TW/SNC: Monster (R)
Title: Monster
Author: Mad Maudlin
Fandom: Torchwood/Sanctuary
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,159
Characters: Jack Harkness, Ashley Magnus
Warnings: BLOOD. But surprisingly, no sex.
Spoilers: "Children of Earth," "End of Time," "End of Nights"
Summary: Some people aren't quite human.
Notes: This is part of the same series as Once and Future and Miles to Go. There are at least two other fics in that series and they're both set before this one. Oops.
Monster
by Mad Maudlin
They find her drifting in the cold of space, and she mauls two of the crew before Jack gets her between a wall and his gun. "Sit down and retract the claws," he orders.
She snarls.
"Nice try, honey, but I've found weirder things than you in my sock drawer."
The thing is, she looks human-well, humanoid, humanish, about average for this galaxy. Parts of her hair had snapped off when they hauled her in out of the vacuum, as had one of her fingers and part of an ear, and her skin is raw with frostbite and radiation burn, but it you took away the claws and fangs and the eyes she'd pass for human well enough. You might even call her pretty.
"I'm going to say this one more time," Jack says, easing forward. She hasn't sprung at him but she hasn't backed down, just bores into his head with eyes that are blood-red behind the cloudy corneas. "If you can hear me and understand me, then sit down and put your hands on your head."
There's nothing human in the way she cocks her head, but after a moment, she kneels. The claws slide back under her nails, mostly, though one oozes blood around the base and won't retract all the way. She puts her hand behind her head, lacing her fingers against the brittle tufts of blonde hair.
"Good girl," Jack says, as he winds a chain around her wrists. "So you understand the lingo around these parts. That's good to know. Now, do you have a name?"
Her fangs draw in, and she enunciates carefully, "Ashley."
XXX
Jack had left Earth because he couldn't stand to look at himself in the mirror anymore; because he had murdered a child to save a planet and it no longer seemed like an even trade. He'd left because he'd lived too long, grown too old, forgotten too much about normal lives and how they worked. He'd become as jaded as he pretended to be and that had made him dangerous.
So he'd lit out for the stars, looking for the man he'd wanted to be. A fresh start and yet another second chance. Except it hadn't really worked like that, because the species might've been different but the problems were the same and there wasn't much of a market for heroes, but you could make a hell of a good living if you were willing to pull a trigger or hold a knife without asking any questions.
And really, at this point, Jack was pretty tired of trying to get it right.
The money was good, the kind of paydays that would've kept him drunk for months if he was still drinking. Instead it just piled up, until he gave it away on whims-to charities, to the poor, to random strangers. It gave him the leeway to go a long time between jobs, if he wanted to, but he didn't see the point in putting off the inevitable.
Jack had made a pretty crap hero, but if there was one thing he was good at, it was pulling a trigger.
XXX
He doesn't ask until everyone's had a round in the tissue regenerator and the crew are satisfied they're not going to catch anything. He doesn't ask while they clean out a hold to lock her in, mostly because he's holding a gun to her head. He doesn't ask while he spot-welds the chains around her wrists to the ribs of the ship, just in case.
Her eyes are blue, not red, now that everything's been healed, and she doesn't put up a fight. He drops down into a crouch in front of her and says, in English, "Okay, Ashley, twenty questions time. Are you from Earth?"
She blinks, brow furrowed. "Of course," she says, as if it were obvious.
"Okay, so next question: how'd you get out here?"
She laughs a little, and that's all the warning he has before her eyes go red. "Like this," she says, and there's a flash of purple, and that's all the warning Jack has before he feels her claws in his throat.
XXX
He saw the Doctor from a distance, once, in a bar far away from Earth, but clearly not far enough. They'd looked each other in the eye and for the first time, Jack had had no urge to run to him, no reason to peel himself off his barstool and even shake hands.
You made me like this, he wants to say, except he knows that's a lie. Rose had made him immortal, and everything else he'd done to himself.
He'd thought at the time that the Doctor knew, knew and had come to condemn him. At least at first. Then he realized he didn't know, had no clue, because if he'd known he wouldn't be setting up Jack with the cuddly redhead on the next stool over. The Doctor couldn't know what Jack had done, because for some reason he still cared.
The thing with Alonzo lasted a couple of weeks, and it was good-he was enthusiastic and not totally inexperienced and just naive enough to have fun with, in bed and out. When his shore leave was up, he asked for Jack's number, asked him what ship he served on in case they crossed paths again.
Jack had been offered a job the same day, so he gave the kid the number for an aural sex line and told him, "I'm sort of retired." That was three months ago, and they hadn't seen each other again since.
XXX
Jack wakes up in a puddle of blood, still dizzy, and it takes a moment before his windpipe fully closes and he can breath without choking. Ashley has left a trail of scarlet footsteps out and down the corridor, but Jack admits he's a little surprised that it doesn't lead to the bridge or the crew quarters.
It leads to an airlock, and she's curled up inside it, in a fetal position. He pushes past the ship's crew and their trembling weapons to plant him firmly in her field of vision. "You want to explain what the hell that was about?" he asks her.
She starts, and he can see her eyes are blue again. "What the fuck?"
"I asked you first," he shoots back.
She looks scared of him for the first time, scared enough to stand and face him. Good. "I just killed you."
"I noticed," Jack says, folding his arms over his bloody shirt. "That teleportation's a nice trick. I didn't realize they were breeding for that in the Sanctuary."
It's a complete stab in the dark-the only place he can think of that could produce a thing like Ashley without offworld help-and he can tell it strikes home when she flinches. "How do you know about the Sanctuary?"
"Oh, I'm an old friend of the Magnus family," he says. "We go back about a hundred and forty years."
"You know--" she starts to say, then shakes her head and stops. "Never mind. I don't care."
"If you didn't care you wouldn't still be talking to me," Jack points out.
Ashley gives a little giggling huff. "You're right." She vanishes in another purple flash.
XXX
Rose asked him, once, about his missing memories. "How do you just take a memory?"
"Engrammatic manipulation techonology got real good in the 4030s," Jack explained. "The Time Agency could stamp an agent's mind with a language or a skill set or a basic outline of local customs, then peel it off when the assignment was over. Or they could peel out information about future events, so you wouldn't create a paradox, or traumatic memories, or-whatever I did for two years."
"You really don't know?"
He knew that time had passed, because he'd seen the calendars, though they tried to say it was a glitch in his manipulator. He knew that they'd tried to stamp him with a cover story, but for some reason it didn't take. He knew the one person who'd tried to tell him everything had been murdered before she could open her mouth.
He knew he'd warned about looking into the abyss. He knew even the other Time Agents were afraid of him.
"I have an idea," he said. "But I need to find out the truth. All of it."
"What happens when you do?"
Jack shrugged at the time, said, "Jump out an airlock, most likely," At the time, he was even joking.
XXX
They haul her out of the void again-Jack has to pay off the captain to get it done-and this time he locks himself in the hold with her. While she sleeps, he goes to great pains to program his wrist strap, and it starts whining softly about four seconds before she opens her eyes.
They're blue again. She rolls them. "God damn it."
"I have to say, if you're trying to kill yourself, you're doing a crappy job of it," Jack said. "Also, I put an EM shield around this entire room. No more zappy fun times for you, at least if you like how your molecules are currently arranged."
She shakes her head. "Already tried that. Woke up here."
"That's impressive," he says, when he realizes she's not joking. "I'm not even sure I could come back from that. What the hell are you?"
Ashley curls up on her side, back to him. "A monster."
"There's a lot of monsters out here. You're going to have to be more specific."
"I'm a thing," she growls, and the hand he can see starts to grow claws. " One part vampire, one part Jack the Ripper, a little bit of all the things that go bump in the night. Made to order."
"By the Sanctuary?" he asks, even though it doesn't sound like Magnus' MO.
"The Cabal."
And Jack hasn't even heard of that group, which means somewhere on Earth there's still something that might surprise him. Too bad. "Well, congratulations, Ashley, because you're out of their reach. By more than a few light years."
She goes very still. "That's impossible."
"If you tried to teleport inside a shield," Jack says, "my guess would be that your molecules got caught on the solar wind before they could start re-integrating. We passed within two light-years of the Sol system around the time we found you, so I'm guess you think it's still 2009?"
She rolls over, and her eyes may be red, but she's listening. "It's not?"
"Sorry. 2011."
She shuts her eyes, and the claws extend a little more. "Liar."
Jack leans forward. "Why would I do that? I've got no motive for deceiving you and you seem to be doing a marvelous job hurting yourself on your own time."
"Who the hell are you?" she blurts, somewhere between a pout and a snarl.
He thinks for a moment. "I'm a monster, too."
XXX
He spent so much of his life waiting for someone else to save him. The Agency, or the Doctor, or Ianto--
What he needed was somebody to make him human.
XXX
Of course she attacks him again, tries to get past him, but when she can't zap from here to there she's lost her main advantage. Jack might not be as strong or as quick, he might not have claws, but he has a hell of a lot of experience fighting things that do.
She jumps on him and he lets her momentum and his weight carry them to the deck; he catches her wrists and grinds his thumbs into her pressure points, making her screech. She sinks her teeth into his neck, low, near the shoulder, but he manages to roll on top of her, and by rocking forward on his knees wrench free. She takes a chunk of muscle with her, though, and the motion gives her space to drive her own knee into his groin. Jack releases one hand and while she pulls back for the strike, drops his elbow into her windpipe.
"If this is what fighting a vampire is like, no wonder they went extinct," he says, while she rakes at his arm, trying to dislodge him.
She changes tactics and bucks under him, knocking him to one side. He keeps his grip on her other wrist, though, despite the blood slicking his fingers; her arm twists viciously as she tries to roll the other direction. He can't bear much weight on either arm for the time being, but he can spin around in a seat position and kick her in the back of the head.
She's stunned a split second; it's enough. He gets the knife out of his sleeve with the hand he can still flex and digs it into her back, sawing through her spinal cord somewhere around the lumbar vertebrae. Her legs go limp, and she howls and howls and tries to come around and bite him. This time, when he gets an elbow on her neck, she's pinned on her face and can't do anything but claw at the air.
Jack pants for a few minutes, watching the gouges in his arms seal up. "So I'm thinking it's going to take more than a few rounds of this to kill you," he tells Ashley. "In fact, if I were you, I'd try fire next. Maybe acid. Something to denature the molecules so they can't reintegrate, and fast enough to keep anything from regenerating."
"Just point me to the furnace, then," Ashley growls, voice terribly altered.
"That would be if I was you," Jack says, and lets her up. When he wrenches the knife out of her back, the blood on the blade is tacky and black. "Since I'm not you, I'm more inclined to keep you locked up here until you stop trying to kill yourself."
She manages to flop onto her back. "Why do you even care?"
"I don't, really," Jack says, and cleans the knife on his own ruined shirt. "Except I've been where you are and I can offer you a shortcut."
"What do you mean?"
He uses the knife as a pointer. "If your molecules can spontaneously re-integrate after a teleportation accident, there's actually not much chance that acid or fire or anything else is going to stop you. You're welcome to try, but I'd say you're stuck with life."
"So what am I supposed to do?" she asks.
Jack shrugs. "Live."
XXX
Jack had done amazing things in his life, sacrificed of himself, loved people, saved them. Say what else you would, he'd had his moments. But usually he regressed to the mean, to pulling triggers and throwing the profits away, because without something to keep him honest, like an army or an Agency or a Doctor or a God...
He'd outlive them all anyway. Already had. There was nobody he had to answer to but himself.
XXX
Ashley cries after that, and then tries to kill him some more, and then she sleeps. Jack takes the chance to change into clean clothes and bribe the ship's captain again-he's got the money, after all. He finds clothes for Ashley, too, a loose crewman's jumpsuit that's better than her bloody black uniform, and when he gets back to the hold she's awake but hasn't tried to run away or kill herself again.
He tosses the suit at her, because it's pretty self-explanatory. She asks, "Why can't I read your mind?"
Jack blinks and instantly revises his opinion of her, from nine-tenths crazy down to three-fifths. "I've had training," he says. "Most people haven't."
She starts peeling off the shreds of her clothes without seeming to care that Jack's in the room. She's small, fit, dangerous, and there are scars on her body that she didn't get in any fight. "I can hear the crew," she says. "They think I'm an animal."
"You didn't exactly make the best first impression. Second, third and fourth impressions were pretty crap, too."
Her runs her a basin of water from the room's only fixture, so she can wash off his blood and her own. She licks some of it from her hands, and doesn't seem to find anything the matter with this. "They also think you want to fuck me," she adds.
Jack shrugs. "If you had all your marbles, I wouldn't say no."
Everything has grown back but her hair; she dumps the basin over her head and rakes at the shaggy stumps with her fingers. "But you think I'm crazy."
"I think you're a long way off from informed consenting, and I don't get off on statutory rape."
She gives him a wan smile, and steps into the jumpsuit. "Thanks for that. I'd have probably killed you again if you said anything else."
"I appreciate your restraint."
She zips up the jumpsuit and then rolls up the sleeves to her elbows; the legs pool over her feet, showing just the tips of her pink toes. Jack wonders if those grow claws, too. Ashley sits down with her back to the wall, facing Jack, and hugs her knees to her chest. "What happens next?"
He shrugs again. "I've got an appointment in the Vegas Galaxies. Got to see a thing about a man."
"And me?"
Jack shrugs again.
Ashely frowns at him. "I'll probably just end up trying to kill myself some more, you know."
"It's not my problem if you do."
"I'm still not totally sure I believe this is a spaceship."
"You teleported yourself out the airlock and you don't believe it's a spaceship?" Jack asks, eyebrows raised.
She shrugs. She looks at her hands.
Jack sighs. "In the interest of keeping you from mauling anyone else, I might as well show you around Vegas. It's the least I could do."
"I'm pretty sure the least you could do was letting me zap out of here the first time."
He realizes that's true. She realizes he realizes it. "Don't you start thinking I'm a good person or anything," he cautions her, half-serious. "I'm not."
"I know," she says. She waves at the door. "I mean, they know. I'm just guessing."
Jack nods. "Just so long as we're clear."
He's still not entirely sure he can leave her alone, but he doesn't know what else to do with her short of putting her on a leash, which, yeah, no. He can't just leave someone this dangerous to her own devices, and it's not like he's got plans to make a stopover on Earth any time soon. Maybe ever again.
This could get real complicated real fast. Then again, he's got nothing better to do with his time.
She asks, "Are you really a captain?" which he assumes is something she's picked up from the crew, too.
"Of a sorts," he says. "Do you have a last name?"
She cocks her head again, that inhuman look, then she nods. "Druitt."
Author: Mad Maudlin
Fandom: Torchwood/Sanctuary
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,159
Characters: Jack Harkness, Ashley Magnus
Warnings: BLOOD. But surprisingly, no sex.
Spoilers: "Children of Earth," "End of Time," "End of Nights"
Summary: Some people aren't quite human.
Notes: This is part of the same series as Once and Future and Miles to Go. There are at least two other fics in that series and they're both set before this one. Oops.
Monster
by Mad Maudlin
They find her drifting in the cold of space, and she mauls two of the crew before Jack gets her between a wall and his gun. "Sit down and retract the claws," he orders.
She snarls.
"Nice try, honey, but I've found weirder things than you in my sock drawer."
The thing is, she looks human-well, humanoid, humanish, about average for this galaxy. Parts of her hair had snapped off when they hauled her in out of the vacuum, as had one of her fingers and part of an ear, and her skin is raw with frostbite and radiation burn, but it you took away the claws and fangs and the eyes she'd pass for human well enough. You might even call her pretty.
"I'm going to say this one more time," Jack says, easing forward. She hasn't sprung at him but she hasn't backed down, just bores into his head with eyes that are blood-red behind the cloudy corneas. "If you can hear me and understand me, then sit down and put your hands on your head."
There's nothing human in the way she cocks her head, but after a moment, she kneels. The claws slide back under her nails, mostly, though one oozes blood around the base and won't retract all the way. She puts her hand behind her head, lacing her fingers against the brittle tufts of blonde hair.
"Good girl," Jack says, as he winds a chain around her wrists. "So you understand the lingo around these parts. That's good to know. Now, do you have a name?"
Her fangs draw in, and she enunciates carefully, "Ashley."
XXX
Jack had left Earth because he couldn't stand to look at himself in the mirror anymore; because he had murdered a child to save a planet and it no longer seemed like an even trade. He'd left because he'd lived too long, grown too old, forgotten too much about normal lives and how they worked. He'd become as jaded as he pretended to be and that had made him dangerous.
So he'd lit out for the stars, looking for the man he'd wanted to be. A fresh start and yet another second chance. Except it hadn't really worked like that, because the species might've been different but the problems were the same and there wasn't much of a market for heroes, but you could make a hell of a good living if you were willing to pull a trigger or hold a knife without asking any questions.
And really, at this point, Jack was pretty tired of trying to get it right.
The money was good, the kind of paydays that would've kept him drunk for months if he was still drinking. Instead it just piled up, until he gave it away on whims-to charities, to the poor, to random strangers. It gave him the leeway to go a long time between jobs, if he wanted to, but he didn't see the point in putting off the inevitable.
Jack had made a pretty crap hero, but if there was one thing he was good at, it was pulling a trigger.
XXX
He doesn't ask until everyone's had a round in the tissue regenerator and the crew are satisfied they're not going to catch anything. He doesn't ask while they clean out a hold to lock her in, mostly because he's holding a gun to her head. He doesn't ask while he spot-welds the chains around her wrists to the ribs of the ship, just in case.
Her eyes are blue, not red, now that everything's been healed, and she doesn't put up a fight. He drops down into a crouch in front of her and says, in English, "Okay, Ashley, twenty questions time. Are you from Earth?"
She blinks, brow furrowed. "Of course," she says, as if it were obvious.
"Okay, so next question: how'd you get out here?"
She laughs a little, and that's all the warning he has before her eyes go red. "Like this," she says, and there's a flash of purple, and that's all the warning Jack has before he feels her claws in his throat.
XXX
He saw the Doctor from a distance, once, in a bar far away from Earth, but clearly not far enough. They'd looked each other in the eye and for the first time, Jack had had no urge to run to him, no reason to peel himself off his barstool and even shake hands.
You made me like this, he wants to say, except he knows that's a lie. Rose had made him immortal, and everything else he'd done to himself.
He'd thought at the time that the Doctor knew, knew and had come to condemn him. At least at first. Then he realized he didn't know, had no clue, because if he'd known he wouldn't be setting up Jack with the cuddly redhead on the next stool over. The Doctor couldn't know what Jack had done, because for some reason he still cared.
The thing with Alonzo lasted a couple of weeks, and it was good-he was enthusiastic and not totally inexperienced and just naive enough to have fun with, in bed and out. When his shore leave was up, he asked for Jack's number, asked him what ship he served on in case they crossed paths again.
Jack had been offered a job the same day, so he gave the kid the number for an aural sex line and told him, "I'm sort of retired." That was three months ago, and they hadn't seen each other again since.
XXX
Jack wakes up in a puddle of blood, still dizzy, and it takes a moment before his windpipe fully closes and he can breath without choking. Ashley has left a trail of scarlet footsteps out and down the corridor, but Jack admits he's a little surprised that it doesn't lead to the bridge or the crew quarters.
It leads to an airlock, and she's curled up inside it, in a fetal position. He pushes past the ship's crew and their trembling weapons to plant him firmly in her field of vision. "You want to explain what the hell that was about?" he asks her.
She starts, and he can see her eyes are blue again. "What the fuck?"
"I asked you first," he shoots back.
She looks scared of him for the first time, scared enough to stand and face him. Good. "I just killed you."
"I noticed," Jack says, folding his arms over his bloody shirt. "That teleportation's a nice trick. I didn't realize they were breeding for that in the Sanctuary."
It's a complete stab in the dark-the only place he can think of that could produce a thing like Ashley without offworld help-and he can tell it strikes home when she flinches. "How do you know about the Sanctuary?"
"Oh, I'm an old friend of the Magnus family," he says. "We go back about a hundred and forty years."
"You know--" she starts to say, then shakes her head and stops. "Never mind. I don't care."
"If you didn't care you wouldn't still be talking to me," Jack points out.
Ashley gives a little giggling huff. "You're right." She vanishes in another purple flash.
XXX
Rose asked him, once, about his missing memories. "How do you just take a memory?"
"Engrammatic manipulation techonology got real good in the 4030s," Jack explained. "The Time Agency could stamp an agent's mind with a language or a skill set or a basic outline of local customs, then peel it off when the assignment was over. Or they could peel out information about future events, so you wouldn't create a paradox, or traumatic memories, or-whatever I did for two years."
"You really don't know?"
He knew that time had passed, because he'd seen the calendars, though they tried to say it was a glitch in his manipulator. He knew that they'd tried to stamp him with a cover story, but for some reason it didn't take. He knew the one person who'd tried to tell him everything had been murdered before she could open her mouth.
He knew he'd warned about looking into the abyss. He knew even the other Time Agents were afraid of him.
"I have an idea," he said. "But I need to find out the truth. All of it."
"What happens when you do?"
Jack shrugged at the time, said, "Jump out an airlock, most likely," At the time, he was even joking.
XXX
They haul her out of the void again-Jack has to pay off the captain to get it done-and this time he locks himself in the hold with her. While she sleeps, he goes to great pains to program his wrist strap, and it starts whining softly about four seconds before she opens her eyes.
They're blue again. She rolls them. "God damn it."
"I have to say, if you're trying to kill yourself, you're doing a crappy job of it," Jack said. "Also, I put an EM shield around this entire room. No more zappy fun times for you, at least if you like how your molecules are currently arranged."
She shakes her head. "Already tried that. Woke up here."
"That's impressive," he says, when he realizes she's not joking. "I'm not even sure I could come back from that. What the hell are you?"
Ashley curls up on her side, back to him. "A monster."
"There's a lot of monsters out here. You're going to have to be more specific."
"I'm a thing," she growls, and the hand he can see starts to grow claws. " One part vampire, one part Jack the Ripper, a little bit of all the things that go bump in the night. Made to order."
"By the Sanctuary?" he asks, even though it doesn't sound like Magnus' MO.
"The Cabal."
And Jack hasn't even heard of that group, which means somewhere on Earth there's still something that might surprise him. Too bad. "Well, congratulations, Ashley, because you're out of their reach. By more than a few light years."
She goes very still. "That's impossible."
"If you tried to teleport inside a shield," Jack says, "my guess would be that your molecules got caught on the solar wind before they could start re-integrating. We passed within two light-years of the Sol system around the time we found you, so I'm guess you think it's still 2009?"
She rolls over, and her eyes may be red, but she's listening. "It's not?"
"Sorry. 2011."
She shuts her eyes, and the claws extend a little more. "Liar."
Jack leans forward. "Why would I do that? I've got no motive for deceiving you and you seem to be doing a marvelous job hurting yourself on your own time."
"Who the hell are you?" she blurts, somewhere between a pout and a snarl.
He thinks for a moment. "I'm a monster, too."
XXX
He spent so much of his life waiting for someone else to save him. The Agency, or the Doctor, or Ianto--
What he needed was somebody to make him human.
XXX
Of course she attacks him again, tries to get past him, but when she can't zap from here to there she's lost her main advantage. Jack might not be as strong or as quick, he might not have claws, but he has a hell of a lot of experience fighting things that do.
She jumps on him and he lets her momentum and his weight carry them to the deck; he catches her wrists and grinds his thumbs into her pressure points, making her screech. She sinks her teeth into his neck, low, near the shoulder, but he manages to roll on top of her, and by rocking forward on his knees wrench free. She takes a chunk of muscle with her, though, and the motion gives her space to drive her own knee into his groin. Jack releases one hand and while she pulls back for the strike, drops his elbow into her windpipe.
"If this is what fighting a vampire is like, no wonder they went extinct," he says, while she rakes at his arm, trying to dislodge him.
She changes tactics and bucks under him, knocking him to one side. He keeps his grip on her other wrist, though, despite the blood slicking his fingers; her arm twists viciously as she tries to roll the other direction. He can't bear much weight on either arm for the time being, but he can spin around in a seat position and kick her in the back of the head.
She's stunned a split second; it's enough. He gets the knife out of his sleeve with the hand he can still flex and digs it into her back, sawing through her spinal cord somewhere around the lumbar vertebrae. Her legs go limp, and she howls and howls and tries to come around and bite him. This time, when he gets an elbow on her neck, she's pinned on her face and can't do anything but claw at the air.
Jack pants for a few minutes, watching the gouges in his arms seal up. "So I'm thinking it's going to take more than a few rounds of this to kill you," he tells Ashley. "In fact, if I were you, I'd try fire next. Maybe acid. Something to denature the molecules so they can't reintegrate, and fast enough to keep anything from regenerating."
"Just point me to the furnace, then," Ashley growls, voice terribly altered.
"That would be if I was you," Jack says, and lets her up. When he wrenches the knife out of her back, the blood on the blade is tacky and black. "Since I'm not you, I'm more inclined to keep you locked up here until you stop trying to kill yourself."
She manages to flop onto her back. "Why do you even care?"
"I don't, really," Jack says, and cleans the knife on his own ruined shirt. "Except I've been where you are and I can offer you a shortcut."
"What do you mean?"
He uses the knife as a pointer. "If your molecules can spontaneously re-integrate after a teleportation accident, there's actually not much chance that acid or fire or anything else is going to stop you. You're welcome to try, but I'd say you're stuck with life."
"So what am I supposed to do?" she asks.
Jack shrugs. "Live."
XXX
Jack had done amazing things in his life, sacrificed of himself, loved people, saved them. Say what else you would, he'd had his moments. But usually he regressed to the mean, to pulling triggers and throwing the profits away, because without something to keep him honest, like an army or an Agency or a Doctor or a God...
He'd outlive them all anyway. Already had. There was nobody he had to answer to but himself.
XXX
Ashley cries after that, and then tries to kill him some more, and then she sleeps. Jack takes the chance to change into clean clothes and bribe the ship's captain again-he's got the money, after all. He finds clothes for Ashley, too, a loose crewman's jumpsuit that's better than her bloody black uniform, and when he gets back to the hold she's awake but hasn't tried to run away or kill herself again.
He tosses the suit at her, because it's pretty self-explanatory. She asks, "Why can't I read your mind?"
Jack blinks and instantly revises his opinion of her, from nine-tenths crazy down to three-fifths. "I've had training," he says. "Most people haven't."
She starts peeling off the shreds of her clothes without seeming to care that Jack's in the room. She's small, fit, dangerous, and there are scars on her body that she didn't get in any fight. "I can hear the crew," she says. "They think I'm an animal."
"You didn't exactly make the best first impression. Second, third and fourth impressions were pretty crap, too."
Her runs her a basin of water from the room's only fixture, so she can wash off his blood and her own. She licks some of it from her hands, and doesn't seem to find anything the matter with this. "They also think you want to fuck me," she adds.
Jack shrugs. "If you had all your marbles, I wouldn't say no."
Everything has grown back but her hair; she dumps the basin over her head and rakes at the shaggy stumps with her fingers. "But you think I'm crazy."
"I think you're a long way off from informed consenting, and I don't get off on statutory rape."
She gives him a wan smile, and steps into the jumpsuit. "Thanks for that. I'd have probably killed you again if you said anything else."
"I appreciate your restraint."
She zips up the jumpsuit and then rolls up the sleeves to her elbows; the legs pool over her feet, showing just the tips of her pink toes. Jack wonders if those grow claws, too. Ashley sits down with her back to the wall, facing Jack, and hugs her knees to her chest. "What happens next?"
He shrugs again. "I've got an appointment in the Vegas Galaxies. Got to see a thing about a man."
"And me?"
Jack shrugs again.
Ashely frowns at him. "I'll probably just end up trying to kill myself some more, you know."
"It's not my problem if you do."
"I'm still not totally sure I believe this is a spaceship."
"You teleported yourself out the airlock and you don't believe it's a spaceship?" Jack asks, eyebrows raised.
She shrugs. She looks at her hands.
Jack sighs. "In the interest of keeping you from mauling anyone else, I might as well show you around Vegas. It's the least I could do."
"I'm pretty sure the least you could do was letting me zap out of here the first time."
He realizes that's true. She realizes he realizes it. "Don't you start thinking I'm a good person or anything," he cautions her, half-serious. "I'm not."
"I know," she says. She waves at the door. "I mean, they know. I'm just guessing."
Jack nods. "Just so long as we're clear."
He's still not entirely sure he can leave her alone, but he doesn't know what else to do with her short of putting her on a leash, which, yeah, no. He can't just leave someone this dangerous to her own devices, and it's not like he's got plans to make a stopover on Earth any time soon. Maybe ever again.
This could get real complicated real fast. Then again, he's got nothing better to do with his time.
She asks, "Are you really a captain?" which he assumes is something she's picked up from the crew, too.
"Of a sorts," he says. "Do you have a last name?"
She cocks her head again, that inhuman look, then she nods. "Druitt."