn about forty minutes outside of town. You have any stories about that place?"
Harris shook his head. "Most of the bad guys stick close to town because the hellmouth is under the old school."
"The one you blew up?" Jack clarified.
Harris looked at him with eyes so wide that Jack could see the whites around them.
"Riley told you?"
"Riley showed me," Jack corrected him. "The footage was pretty grainy, but it gave me a fairly good idea of what went on at graduation. The snake as a nice touch. Blowing it up was even better."
Harris started breathing faster. "Look, Colonel, I know you don’t like me."
"Don’t tell me how I feel, Harris," Jack said, cutting him off. He had no idea was was in Harris' mind, but it was wrong. Jack may not want to like Harris, but he had to respect a man with the balls to pull off what Harris had.
"Okay. You have an expression on your face that makes you look like you just stepped on a bug whenever I get too close. See? I didn’t mention your feelings at all." Xander gave a totally insincere grin.
"Yeah, well looking in a mirror is never pretty, especially not at my age," Jack pointed out dryly. He was actually starting to have a little sympathy for the many commanders he'd annoyed with irreverent humor.
"What?” Harris was confused out of his self-hate.
"You. I saw the footage from your graduation. That was a military action."
Harris shrugged like the whole incident was nothing. "Stuff happens."
"Stuff?" If Harris really thought that a full-scale military maneuver with resulting casualties was stuff, he was insane. However, Jack suspected that Harris was just avoiding the real meat of the subject to avoid feeling the pain.
"Yep." Harris turned around and headed for the window. Sweeping back the curtains with his hand, he looked outside. A little voice in Jack's head screamed about sharpshooters and backlit targets, but everything he'd read suggested that sharpshooters weren't part of the problem here, so he ignored that crawling fear in his own gut.
"Like friends dying when they’re following your orders?" Jack asked. It was time to lance this boil before Harris put another numbing layer on top. Right now he might feel raw, but Jack needed him to feel a whole lot more.
Harris whirled around. "Hey, I am not the sort to give orders."
Jack sat carefully on the edge of the bed, watching Harris' body language. A man could only be pushed so far before he snapped, and Jack wasn't fool enough to discount Harris' abilities. Teal'c thought enough to train him, and Harris was half his age, so Jack wasn't discounting him as a threat. "Buffy might be the general, but you were the one on the field directing the action," Jack pointed out.
"You’ve confused me with someone competent." Harris gave a pained laugh.
"You’re right that the man on that field was competent," Jack said mildly. Harris' body had tightened up like an overwound spring, and Jack could almost hear the cracking as the facade started to slip. "From a military perspective, I can say that the man on that field managed to meet a superior force, handle a flanking maneuver from a new enemy on the field and keep his troops in formation the whole time." The compliment might be true, but it wouldn't make Harris feel better. When people complimented an action, it felt like a slap in the face, every damn time. Jack knew that feeling all too well. If he was so damn good, why had people died? Yeah, Jack knew exactly how Harris would hear his words. Sure enough, Harris turned an alarming shade of white.
"And yet people died."
"People do that," Jack agreed. It was cold comfort, but he wouldn't lie to Harris.
"Yeah. So I hear." Harris backed up until his pressed himself to the dresser before going for a quick change of subject. "Look, if you’re going to arrest me for desertion, I’m not even going to fight the charge, but you make sure that Buffy has backup. She doesn’t ask for help, not even when she needs it, and Giles spends all his time explaining exactly why the slayer has to handle everything. And I am not suggesting you can take over because I don’t care how many aliens you fought, you don’t have her instincts or her prophetic dreams or her weird ability to quip and asskick at the same time. You can’t do her job, but she can’t do it without help, and everyone always tells her that she shouldn’t need help. It’s killing her, and it’s killing Willow because she’s pushing herself way too hard just so that Buffy isn’t out there alone."
Jack blew out a breath. Okay, the kid surprised him. He hadn't expected that much insight out of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. Xander might play stupid, but he had a better handle on the truth than Finn had given him credit for, and Finn had clearly liked him. "You want to be arrested, don’t you?" Jack asked.
Harris jerked as though hit by an electric charge. "What? No. I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I’m not looking forward to bending over in the shower for my soap."
"If you were in a cell, you wouldn’t be responsible for any of this," Jack pointed out.
Harris was quick to spit out his response. "You’re full of shit." However, Jack could see the shadowed doubts in Xander's eyes. He didn't know if he wanted to be arrested or not. He was at least considering his own illogical reactions.
"You’re so caught between wanting to run away and wanting to back up Buffy and protect her from her own mistakes that you can’t see straight. I bet there are nights that you wake up in a cold sweat, terrified that you’ve forgotten something. You look at people and you find yourself constantly trying to figure out if they’re a danger, and when you catch yourself doing it, you try to stop. But when you stop, you feel this cold panic like the woman who just passed you in the cereal aisle is going to turn around and shoot you in the back."
"What? No." Harris might have insight, but he was clearly the worst liar Jack had ever met.
"You suck at lying, Harris."
"I don’t… I’m not the one who has to carry the weight of being the one girl in all the world."
"Hey, maybe she’s even more screwed up. I haven’t talked to her enough to know for sure. But right now, I know that you’re falling apart. Have you gotten to the stage where you start looking at alcohol and wondering if it would dull some of the pain? That’s the next step, you know.”
Harris stared at him with a barely disguised panic raging just below the surface.
"Harris, do you really think you’re the only man to be this fucked up? Hell, after my first tour in Iraq, I couldn’t sleep in the same room with my wife because I’d wake up and panic at the feeling of another person touching me. It took a lot of therapy for me to get over that, and I was older than you. I was older, and I had officer training behind me, so I knew what to expect. I knew the psychological toll of war, and even that couldn’t protect me from feeling it."
"You couldn’t sleep with her?" Harris' voice came out thin and strained, like he was struggling to even speak or maybe he was struggling to not scream. Jack had been both places as he tried to get his own balance back.
"Nope. That happen to you?" Jack asked softly. This wasn't some raw recruit doing something stupid, like going AWOL to visit a girl. This was a battle weary soldier with too much pain to make any sort of rational decision. And it didn't escape Jack's attention that Harris' instinct had been to run for the war, not away from it. He just ran for the war he knew.
Harris gave a reluctant nod. “I moved into my basement because when my mom would get up to go to the bathroom, I would panic and think that someone had gotten in the house or that she’d been turned. I would spend the rest of the night checking the locks and clutching a cross."
"That’s normal, Xander."
The explosion came, but Harris stormed across the room instead of attacking. Jack leaped up to keep Harris from running out into the hall, but Harris reversed direction and ended up back at the window, his body trembling. "How can that be normal? I feel like I’m always waiting for the next person to try and kill me."
"Let me tell you something Captain Finn said."
"Great," Harris said, self-hate coloring his voice. "I bet he said I was a real basket case."
"He said you were traumatized. You didn’t have the support you needed to fight this battle. He also said you were less damaged than anyone else in your group." Jack was really hoping that he was dead wrong on that. If Harris was the least damaged, they were going to need a whole squadron of psychiatrists. However, Jack suspected that Harris had effectively hidden a lot of this damage from his friends. The fact that he had hidden it from a field commander with training in psychology didn't say much about Finn's skills, though. A kid should not be able to bluff an officer.
"God, I hope that’s not true. If they’re more damaged than me, we have a problem," Harris whispered, his voice utterly defeated.
"The only problem is if you don’t get help, Harris."
"I don’t…. I can’t….” Harris lost the pattern of breathing and seemed to flail for a moment.
"You can, Xander. It’s hard. It’s hard facing your psychological demons, but that’s what we do in the military. We face them."
Harris rubbed his eyes even though Jack couldn't see any actual tears. Yet.
"Who died that day at graduation?"
Harris stopped breathing.
“Just one. Remembering won’t change anything, and it can’t hurt you unless you let it, unless you lock it up and let it fester. Come on, Airman, cough up a name. Who died?”
“Larry.” The name seemed to slip out without Harris' permission, and the moment he said it, Harris just froze. The guilt almost leaked from him, and Jack so wished he could pull out every bad memory and toss it away, but that's not how it worked. Xander had to find a way through this pain. And he'd have to find a way over and over and over until he figured out how to have a life without the pain ruling him. Jack waited, not sure how Xander would react and he really didn't want to get punched.
A wordless cry followed, and Xander seemed to crumple to the ground. Jack darted forward, trying to catch Xander's head, but it thunked against the dresser with a hollow sound. However, the second Jack touched him, Xander grabbed his shirt, the raw desperation circling like a low-lying fog. Jack caught Xander by the back of the neck and pulled him close, holding him as tight as he could, but Xander still clung like he was afraid someone was going to pull him away. After the first cry, Xander fell silent, but Jack could feel the trembling ripping through his body. His breathing turned ragged and then the real tears came.
Jack ached for him. He'd spent his own time trying so hard to push his pain way. He'd wanted to die after losing his son. But his pain wasn't Xander's and he couldn't do anything to dull Xander's pain. He could only hold on as Xander struggled to feel everything he'd spend years trying to avoid.
The connecting door opened, and Jack looked up as Teal'c stood in the doorway, silently watching. He had no censure on his face, but he stood as a mute witness as Xander's cries gradually faded. It took over an hour, but eventually the stiff muscles and hard tremors faded until Xander lay limp in Jack's arms, either asleep or too worn out to keep grieving. Jack didn't fool himself. This was the first step in a long journey. But at least Harris had the balls to start down it. Plenty of men could never face their own fears.
"You want to give me a hand?" Jack asked softly. Teal'c moved into the room, a silent shadow as he walked over and knelt down to scoop Harris up. Harris was really out of it. His eyes didn't even flicker as Teal'c lifted him and took him into the other room.
Jack sat on the floor feeling nearly as exhausted himself. Watching Harris fight through all the pain made his own wounds feel more raw than they had in a while. Losing people. It wasn't easy. And the officers for whom it became easy weren't worth their spit. Mostly, those bastards joined the NID.
Teal'c reappeared at the connecting door, and Jack made a production of standing with his stiff knees. Usually he was exaggerating when he talked about his old legs, but Xander had put his weight onto Jack's left leg, and he had a raging case of pins and needles. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Jack rubbed his sore leg.
"He has endured much," Teal'c commented.
"Yep."
Teal'c nodded but he didn't say anything more. Jack figured that neither of them needed to talk about it because both of them had seen their share of men struggling to carry the emotional burdens the world required them to carry. Really, Daniel should have found someone with fewer scars.
