(no subject)
Airman Harris
Chapter Seventeen
Rated: Adult
Pairing: Xander/Daniel (and who the hell knows where this is going)
It's an odd sort of morning after that Xander and Jack are sharing.
Previous chapters: One : Two : Three : Four : Five : Six : Seven : Eight : Nine : Ten : Eleven : Twelve : Thirteen : Fourteen : Fifteen : Sixteen
Seventeen
Xander woke on the bed, not sure how he got there. All his clothes were on, so Daniel hadn’t been involved. Sitting up, Xander cradled his head in his hands and tried to think through the pain. His head ached and his whole body had that recovering-from-the-flu achiness that made him want to pull the covers over his head and ignore the world.
“Here, coffee.” O’Neill shoved a cup at him, and Xander jumped, startled that he hadn’t seen him coming. O’Neill didn’t comment, he just continued to hold the cup out.
“Thanks.” Xander took it and sipped slowly as memories crowded back in. He wondered how you handled crying on your commanding officer half the night. Yep, military protocol class left out all sorts of situations.
“You feel better?” O'Neill asked.
Xander had to think about that for a second. “Yes, sir. I just feel exhausted.”
"Good. That means your body is finally coming down off full alert."
"Just in time for a big Armageddon. Yea," Xander said tonelessly. Oddly, he couldn’t even come up with the energy to care about that.
O'Neill leaned against the hotel dresser. "SG3 is inbound. They were holding at Vanderburg waiting for us to call them in. Trust me, the world is not going to end on my watch."
Xander pushed himself up. "But you aren’t taking over from Buffy, are you?” Xander’s heart started to pound faster because pushing Buffy out of the slaying business was a really good way to make things go really, really wrong, really, really fast.
"Nope," O'Neill said. "She’s the general, and that’s fine. She knows the territory, and if the NID and Initiative reports are right, she’s hardwired into the demon community. We’ll follow her lead as long as she doesn’t give an illegal order."
Xander thought he should have some sort of comment about her being hardwired into the demon community because that sounded so not right, but he was too tired to really care. The fact that O’Neill wasn’t taking over was enough to make him a little happier.
"Daniel is worried about you,” O’Neill commented. “I told him you needed a night to really stand down and that he needed to give you some space. I love him, but sometimes Daniel pushes when he needs to back off."
Xander cringed at the idea of Daniel having seen him the night before. Yeah, there was pathetic and then there was having your lover see you cry like a baby on his best friend. "Having him see me cry on my commanding officer, yeah, not really something on my list of things to do before I die," Xander admitted. It was as close as he could come to thanking O'Neill. This whole situation was so uncomfortable that Xander really wanted to just run away.
"That wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Losing someone is hard, losing someone in your command is so much harder that you can’t even explain the pain to someone who hasn’t felt it. You knew Larry well, didn’t you?”
Xander expected the sword through the guts at Larry’s name, but it was only a dagger that caught him just under the ribs. He carefully set the coffee to the side. He remembered driving on his big road trip, screaming his rage about all the deaths-screaming Larry’s name. But since then, he’d grown used to editing Larry and Harmony and all the others out of his reality. “We grew up together,” Xander said, the sorrow washing over him. “He always bullied me, all the way up into high school. I hated him, only then in high school he came out as gay and suddenly I could see how much he’d been afraid his whole life that people would pick on him. When I tried to rally everyone for the graduation day fight, Larry was the first one to stand by my side. He would have been a good man."
"He was a good man, and he died fighting for what he believed in, just the same as you and I would do if the time came," O'Neill corrected him.
Xander studied the pattern on the bedspread. "It was my fault, sir."
"No,” O’Neill said firmly, “it was the enemy’s fault. You just feel that way because you’re a good fighter, and you always want to find a way to do your job better. Sometimes there isn’t a way to avoid casualties, and the only thing we can do is respect their memories."
Xander blinked as his brain rewired. That sounded unexpectedly supportive. "Huh."
"What?"
"You’re looking at me without that just stepped on a bug expression," Xander pointed out.
O'Neill rolled his eyes. "Hell, Harris. It isn’t you that disgusts me. It’s this situation. Kids aren’t prepared for this sort of war, and what the Watchers do is unforgivable. Fine, a slayer is called at fifteen. So protect her, train her, give her the sort of psychological training she’s going to need to fight the long battle. Teach her to be a leader and make sure she has backup that respects her skills. It’s not like I never worked with a translator or a local guide who was young enough to be in high school. We have troops capable of doing that without stepping all over her paranormal toes. But your Watcher friends dumped you in the middle of a war without any help and then didn’t notice that you had a raging case of post-traumatic stress." O’Neill definitely sounded cranky.
"Okay, the world is a little tippy-tilty again."
"Oh, why?"
Xander thought about that for a second. "Because Giles is supposed to be the know-everything man, and it sounds like you’re calling him an idiot."
"Because I am,” O’Neill said dryly. “He might know demons, but I know fighters."
Xander frowned at the cheap hotel bedspread and thought about that. "I'm not sure that's true, sir. Well, not that I'm saying you don't know your fighters because you.... Hell." Xander just stopped when he realized he was digging the hole deeper.
O'Neill looked surprised, but at least he didn't shoot Xander down. Instead he moved to the corner and settled into the chair on the far side of the second bed. "Airman?" O’Neill’s voice made it pretty clear that he expected a little clarification.
"You know normal fighters, sir." Xander tried again. He looked up to see if the colonel was on the verge of telling him to shut up. Oddly, he looked amused.
"Well, yeah,” O’Neill shrugged. “Although Danny would debate you on the normal part."
Xander scratched his throat. It had an odd itchiness he couldn’t seem to reach. "Buffy is kind of my bright and shining girl, you know?" he said, carefully picking his words, which wasn’t easy because normally he just let words fall out of his mouth without edit. Boot camp had helped fix that, though.
"Your first crush?" O'Neill guessed.
"Yes, sir, but that's not it. No matter what happened, she bounced back. She came through all shiny and bright when anyone else would have been destroyed."
"That doesn't mean she isn't damaged," O'Neill said softly.
"Yes, sir, I know that. But I also know Buffy. Like that guy I told you about with the dead fish?"
Leaning back in his chair, O'Neill seemed to be taking Xander a lot more seriously than Xander expected. "The big bad?"
Xander snorted. "Angelus the kinda sorta bad. Oh, he was totally a badass in the past, only he was the sort of bullying badass that ate nuns, and I'm thinking that it doesn't take a whole lot of impressive badassery to kill nuns. I mean, it's not like they fight back. What? They're going to pray you to death?"
"He sounds less than impressive," O'Neill commented.
"Thank you." Xander threw his hands up. He found Angel way less than impressive most of the time. Now the whole dark brooding hotly muscled part--yeah, Xander was totally intimidated and jealous of Angel's body. He just didn't think much of the personality in it.
"But before he went back to his soulless and fish-killing ways, he had this soul that got cursed on him and he was dating Buffy."
O'Neill's disgusted scrunchy face made Xander feel a whole lot better than he wanted to admit. "She was dating a murdering vampire?"
"She kept pointing out he was a reformed murdering vampire, only then his lost his soul and he went back to murdering, and there she was having to kick her ex-lover's ass, and trust me, Angel was playing all sorts of head games with Buffy over the fact that they'd done the horizontal mambo."
"I'm starting to wonder how any of you survived this long," O'Neill said wearily.
"But that's it. Buffy had to send Angel to hell, only she did it after he actually got his soul back. There was a demon and a portal and all sorts of world-ending fun, but the point is that Angel had turned back into the annoyingly soulful boyfriend, sir. He was back to being Buffy's Angel, and she had to send him to hell to stop the world from getting sucked into a vortex."
O'Neill rubbed his hand over his face and leaned back in the chair. "And now I’m thinking about how many psychiatrists I can get here by tomorrow."
"That's it, sir. She doesn't need one. She sent Angel to hell, and then he came back, and there was yelling and screaming involved, mostly because she figured out that I had kinda lied to her to get her to fight her hardest." O'Neill gave him a weird look. "I kind of implied that there was no chance of getting the soul back, sir."
"Sweet. That went over well, didn't it?"
"Oh yeah." Xander cringed just remembering that fight. "But then Buffy forgave, and she really forgave. Like she still shoved popcorn down my shirt while we watched Indian movies and she still loved Angel when he came back from hell and she was totally sad when Angel moved away, but it was sort of a normal girl sad, not a 'I doomed my lover to a century of hell' sort of sad. And when Riley came around, she fell in love. She didn't spend all her time wondering if he was evil or if she was doomed. Hell, Willow and I spent more time worrying about that stuff than she did. I'm pretty sure she doesn't worry even when she should. And I don't know if that's a Buffy thing or a slayer thing, but I'm pretty sure you can't blame Giles for ignoring the psychological damage because I'm pretty sure that Buffy doesn't have any more screws loose than a normal teenager."
O’Neill took a deep breath and seemed to let that soak in, and having officers listen to him was definitely a new experience in Xander’s book.
“The human body can’t go on forever, Harris. We wear down. And if we’re always in danger, we wear out. You were worn out, but you were too damn stubborn to admit it. I’ve been worn down to nothing. Even Teal’c has had his days. You’re assuming your Buffy is such a bright and shining girl that she can carry everything alone.”
O’Neill’s words made Xander really stop and think. “I don’t think she can carry everything. Her first year… there was this prophesy that said she would die, and Giles kinda told her that she couldn’t get out of it. She was so…” Xander struggled to come up with a word. Sad didn’t cover it. Not even hopeless came close. It was like she’d lost her light, and Xander remembered the pure panic in his heart, the absolute belief that if her light went out, the rest of them were doomed.
“How did she win the fight, then?”
“She didn’t.” Xander gave a small smile. “The Master killed her. Only he drowned her and I’d had CPR in sixth grade. I was actually pretty good at it. It turned out that the prophesy hadn’t said anything about her coming back. So I know she has her breaking point, but it isn’t the same as ours.”
Pursing his lips, O’Neill seemed to think about that. “I’ll take it under advisement. Meanwhile, you have pushed yourself far beyond your reserves. We’re doing some simple recon and trying to get a feel for the field. I need you stay here and do some recuperating.”
“I didn’t feel worn out, sir, not until this morning,” Xander said in way of an apology. He wanted to be out there in the fight, but O’Neill was right that he felt so utterly exhausted that he didn’t know how to get out of bed. Oh, he could if something slimy or demonic came through the door, but even if there was an entire Twinkie convention eight feet past his hotel door, he still wouldn’t find the energy to crawl out of bed. And for him, that was saying something.
“And that’s the healthiest thing I’ve heard you say yet. I might not have to hate you, after all.” O’Neill stood up and headed for the door.
“Sir?”
“Airman?” O’Neill stood with a hand on the doorknob.
Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Xander asked the one question he couldn’t have faced yesterday. “Could I have done something different?” he blurted out. “At graduation, was there something I could have done to cover that one side better?” Xander wanted the quick answer, the easy ‘no,’ the promise that he had done everything right and nothing was his fault. Instead O’Neill seemed to take some time to think.
“It’s hard to tell from the video. There weren’t any obvious mistakes, and given who you had to work with, I’m amazed at how well you did,” he finally offered. “I would have called the maneuver a success with regrettable losses.”
Xander pressed his lips together. He wanted to beg O’Neill for some sort of promise that he was telling the truth. Xander needed that so much.
“When you’re feeling better, we’re definitely going to talk about where you learned to shape C4,” O’Neill said with an edge of threat to his voice.
Xander huffed, the threat somehow pulling him away from all those fears. He had done that right-he knew that for sure. He’d watched that building go up, and of all the things he regretted from that day, he’d known he couldn’t have placed one ounce of explosive in a better postion. “I told Giles it was a fertilizer bomb,” he admitted. He hadn’t wanted Giles worrying about just how often Xander had broken into the local Army base.
“Now I know the man’s an idiot,” O’Neill said dryly. “If that had been a fertilizer bomb, you would have had collateral damage for half a mile. That was too controlled for anything other than C4. I just can’t figure out how you learned to shape it without blowing yourself up.”
Xander shrugged. “Long story. Long unbelievable story featuring magical uniforms and a seriously hacked off chaos mage.”
“I hate this town.”
“Yeah, most people do.”
“I wonder why,” O’Neill said sarcastically. “Look, Danny’s going to kill me and hide the body if I don’t let him in here, and I need to go play nice with Summers so we can form some sort of alliance here, so I’ll see you tonight.”
“Oh,” Xander sat straight up, panic slamming into him. “Public buildings. Public buildings have no protection from vampires. They don’t need an invitation to come in here.”
“Understood, Airman. We have our defensive perimeter set up around this entire floor, and SG3 is bringing in heavy duty sun lamps.”
The fear that had closed in around Xander’s heart eased as he realized that O’Neill really did have it under control. With one final look as though waiting for Xander to panic about something else, O’Neill turned and headed out of the hotel room. However, before the door could close, Daniel pushed it back open. Daniel stood in the open doorway, glasses a little askew and his face lined with worry. Xander could feel tears threaten again as he saw the concern on his lover’s face.
“Oh god this is stupid,” Xander said as he raised a hand to wipe tears away. Daniel came in, letting the door close behind him, and while Xander was still trying to get his emotions back under control, Daniel settled in on the bed, pulling Xander close in a desperate hug.
Xander said,“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you everything.”
“No. Xander, I should have known. You didn’t hide anything, even if you didn’t tell me anything, either.” Daniel’s arms tightened, and Xander hugged Daniel back, holding on for dear life as his whole life seemed to crumble around him. “It’s okay,” Daniel muttered over and over, and each time, Xander could feel the emotions rise and his tears force their way out, despite his every effort. “I promise it’s okay.” This time the tears came easier. For a man who didn’t like to cry, Xander felt like it was all he could do anymore. Luckily Daniel didn’t mind crying, snotty lovers because he just held on even harder.