TW: Ghost Story (PG-13) 7/18
Title: Ghost Story 7/18
Author:
mad_maudlin
Rating: PG-13
Pairing and Characters: Jack/Ianto, The Doctor, Torchwood, the other Torchwood, OCs, A THOUSAND ELEPHANTS, et cetera.
Length: 70,000
Spoilers: Oh, let's say the whole Rusty era of DW+TW, just to be safe.
Ghost Story
by Mad Maudlin
7. noons of dryness
Let's do a little experiment, shall we? Find yourself a dark room, and a comfortable chair. Have a friend tie your hands behind your back, nice and firm, but not too tight because I won't be responsible for your loss of circulation. Maybe put on a blindfold, too, if the room's not very dark. Tie your legs to the chair as well. Wear a really loud watch.
Now turn up the thermostat as high as it goes, or get a rip-roaring fire going, or just hold a hot brick in your lap. (Best to pre-heat the brick, if you go that route, and have it handy.) And have your friend put a large metal drum over your head, the kind that holds oil or dangerous chemicals; in fact, the more recently it held those dangerous chemicals, the better. You friend should also have a really large stick, or maybe a lead pipe, something hard that'll make a nice loud clang when they hit the drum with it.
Which they should commence to do. Hit the drum, I mean. Nice and rhythmic. For about twenty or thirty years.
You may have to occasionally reheat the brick.
What I'm trying to communicate here-because talking about my sense of Time often seems to be in the same vein as dancing about architecture-is that I've got a bit of a blank spot. I've always been able to retreat from Jack, go hide in the pocket watch, even if I didn't enjoy it. But after the Bad Wolf brought us back, I didn't have a choice.
Whatever I was, ghost or memory or second self, I could perceive what she'd done: pinned us down like an insect, frozen us in amber, made us Fact. Made us Wrong. The Vortex itself pulsed within us, and for me it was like burning alive; it was like suffocating; it was like the constant, deafening pounding of drums. I couldn't really escape it, but at least if I was hidden in the watch, it was slightly more bearable. Of course, inside the watch I was also blind and paralyzed, ignorant of everything except time moving on.
At least, if you do with the trick with the metal drum, you'll know you're not alone.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack was already in the undertaker's carriage when he woke up the first-well, technically, second-time. There was a split second of muzzy awareness, and then he bolted upright, sucking in air and looking for the scumbag who'd pulled a pistol on him.
Except there was nobody there but a scruffy ginger teen, who started to scream. Which startled Jack enough to make him scream, too. Somewhere far off, a horse started screaming. It was that kind of night.
"What the hell is going on here?" Jack demanded.
The teen, who'd gone white under a layer of freckles and acne, fainted. A moment later, the carriage lurched to a halt-just in time for Jack to realize he was sitting in an open coffin.
The undertaker opened the carriage and stared inside, eyes bulging. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded.
Jack looked down at the blossom of blood on his shirt, already turning dry and brown around the edges. There was a perfect bullet hole right over his heart, exactly where-where--
"I don't know," he told the undertaker, but of course, he kind of did. If a Dalek couldn't kill him, how did a measly little bullet stand a chance?
-\-\-\-\-\-
I was as surprised as Jack when we came back to life, I swear. Just because I could feel the Wrongness of us didn't mean I figured out every implication from the start. It was hard to think at all through the pain, at least at first, but a death and resurrection are a bit hard to miss. I remember each one, crisp as a photo-flash, even through the haze that made it hard to reach our common senses. The moment of darkness, the exhale of Nothing, and the sudden shock of physicality again; there was always a moment before I had to flee, when I could touch Jack's mind and collect puzzle-piece answers to questions like since when has it been the nineteenth century? and what city are we in now? and who is that man with the shovel?
And here is the awful part: every time it happened, the pain decreased. Just the tiniest bit. I didn't notice it during the first few times, because even in the midst of a multi-year bender Jack did have a shred of caution; the small, gradual change was easy to miss. It was like each resurrection used up a bit of the fire, loosened the spear just the tiniest bit. Not enough to free us, even if I'd understood just how we were transfixed; barely enough to give me space to think. I might easily have missed the cause-effect connection altogether.
At least, until Torchwood came along.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack gasped back to life on a cold table, with a voice at his elbow announced, "Thirty-seven minutes, four seconds."
"You know," he said without turning his head, "you don't have to sound like you enjoy it so much."
Alice snorted softly. "It's in the scientific interest," she said, and made a few more notations in her little book like Jack wasn't even there. One day he was going to read that thing and discover it was nothing but haiku about blood spatter. Or possibly an office-wide pool on the outcome of every resurrection.
He pushed himself upright and glanced around the autopsy area, but they were alone, and when Alice was finished making her notes she flounced off. Jack raked his fingers through his hair and winced when they snagged on mats of blood and brains; he was developing a special distaste for head injuries. He ambled into the main floor in search of a mirror, so he could see if the shirt was a total loss, and found Charles scribbling away in his own little notebook, and occasionally poking at a map. "Late night?" Jack asked.
Charles shrugged. "For some. Alice caught the target while you were down, by the way."
"Well, that's good to know," Jack sighed. "Very nice of her to tell me so, too. I swear she uses me as a human shield just so she can take all the credit."
"Why not, when you're the indestructible man?" Charles asked.
"Because it hurts," Jack blurted miserably. He was too tired for this conversation; death was nothing like sleep, no matter what Hamlet seemed to think. He wanted a shower, rest and clean clothes, in more or less that order; he should probably think about food, too, before he accidentally starved to death again. (Well, Alice said it was an accident the first time.)
Charles just chuckled at him and scribbled something on the map. "No rest for the wicked, Harkness. Now hit the showers, you smell like an abattoir."
Jack sighed again. Sometimes, he really hated Torchwood.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sometimes I really hated Torchwood, because through them I got something I wanted in the worst possible way: the more often they threw Jack into the line of fire, the more often we came back, burning through a bit of the Bad Wolf's work. My suffering lessened as Jack's increased. If guilt were fatal, I would've added a fair number of tallies to our death toll all on my own.
Torchwood knew about me, as well-or at least they thought they did. Emilie Holroyd had enough telepathic training that I couldn't have put her off the watch even if I'd been in top form, but though she tried everything short of explosives to get it open (while Jack watched, teeth gritted, fists clenched) she never succeeded in getting so much as a filing off it. Time Lords one, Torchwood zero. She did speculate that the watch was connected to Jack's immortality, and even kept it in a vault for a few months-glorious, terrible months when I could barely feel Jack at all-but eventually it was returned to him, since they couldn't justify keeping it except through pure sadism.
(Not that sadism wouldn't have been an adequate motive all its own for this lot, but they did have a vague idea who and what they were dealing with. If Jack's patience-or his apathy--had given out, the cost of stopping him would've been terrible. It was perhaps the only thing that kept Alice from testing out certain theories regarding acid.)
Once I caught Jack wondering if the perhaps the watch was connected with his longevity, in one of those all-too-brief moments of grace after death. It was the first time he'd thought actively about the watch in decades, and his thumb even stroked the clasp, not applying pressure, just teasing. And even if no one else in our life had been able to open it, I had a hunch or intuition that Jack probably could; and the thought terrified me, because I wasn't sure I could bear to become him when our body was suffused with such Wrongness. I had a vision of the pain killing me, again and again and again, and every time the Bad Wolf dragging me back, and so I desperately shoved his thoughts off the topic before retreating again from the pounding of the Vortex.
(I didn't like to think that I might have to fight Jack for control of our body-even if it was technically my body-when the right moment finally came. But I was just as worried that he might simply wink out altogether. After all this time together, I wasn't sure what to do without his stupid, reckless thoughts twined in mine, even when they also brought me pain; and while that says something disturbing about my psychology, it was a very real fear, the slow-burning kind that keeps people up at night. People who can sleep, that is.)
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack had just gotten the bubbles at an acceptable level when Frank came down into the boiler room with a folder. "Jack, we've got one for you, disturbance in Newport, witnesses reporting--"
"Not going," Jack declared, and reached for the champagne.
Frank stopped short and took a good long look at Jack, and Jack's champagne, and Jack's Jacuzzi. The last he had improvised out of a car engine and a Trybatian incubation tank, and he was rather proud of the jets. "What do you mean, not going?" Frank asked warily.
"It's my birthday," Jack explained, and made a toast in Frank's general direction.
"You never celebrate a birthday," Frank pointed out.
"I've never been a hundred before."
Frank huffed softly. "Huh. Your centennial."
"Or thereabouts." He hadn't actually bothered to do the math on converting the exact dates, but the years more or less matched up, so he'd thrown a dart at a calendar. He settled deeper into the warm water. "Looking pretty good for my age, huh?"
Frank shook his head, and surprisingly, leaned on the edge of the tool cabinet in the corner. "Didn't believe it myself, you know. When Gerald told me about you."
"Nobody does." Jack sipped the champagne and looked at the ceiling, which was spotted with nitre. "One hundred down, less than seventy to go."
"To go?" Frank asked. "Before what?"
Before the century turned again and he could find his Doctor. "Before I can claim my pension on my home world," he said. "You want some champagne?"
"No, thanks."
"You want to hop in?" Jack poked his toes out of the churning water, just barely reaching the other side of the tank. "There's room for two."
Frank made a disgusted face at him, standing up. "You're never gonna change, are you, Harkness?"
"Not really, no." He set the champagne flute aside, and found himself tracing the lines of his own shoulder, feeling for the bones through the muscle. He'd lost the arm to a pair of particularly savage Weevils just a few days ago. Gerald had taken pictures. "I don't change, I don't mature, I don't grow as a person, I just...become more of what I already am. What I've always been. Whether I like it or not."
Frank didn't seem to know how to respond for that; after a moment of toying with the corner of the folder, he said, "I'll just pass this on to Vicky, then. Happy birthday, Jack."
"Thanks, Frank." Jack watched him retreat up the stairs, and after a moment, reached morosely over the side of the tub for a slice of cake.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack had absolute faith in the Doctor, more faith than he'd ever had in any employer, any partner, any lover in his life. He had faith that the Doctor could put him right, even if he still wasn't sure what right meant these circumstances. It at least gave him something to look forward to, something that made Torchwood bearable as decade piled up upon decade. Some day, he'd cross paths with the Doctor. Some day, the Doctor would save him.
I wasn't so sure. Not after I'd pieced together what actually happened on the Gamestation from the moments I could touch Jack's mind. Something-the Bad Wolf, perhaps-had stopped the Daleks, and the Doctor had fled in an awful hurry thereafter: perhaps he thought we were still dead at the time and there was nothing to wait for. Or perhaps he meant for us to stay behind and manage the aftermath, the way he never would.
Or maybe the Wrongness of us was so strong that he felt it, and fled from it, unable to bear our presence. God knows I sometimes wished I could do the same. And if that was true, what could he possibly do to save us? And would he even be willing to try?
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack watched Cardiff from the bell tower of the Pierhead Building, a few lights twinkling faintly through a miserable fog. A dirty little city on the forgotten edge of a dinky little island; a backwater region on a backwater planet. Not the most impressive cityscape he'd ever laid eyes on, but from above you could almost call it pretty.
"You really should stop loitering on top of tall buildings," an accented voice called from behind him. "People might think you're planning to jump."
"You should stop sneaking up on people loitering on top of tall buildings," Jack shot back, though he'd heard the soft footsteps long before the voice spoke.
Lucia wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressing her face between his shoulders. "What's the worst that could happen, Jack? You'll fall?"
"Pretty much, yeah," he said, more sharply than he should've. "Mood Abby's in, I might have to escape the morgue all by myself again. Not to mention I just found this coat."
"You and your coats," Lucia murmured, and he could imagine her rolling her eyes even as she slid her hands inside the front of said coat. "And if you're standing out here in the cold, you and Abby must be a match for each other. You only go climbing when you're grumpy."
"London called earlier tonight," Jack said. "That answer your question?"
"Well, at least it explains the shouting."
Oh, there had been shouting, all right: lots of shouting and not much said. The London office couldn't bring themselves to take this UNIT thing seriously, not when Torchwood had been doing the same thing but better for about a century. Abby wasn't about to hand Jack over for a futile mission against a potential enemy that, so far, didn't seem to know Torchwood existed; she was convinced they were just trying to poach him. And Jack had taken one look at the man in the surveillance photos, and refused point-blank to have anything to do with the case at all.
Maybe it was the Doctor, like London seemed to think. But it wasn't Jack's Doctor, and he couldn't take the risk that he'd be scrambling up their timelines. So close and so damned far, just like all the other sightings he'd tracked down...1902, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1925, 1934, 1943, 1953, 1959, 1963, 1966, 1969...and almost every one with a different face. Only those had been reports, sightings, rumors of blue boxes and bloodbaths, and this one was living full-time on Earth and working for the United Nations...
...and if he knew Jack worked for Torchwood, knew about the things he'd done...
"You're grinding your teeth," Lucia said lightly, but when Jack turned away from the lights of Cardiff, her eyebrows were low. "Why is London calling you now?"
"Why do you assume they were calling me in particular?"
"You're the mysterious immortal with a thousand secrets," Lucia said. "It's not as if they're taking a sudden interest in the well-being of Cardiff."
Jack sighed. "I don't keep secrets. I just...forget to tell people things." And then they died or left him, and new people came, and he forgot what they didn't already know, and...these things became habit, after a time. It was easier when people could forget what he was.
Lucia stroked the front of his coat and toyed with the buttons. "Hmm. Fine. So don't tell me anything. See if I climb a building for you ever again."
He seized her by the wrist, feeling her pulse point through the cuff of her glove. "I thought we agreed that this wasn't complicated?" he asked quietly.
She looked up at him with those big dark eyes, almost pulling off innocence. "Who says it's complicated? All my samples are in the incubator until morning and I'm lonely."
"You climbed a building for me."
"I enjoy the thrill of the chase."
He let her go and gave the muted lights of the city one last glance. "I'm lousy company tonight, Lucia. Maybe take a rain check on this one."
She toyed with the end of her scarf. "Sure you don't want to take your mind off things? I know we agreed 'no strings attached,' but I don't recall saying anything about ropes..."
That caught him by surprise, and he laughed out loud. "Never stop doing that," he asked.
"Using ropes?"
He reached up to stroke a curl of black hair that had escaped her beret. "Surprising me."
She laughed gently. "Oh, Captain, my Captain," she sighed, and kissed him, and Jack didn't have the heart to tell her that those verses were written for a dead man.
-\-\-\-\-\-
A funny thing happened at Torchwood, over the years, though. At first I only noticed that Jack got us killed less often. The Wrongness wasn't abating as fast. Then I realized, that when we did die, in the moments I got to touch his mind-things were different. Something had changed.
Because in 1899 Jack was a freak, a suspect, a tool. But Alice Guppy and Emilie Holroyd and Charles Gaskell, they all died. Gerald Carter and Frank Llewellyn and Abigail Dawes came and went. Lucia retired and Moira committed suicide and Ed got taken by the Rift.
Jack remained.
And at some point, the new people stopped seeing him as a strategic resource to be managed. Somewhere along the line, he became the center of the widening gyre. His past buried itself, and in the meantime he fought beside the others, and died alongside them, and then came back to fight and die again. He knew things they didn't. He could do things they didn't.
One day he revived in the middle of the Hub with internal organs still hanging out of our torso and the charred husk of a Shrodite pinning our legs, and all of Torchwood Cardiff standing around watching, and he realized that he might even be happy.
-\-\-\-\-\-
"Mail call," Rob said, tossing an envelope at Jack's desk. "You need to stop getting your personal correspondence sent here."
"Where else am I going to get it sent?" Jack asked. He caught the envelope easily and slit it with a penknife.
"At least the rest of us pretend to have lives, Harkness," Rob grumbled. "You could make the effort."
Elen came up from the archives with a box marked Xmas Party!!! balanced on her hip. "If you're got time to wag your jaws, you've got time to help me decorate," she declared. "Jack, you're tallest, you get to do the doors."
"Urgent correspondence here," he shot back. It was a Christmas card from Alice; there was a picture of her and Joe with the new baby. Steven Joseph Carter, she'd written on the back. The threat of Lucia's wrath had kept Jack away so far, but with Christmas coming up, he thought he might just be able to dare a quick visit and meet his newest grandchild. Maybe they could tell Joe he was a cousin or something.
Elen started unpacking cheap foil decorations and garlands of plastic holly all over Rob's desk, while he sputtered. "Right, so we can do these up over the doors, and I'm saving this bit for my desk, and I thought Alex might like the wreath for his door."
"You go right ahead and ask him, then," Rob said. "Better you than me."
That caught Jack's attention. "Something up with Alex?"
"He just about took James's head off on Monday," Rob said. "You were on Weevil watch, you missed it-James just asked him to sign off on a purchase order and Alex went nuts."
"He's got a lot on his mind," Elen said defensively. "London keeps trying to dump their shit on us. Immortality Gate? Oooh, that's all theirs. Pile of fiddly bits that nobody else can figure out? Give it to Three, see if it kills any of them."
Rob started picking at a limp-looking strand of tinsel garland. "Still. Something weird about this. He'd tell us if it was anything important, right?"
Jack realized they were both looking at him. "He'd tell us if we needed to know," he said, burying his face in the card again.
"Would you say something to him?" Rob asked tentatively. "If, you know, it keeps up?"
"Like what?" Jack asked. "'Hey, Chief, lighten up, you're scaring the peons?'" He dodged the piece of holly that Rob lobbed at his head. "Careful, Campbell, you don't want to open hostilities with me."
"It's just that you've known him longer than any of us," Elen blurted. "You're all...you know. So maybe he'd listen to you, even if he's not listening to anyone else. Maybe he'd tell you, you know?"
They were both looking actively worried now, and Jack squirmed. "I promise I'll say something, okay?" he asked. "It could be personal, you know."
"It's not like he leaves work any more than the rest of us," Rob pointed out.
"Maybe that's the problem?"
Elen threw one end a string of fairy lights at Jack and started unwinding the snarls. "Jack, why aren't you in charge?" she asked apropos of nothing.
Jack blinked at her. "In charge of Three? Are you serious?"
"Well, yeah," she said. "You've got more seniority than the rest of us put together, after all."
"Ha. Sorry. No." He gave a helpful tug on the lights. "Wouldn't want the extra work. I get killed often enough down here in the trenches with you peons. Besides," he added, "command's not my style. I'm much better at this whole loveable rogue thing I've got going on."
"So you've turned it down?" Rob asked.
Jack gathered up some of the slack from the lights and wound it around his arm. "Nobody's ever asked, actually."
Chapter One
Chapter Six
Chapter Eight
Author:
mad_maudlin
Rating: PG-13
Pairing and Characters: Jack/Ianto, The Doctor, Torchwood, the other Torchwood, OCs, A THOUSAND ELEPHANTS, et cetera.
Length: 70,000
Spoilers: Oh, let's say the whole Rusty era of DW+TW, just to be safe.
Ghost Story
by Mad Maudlin
7. noons of dryness
Let's do a little experiment, shall we? Find yourself a dark room, and a comfortable chair. Have a friend tie your hands behind your back, nice and firm, but not too tight because I won't be responsible for your loss of circulation. Maybe put on a blindfold, too, if the room's not very dark. Tie your legs to the chair as well. Wear a really loud watch.
Now turn up the thermostat as high as it goes, or get a rip-roaring fire going, or just hold a hot brick in your lap. (Best to pre-heat the brick, if you go that route, and have it handy.) And have your friend put a large metal drum over your head, the kind that holds oil or dangerous chemicals; in fact, the more recently it held those dangerous chemicals, the better. You friend should also have a really large stick, or maybe a lead pipe, something hard that'll make a nice loud clang when they hit the drum with it.
Which they should commence to do. Hit the drum, I mean. Nice and rhythmic. For about twenty or thirty years.
You may have to occasionally reheat the brick.
What I'm trying to communicate here-because talking about my sense of Time often seems to be in the same vein as dancing about architecture-is that I've got a bit of a blank spot. I've always been able to retreat from Jack, go hide in the pocket watch, even if I didn't enjoy it. But after the Bad Wolf brought us back, I didn't have a choice.
Whatever I was, ghost or memory or second self, I could perceive what she'd done: pinned us down like an insect, frozen us in amber, made us Fact. Made us Wrong. The Vortex itself pulsed within us, and for me it was like burning alive; it was like suffocating; it was like the constant, deafening pounding of drums. I couldn't really escape it, but at least if I was hidden in the watch, it was slightly more bearable. Of course, inside the watch I was also blind and paralyzed, ignorant of everything except time moving on.
At least, if you do with the trick with the metal drum, you'll know you're not alone.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack was already in the undertaker's carriage when he woke up the first-well, technically, second-time. There was a split second of muzzy awareness, and then he bolted upright, sucking in air and looking for the scumbag who'd pulled a pistol on him.
Except there was nobody there but a scruffy ginger teen, who started to scream. Which startled Jack enough to make him scream, too. Somewhere far off, a horse started screaming. It was that kind of night.
"What the hell is going on here?" Jack demanded.
The teen, who'd gone white under a layer of freckles and acne, fainted. A moment later, the carriage lurched to a halt-just in time for Jack to realize he was sitting in an open coffin.
The undertaker opened the carriage and stared inside, eyes bulging. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded.
Jack looked down at the blossom of blood on his shirt, already turning dry and brown around the edges. There was a perfect bullet hole right over his heart, exactly where-where--
"I don't know," he told the undertaker, but of course, he kind of did. If a Dalek couldn't kill him, how did a measly little bullet stand a chance?
-\-\-\-\-\-
I was as surprised as Jack when we came back to life, I swear. Just because I could feel the Wrongness of us didn't mean I figured out every implication from the start. It was hard to think at all through the pain, at least at first, but a death and resurrection are a bit hard to miss. I remember each one, crisp as a photo-flash, even through the haze that made it hard to reach our common senses. The moment of darkness, the exhale of Nothing, and the sudden shock of physicality again; there was always a moment before I had to flee, when I could touch Jack's mind and collect puzzle-piece answers to questions like since when has it been the nineteenth century? and what city are we in now? and who is that man with the shovel?
And here is the awful part: every time it happened, the pain decreased. Just the tiniest bit. I didn't notice it during the first few times, because even in the midst of a multi-year bender Jack did have a shred of caution; the small, gradual change was easy to miss. It was like each resurrection used up a bit of the fire, loosened the spear just the tiniest bit. Not enough to free us, even if I'd understood just how we were transfixed; barely enough to give me space to think. I might easily have missed the cause-effect connection altogether.
At least, until Torchwood came along.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack gasped back to life on a cold table, with a voice at his elbow announced, "Thirty-seven minutes, four seconds."
"You know," he said without turning his head, "you don't have to sound like you enjoy it so much."
Alice snorted softly. "It's in the scientific interest," she said, and made a few more notations in her little book like Jack wasn't even there. One day he was going to read that thing and discover it was nothing but haiku about blood spatter. Or possibly an office-wide pool on the outcome of every resurrection.
He pushed himself upright and glanced around the autopsy area, but they were alone, and when Alice was finished making her notes she flounced off. Jack raked his fingers through his hair and winced when they snagged on mats of blood and brains; he was developing a special distaste for head injuries. He ambled into the main floor in search of a mirror, so he could see if the shirt was a total loss, and found Charles scribbling away in his own little notebook, and occasionally poking at a map. "Late night?" Jack asked.
Charles shrugged. "For some. Alice caught the target while you were down, by the way."
"Well, that's good to know," Jack sighed. "Very nice of her to tell me so, too. I swear she uses me as a human shield just so she can take all the credit."
"Why not, when you're the indestructible man?" Charles asked.
"Because it hurts," Jack blurted miserably. He was too tired for this conversation; death was nothing like sleep, no matter what Hamlet seemed to think. He wanted a shower, rest and clean clothes, in more or less that order; he should probably think about food, too, before he accidentally starved to death again. (Well, Alice said it was an accident the first time.)
Charles just chuckled at him and scribbled something on the map. "No rest for the wicked, Harkness. Now hit the showers, you smell like an abattoir."
Jack sighed again. Sometimes, he really hated Torchwood.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Sometimes I really hated Torchwood, because through them I got something I wanted in the worst possible way: the more often they threw Jack into the line of fire, the more often we came back, burning through a bit of the Bad Wolf's work. My suffering lessened as Jack's increased. If guilt were fatal, I would've added a fair number of tallies to our death toll all on my own.
Torchwood knew about me, as well-or at least they thought they did. Emilie Holroyd had enough telepathic training that I couldn't have put her off the watch even if I'd been in top form, but though she tried everything short of explosives to get it open (while Jack watched, teeth gritted, fists clenched) she never succeeded in getting so much as a filing off it. Time Lords one, Torchwood zero. She did speculate that the watch was connected to Jack's immortality, and even kept it in a vault for a few months-glorious, terrible months when I could barely feel Jack at all-but eventually it was returned to him, since they couldn't justify keeping it except through pure sadism.
(Not that sadism wouldn't have been an adequate motive all its own for this lot, but they did have a vague idea who and what they were dealing with. If Jack's patience-or his apathy--had given out, the cost of stopping him would've been terrible. It was perhaps the only thing that kept Alice from testing out certain theories regarding acid.)
Once I caught Jack wondering if the perhaps the watch was connected with his longevity, in one of those all-too-brief moments of grace after death. It was the first time he'd thought actively about the watch in decades, and his thumb even stroked the clasp, not applying pressure, just teasing. And even if no one else in our life had been able to open it, I had a hunch or intuition that Jack probably could; and the thought terrified me, because I wasn't sure I could bear to become him when our body was suffused with such Wrongness. I had a vision of the pain killing me, again and again and again, and every time the Bad Wolf dragging me back, and so I desperately shoved his thoughts off the topic before retreating again from the pounding of the Vortex.
(I didn't like to think that I might have to fight Jack for control of our body-even if it was technically my body-when the right moment finally came. But I was just as worried that he might simply wink out altogether. After all this time together, I wasn't sure what to do without his stupid, reckless thoughts twined in mine, even when they also brought me pain; and while that says something disturbing about my psychology, it was a very real fear, the slow-burning kind that keeps people up at night. People who can sleep, that is.)
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack had just gotten the bubbles at an acceptable level when Frank came down into the boiler room with a folder. "Jack, we've got one for you, disturbance in Newport, witnesses reporting--"
"Not going," Jack declared, and reached for the champagne.
Frank stopped short and took a good long look at Jack, and Jack's champagne, and Jack's Jacuzzi. The last he had improvised out of a car engine and a Trybatian incubation tank, and he was rather proud of the jets. "What do you mean, not going?" Frank asked warily.
"It's my birthday," Jack explained, and made a toast in Frank's general direction.
"You never celebrate a birthday," Frank pointed out.
"I've never been a hundred before."
Frank huffed softly. "Huh. Your centennial."
"Or thereabouts." He hadn't actually bothered to do the math on converting the exact dates, but the years more or less matched up, so he'd thrown a dart at a calendar. He settled deeper into the warm water. "Looking pretty good for my age, huh?"
Frank shook his head, and surprisingly, leaned on the edge of the tool cabinet in the corner. "Didn't believe it myself, you know. When Gerald told me about you."
"Nobody does." Jack sipped the champagne and looked at the ceiling, which was spotted with nitre. "One hundred down, less than seventy to go."
"To go?" Frank asked. "Before what?"
Before the century turned again and he could find his Doctor. "Before I can claim my pension on my home world," he said. "You want some champagne?"
"No, thanks."
"You want to hop in?" Jack poked his toes out of the churning water, just barely reaching the other side of the tank. "There's room for two."
Frank made a disgusted face at him, standing up. "You're never gonna change, are you, Harkness?"
"Not really, no." He set the champagne flute aside, and found himself tracing the lines of his own shoulder, feeling for the bones through the muscle. He'd lost the arm to a pair of particularly savage Weevils just a few days ago. Gerald had taken pictures. "I don't change, I don't mature, I don't grow as a person, I just...become more of what I already am. What I've always been. Whether I like it or not."
Frank didn't seem to know how to respond for that; after a moment of toying with the corner of the folder, he said, "I'll just pass this on to Vicky, then. Happy birthday, Jack."
"Thanks, Frank." Jack watched him retreat up the stairs, and after a moment, reached morosely over the side of the tub for a slice of cake.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack had absolute faith in the Doctor, more faith than he'd ever had in any employer, any partner, any lover in his life. He had faith that the Doctor could put him right, even if he still wasn't sure what right meant these circumstances. It at least gave him something to look forward to, something that made Torchwood bearable as decade piled up upon decade. Some day, he'd cross paths with the Doctor. Some day, the Doctor would save him.
I wasn't so sure. Not after I'd pieced together what actually happened on the Gamestation from the moments I could touch Jack's mind. Something-the Bad Wolf, perhaps-had stopped the Daleks, and the Doctor had fled in an awful hurry thereafter: perhaps he thought we were still dead at the time and there was nothing to wait for. Or perhaps he meant for us to stay behind and manage the aftermath, the way he never would.
Or maybe the Wrongness of us was so strong that he felt it, and fled from it, unable to bear our presence. God knows I sometimes wished I could do the same. And if that was true, what could he possibly do to save us? And would he even be willing to try?
-\-\-\-\-\-
Jack watched Cardiff from the bell tower of the Pierhead Building, a few lights twinkling faintly through a miserable fog. A dirty little city on the forgotten edge of a dinky little island; a backwater region on a backwater planet. Not the most impressive cityscape he'd ever laid eyes on, but from above you could almost call it pretty.
"You really should stop loitering on top of tall buildings," an accented voice called from behind him. "People might think you're planning to jump."
"You should stop sneaking up on people loitering on top of tall buildings," Jack shot back, though he'd heard the soft footsteps long before the voice spoke.
Lucia wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressing her face between his shoulders. "What's the worst that could happen, Jack? You'll fall?"
"Pretty much, yeah," he said, more sharply than he should've. "Mood Abby's in, I might have to escape the morgue all by myself again. Not to mention I just found this coat."
"You and your coats," Lucia murmured, and he could imagine her rolling her eyes even as she slid her hands inside the front of said coat. "And if you're standing out here in the cold, you and Abby must be a match for each other. You only go climbing when you're grumpy."
"London called earlier tonight," Jack said. "That answer your question?"
"Well, at least it explains the shouting."
Oh, there had been shouting, all right: lots of shouting and not much said. The London office couldn't bring themselves to take this UNIT thing seriously, not when Torchwood had been doing the same thing but better for about a century. Abby wasn't about to hand Jack over for a futile mission against a potential enemy that, so far, didn't seem to know Torchwood existed; she was convinced they were just trying to poach him. And Jack had taken one look at the man in the surveillance photos, and refused point-blank to have anything to do with the case at all.
Maybe it was the Doctor, like London seemed to think. But it wasn't Jack's Doctor, and he couldn't take the risk that he'd be scrambling up their timelines. So close and so damned far, just like all the other sightings he'd tracked down...1902, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1925, 1934, 1943, 1953, 1959, 1963, 1966, 1969...and almost every one with a different face. Only those had been reports, sightings, rumors of blue boxes and bloodbaths, and this one was living full-time on Earth and working for the United Nations...
...and if he knew Jack worked for Torchwood, knew about the things he'd done...
"You're grinding your teeth," Lucia said lightly, but when Jack turned away from the lights of Cardiff, her eyebrows were low. "Why is London calling you now?"
"Why do you assume they were calling me in particular?"
"You're the mysterious immortal with a thousand secrets," Lucia said. "It's not as if they're taking a sudden interest in the well-being of Cardiff."
Jack sighed. "I don't keep secrets. I just...forget to tell people things." And then they died or left him, and new people came, and he forgot what they didn't already know, and...these things became habit, after a time. It was easier when people could forget what he was.
Lucia stroked the front of his coat and toyed with the buttons. "Hmm. Fine. So don't tell me anything. See if I climb a building for you ever again."
He seized her by the wrist, feeling her pulse point through the cuff of her glove. "I thought we agreed that this wasn't complicated?" he asked quietly.
She looked up at him with those big dark eyes, almost pulling off innocence. "Who says it's complicated? All my samples are in the incubator until morning and I'm lonely."
"You climbed a building for me."
"I enjoy the thrill of the chase."
He let her go and gave the muted lights of the city one last glance. "I'm lousy company tonight, Lucia. Maybe take a rain check on this one."
She toyed with the end of her scarf. "Sure you don't want to take your mind off things? I know we agreed 'no strings attached,' but I don't recall saying anything about ropes..."
That caught him by surprise, and he laughed out loud. "Never stop doing that," he asked.
"Using ropes?"
He reached up to stroke a curl of black hair that had escaped her beret. "Surprising me."
She laughed gently. "Oh, Captain, my Captain," she sighed, and kissed him, and Jack didn't have the heart to tell her that those verses were written for a dead man.
-\-\-\-\-\-
A funny thing happened at Torchwood, over the years, though. At first I only noticed that Jack got us killed less often. The Wrongness wasn't abating as fast. Then I realized, that when we did die, in the moments I got to touch his mind-things were different. Something had changed.
Because in 1899 Jack was a freak, a suspect, a tool. But Alice Guppy and Emilie Holroyd and Charles Gaskell, they all died. Gerald Carter and Frank Llewellyn and Abigail Dawes came and went. Lucia retired and Moira committed suicide and Ed got taken by the Rift.
Jack remained.
And at some point, the new people stopped seeing him as a strategic resource to be managed. Somewhere along the line, he became the center of the widening gyre. His past buried itself, and in the meantime he fought beside the others, and died alongside them, and then came back to fight and die again. He knew things they didn't. He could do things they didn't.
One day he revived in the middle of the Hub with internal organs still hanging out of our torso and the charred husk of a Shrodite pinning our legs, and all of Torchwood Cardiff standing around watching, and he realized that he might even be happy.
-\-\-\-\-\-
"Mail call," Rob said, tossing an envelope at Jack's desk. "You need to stop getting your personal correspondence sent here."
"Where else am I going to get it sent?" Jack asked. He caught the envelope easily and slit it with a penknife.
"At least the rest of us pretend to have lives, Harkness," Rob grumbled. "You could make the effort."
Elen came up from the archives with a box marked Xmas Party!!! balanced on her hip. "If you're got time to wag your jaws, you've got time to help me decorate," she declared. "Jack, you're tallest, you get to do the doors."
"Urgent correspondence here," he shot back. It was a Christmas card from Alice; there was a picture of her and Joe with the new baby. Steven Joseph Carter, she'd written on the back. The threat of Lucia's wrath had kept Jack away so far, but with Christmas coming up, he thought he might just be able to dare a quick visit and meet his newest grandchild. Maybe they could tell Joe he was a cousin or something.
Elen started unpacking cheap foil decorations and garlands of plastic holly all over Rob's desk, while he sputtered. "Right, so we can do these up over the doors, and I'm saving this bit for my desk, and I thought Alex might like the wreath for his door."
"You go right ahead and ask him, then," Rob said. "Better you than me."
That caught Jack's attention. "Something up with Alex?"
"He just about took James's head off on Monday," Rob said. "You were on Weevil watch, you missed it-James just asked him to sign off on a purchase order and Alex went nuts."
"He's got a lot on his mind," Elen said defensively. "London keeps trying to dump their shit on us. Immortality Gate? Oooh, that's all theirs. Pile of fiddly bits that nobody else can figure out? Give it to Three, see if it kills any of them."
Rob started picking at a limp-looking strand of tinsel garland. "Still. Something weird about this. He'd tell us if it was anything important, right?"
Jack realized they were both looking at him. "He'd tell us if we needed to know," he said, burying his face in the card again.
"Would you say something to him?" Rob asked tentatively. "If, you know, it keeps up?"
"Like what?" Jack asked. "'Hey, Chief, lighten up, you're scaring the peons?'" He dodged the piece of holly that Rob lobbed at his head. "Careful, Campbell, you don't want to open hostilities with me."
"It's just that you've known him longer than any of us," Elen blurted. "You're all...you know. So maybe he'd listen to you, even if he's not listening to anyone else. Maybe he'd tell you, you know?"
They were both looking actively worried now, and Jack squirmed. "I promise I'll say something, okay?" he asked. "It could be personal, you know."
"It's not like he leaves work any more than the rest of us," Rob pointed out.
"Maybe that's the problem?"
Elen threw one end a string of fairy lights at Jack and started unwinding the snarls. "Jack, why aren't you in charge?" she asked apropos of nothing.
Jack blinked at her. "In charge of Three? Are you serious?"
"Well, yeah," she said. "You've got more seniority than the rest of us put together, after all."
"Ha. Sorry. No." He gave a helpful tug on the lights. "Wouldn't want the extra work. I get killed often enough down here in the trenches with you peons. Besides," he added, "command's not my style. I'm much better at this whole loveable rogue thing I've got going on."
"So you've turned it down?" Rob asked.
Jack gathered up some of the slack from the lights and wound it around his arm. "Nobody's ever asked, actually."
Chapter One
Chapter Six
Chapter Eight