Title: Watcher-in-Law

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not. I claim nothing but the plot.

Rating: PG-13

Summary: B:tVS, SG-1. After a year of epic weirdness, Xander attends a wedding and thinks about family. 800 words.

Spoilers: General post-B:tVS (no comics) and Stargate SG-1 (current year)

Notes: For the request: "B:tVS/SG-1, family is what you make of it."

Xander stared across the room from his position holding up one of the walls of the reception hall, following the radiant bride as she laughed her way through a tour of the dance floor on the arm of the groom's-- father? Brother? Clone? Whatever the hell you wanted to call him.

He'd snagged a champagne flute from a passing waiter at one point, but only took a few sips; it had given him something to do with his hands, but he felt disoriented enough already just from the day's events without the extra added bonus of alcohol.

"Pretty weird, isn't it?"

Xander flinched at the unexpected voice in his ear, and chastised himself as he turned to reply. Some Watcher he was. "What, them dancing?" he asked, gesturing with his free hand.

The corners of the groom's mouth were turned up in a familiar smirk. "Well, yeah; of course it's weird, he's me. Except, not. And if I love her--" He shrugged.

Xander snorted. "He's got his own Buffy, and you know it. He's only got himself to blame for letting her take a job in another galaxy before making it official. Besides, Buff met you both the same day, and she picked you, remember?"

The smirk turned into a full-on grin, something Xander didn't see on Jack's face very often. Either Jack. Except where their respective blonde bombshells were involved.

"Yeah, she didn't, didn't she?" The Jack in question rocked on his heels a bit, looking smug, hands thrust into the pockets of his tux as he watched his new wife some more. Then he shook his head, like a dog shaking off water, and shot a shrewd look at Xander again. "That wasn't what I meant, though. This whole last year--"

He paused, and Xander's memory filled in the silence with all the craziness they seldom spoke of. Him tracking down his birth records for passport purposes after the fall of Sunnydale, only to find out that Tony Harris wasn't his father after all. Tracking down his actual father, only to find out that the man was a two-star General in the Air Force, about as different from the man Xander had grown up calling Dad as it was possible to be and still be human. Finding out that they weren't actually, one hundred percent human after all, and the avalanche of paperwork and secret revelations that had followed when his new dad's employers realized they had another strong carrier of the Ancient's gene on their hands.

That was where he'd met the other Jack, actually: between the two of them, they were now the world's back-up defense system for when Sheppard and the senior O'Neill were both off-Earth at the same time. He'd even been allowed to sit in the big chair in Antarctica the last time it had happened, and had come away with a lot of interesting information for Giles when he'd queried the little Ancient database it was attached to for anything it knew about the Slayer.

Which, of course, he'd had to pass along to his Slayer... who'd been pretty fed up already with all his secrecy on the new-dad-issue, and deeply curious where he'd got his information from... which had led directly to this situation.

"Yeah, I know," Xander said, then laughed, feeling slightly hysterical. "If you're Dad Junior, does that mean my Slayer's now my mother-in-law?" he asked. He'd given up his own crush on Buffy long ago, letting it settle little by little into a deep and enduring friendship, but the implications still felt epically strange. He could still remember crashing off his skateboard the first time he met her, which-- God, he hoped that never came up in conversation with Jack. He'd never live it down.

Jack rolled his eyes. "Family's what you make of it," he said. "You should know: your side is infinitely weirder than mine is, even on a good day. And it'd be step-mother, not mother-in-law. But I'd rather think of you as a brother-- though let's leave the older or younger question out of it, shall we?" He grinned.

"Brother sounds good," Xander nodded. And it did; the closest he'd ever come to having a real brother was Jesse, a decade gone now, or-- God forbid-- Andrew. It felt like a fitting label for the strange friendship that had been developing since the two twenty-something guys-- one with a too old soul, the other with a too old mind-- had met several months before.

"Good," Jack said, then grabbed the champagne flute out of Xander's hand and took a long sip. Then he grabbed Xander by the shoulder and shoved him toward the dance floor. "Now get out there and look like you're having fun, for crying out loud."

Xander laughed again, and went.

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