Fic: A Series of Disappointments (or 5 times + Jack + Other Immortals) PG-13 TW/HL
Title: A Series of Disappointments (or 5 times + Jack + Other Immortals)
Author: amand_r
Fandom:Torchwood/Highlander
Characters: (in order of appearance) Jack, Amanda, Duncan, Fitz, [k'immie], Richie, Methos, Ianto.
Rating: PG-13 for language and shit
Author's Notes: You know I can't keep the peanut butter out of the chocolate. Or something. Thanks to lastrega for the beta magic.
Summary: They're like him, but not like him. They know less than he does, and they cannot teach him anything new.
A doll in the doll-maker's house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
'That is an insult to us.'
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Out-screams the whole shelf: 'Although
There's not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.'
Hearing him groan and stretch
The doll-maker's wife is aware
Her husband has heard the wretch,
And crouched by the arm of his chair,
She murmurs into his ear,
Head upon shoulder leant:
'My dear, my dear, O dear,
It was an accident.'
--(Yeats, 'The Dolls')
1. 1907: We are not alone (well, but you are, Jack-o).
Apparently, the other immortals could sense each other. They all had some inner radar that went off when they were near each other. Each other, as in there was more than one of them.
When Amanda had told him about that, he'd felt pretty damn deflated at the time. Her big brown eyes batted as she laid next to him in her giant four-poster canopied bed (she had given him a blow job that rivaled the skills of the six-tongued Pon-Tons of the Lotus Nebula), and she'd described the feeling in detail: throbbing, burning, sometimes, a stretching sensation, standing up too quickly, pins and needles in the skull. Nothing he'd ever felt, well, nothing from just being near another human being. Well, except for Torchwood's brief flirtation with electroshock therapy.
And her hand, sliced open to show him the spark of energy as the skin healed. When he cut himself like that, he healed like a normal human, and no spark. No fire.
Where did she come from? Where did they all come from? What did she do now? Every answer shoved them further apart on the spectrum. He'd never really ever seen the need for a blade, aside from the occasional pocketknife.
Jack left Amanda's bed feeling more alone than ever, distinctly wondering if he had been cheated in some way, and that hadn't just been because she'd lifted his billfold.
2. 1920: Two ships passing.
So fine, he didn't have a sensor, but he could see them from the way they moved-every immortal with fifty years under his or her belt had a certain savoir faire about the way they moved, the way they talked, the way they interacted with strangers.
Case in point-the man in front of him on the street. He was handsome, Jack'd happily admit, cropped hair of the fashion, suit and shiny shoes and the air of a dapper dom out to meet some lass at the café. But his hands had unmistakable calluses, and his feet rested too often on the balls when he was still, and his eyes, even when they laughed, moved along the figures that strolled past his wire chair in the Quarter.
Once seated, his companion wasn't much different: more laughing, more dangerous movement, a shoulder thrown back so that the sword was harder to see.
Jack was somewhat fresh from war and the things he had seen there, and he brushed past the flower sellers when they crushed him with blossoms, their quick and cheerful voices babbling, 'lush,' and 'beautiful'. Instead, he settled in the corner of the café, let the waitress bring him something, something, he waved a hand n'importe quoi. Then he opened the paper and skimmed the news, not really seeing it because he was looking at the two men on the other side of the square.
The one he had followed, Duncan MacLeod, was something or other on the Torchwood watch list-do-gooder, good man, saver of things, Scottish (therefore threat to the Empire). Jack found that he liked a great many of the threats to the Empire. They were usually his idea of a good time. Besides, Amanda was fond of MacLeod.
The other, ragged-haired Englishman with a mop of curls he'd rather have placed on a sixties singer, except that this was time linear, and not Time Agency time, not anymore, not even Doctor time. He sipped his coffee with his pinky out, but manly, mannish, rather, virile. Both of them actually. Jack didn't know why he was bothering, except that they were there, and he could never look away from immortals, not when they thrummed and moved and taunted him with what they knew that he didn't, which, as far as he was capable of gleaning, was just as little as he knew about everything to do with this energy, this thing that kept them alive.
He hadn't really meant to follow them here. He had just been in the area when MacLeod had caught his eye, tight arse in trousers, strong forearms cording out from rolled shirtsleeves, jacket draped over the back of the chair. And he could never pass up an opportunity, could he? Not that he'd met MacLeod, not officially. He might have spent a few leisurely hours perusing Torchwood's file on the man, on all of them (they had choice words about Amanda, too, didn't they, like thief, and Threat to the Empire. Jack still liked her too. Liked her immensely, right down to the cockles of his, well, just his cock, actually.)
He had a lot of questions, and while he could have had them answered by chatting up the gorgeous Watcher that shadowed MacLeod about in a manner that made him wonder how she hadn't yet been caught, he wanted to ask the man himself. He knew what he would probably get for his trouble, but it didn't change anything, really. Jack stared at the girl on the corner scribbling into a notebook, little bob of a haircut curling about her ears; lickable.
She'd be able to tell him, probably, about what happened when the sword hit the neck, when the head fell, why it fell and didn't reattach. Why his always did. He could even give her a good night of it, a liberated girl like that-in two years her skirt would probably be even shorter, her naked lips painted red kewpie. He could probably slip her a little retcon in a bottle of champagne, kiss her senseless while picking her brain. He shook his head; she looked too much like a few other someones he wasn't done with yet, not in his mind, really, someones he was trying to get over still.
They must have stayed there for an hour, eyes moving like scanners on the street, on the people, their bodies woefully relaxed but armed, decommissioned but still looking for something to kill. Jack had been reading the same article for the last twenty minutes. They never seemed to notice him, tucked away on the opposite corner, hands clenching the newspaper, his uniform faded and not nearly as smart as he'd like it to be. When they left, MacLeod came close enough that he could smell the man's pomade, something musky, not Brilliantine at all. The linen of his suit was delightfully wrinkled in that casual way, and his leather braces creaked when he twisted sideways a little to avoid two girls trying to squeeze through the café entrance gate with him.
Jack wanted to reach out and snag the man's sleeve when he passed, to grab his hand; the Northernness of his face reminded him of someone else, someone else whose approval he'd ended up yearning for, and had somehow, apparently, lost. Maybe he'd never had it to begin with.
Jack turned away, not letting his eyes track MacLeod down the street. His coffee was cold.
3. 1968: Yeah, but they were all bad.
And apparently, some immortals weren't particularly scrupulous. Jack could sympathise, though he generally preferred theft and a good con game; he hadn't done either in a long time, and sometimes he missed it. Then again, it was easy to lose sight of the long-term con, the one he'd been pulling for the past eighty years.
Sharon was out cold, but Robert was still awake, and he had her frame in his arms, dragging her clear of the warehouse. Jack didn't know where the rest of the team was, but he wasn't particularly curious about that right now.
Kyle Kintrall was a serial killer, and currently peddling alien tech in the guise of hallucinogens to the drugged out crowds of teenagers who had all decided that they didn't want to live in this reality anymore. Jack wanted to tell them all to have a good time, but to try not to be too disappointed. The tech spit out the poison pills in batches, little luminescent beads shaped like peace signs, (oh ha ha), and Kintrall hadn't been making them long, but long enough for some kids to have sprouted very real and non-hallucinogenic tentacles. Tentacles wouldn't be in-vogue modifications until the forty-fifth century, and even then only for about three weeks, and only because Madonnaclone24 had them.
He had already been shot once, and Kintrall had definitely seen it. In its own way it was pretty fucking funny, freaking another immortal out by being inexplicably immortal oneself. Kintrall had to know that he wasn't one of them, with his lack of telltale buzz.
Jack grimaced at his bloody shirt and sighed. "Do you know how hard it is to explain these things?" he griped, then shrugged. "Oh wait-you probably do. Finally we have something else in common." He glanced at Kintrall's cheesecloth shirt. "Well, thankfully not our fashion sense."
The man's eyes widened. "You were dead." When Jack stooped to pick up his sword, Kintrall scrambled backwards and nearly brained himself on a steel support beam. Jack took a second to inspect the blade, a two-edged beauty, actually, high carbon, folded steel, almost a little ahead of its time, actually. He wondered if it had fallen through the rift, too, a precursor of violence to come.
"Kyle, Kyle, Kyle," Jack said, swinging the sword around in an arc. "The bad ones always have the names that start with K. Why is that?"
"Y-Y-You can't use that," Kyle stammered, his eyes wide. "It's against the rules."
Jack smacked the flat of the blade off one of the steel supports and let the vibration rattle his hand almost painfully. The blade wobbled perceptibly. "Really? What rules?" He spread his hands and tried the smile that Sharon often told him was not, quote, reassuring. "I don't remember being given any rules."
Kyle pressed backwards into the beam before sliding around it, but he glanced over his shoulder, and Jack followed his gaze to the gun fifteen feet away. "You can't kill an unarmed man."
"You mean like you did, earlier?" Jack lunged forward and stabbed the tip of the blade into Kyle's belly. "To me?" He shrugged and dug the blade in deeper, and Kyle screamed. "Well, okay, I was armed, but you didn't know that." He turned the pommel. "Hrm. Pointy."
"Look, we can come to an arrangement," Kyle gasped, one hand propping himself up, the other one holding his bleeding gut. Jack glanced about for Robert and Sharon, but they had cleared out. Jack considered just running them an through and leaving him, but it seemed much like a slap in the wrist, really. Did dying ever stop him either?
"I doubt it," he said. "Get up." And when Kyle didn't move, he reached forward and yanked the man up to his knees.
Kyle didn't whine or beg of curse. Jack had to give him credit for grace. Or fear, maybe. "What are you?" he whispered.
Jack pulled back. This had to be just right; be the ball. "Good question."
He didn't stay for the lightshow. It didn't want him, anyway.
4. 1996: So he doesn't wear a suit, but he has a great ass.
Jack hated races. They were boring to watch when one wasn't out there on a bike themselves, gunning the throttle and surging over the track in its deadly paces. The tracks here were small and filthy and littered with loose women, and that last bit might have been more intriguing if Jack hadn't been there on business. Personal business, not Torchwood business, or Whitehall business.
His personal business came in an attractive, leather-clad, tight-arsed package: Richard Ryan, aka Richard Redstone. Born in Seacouver in 1975, orphan, juvenile delinquent, all but legally adopted by Duncan MacLeod. That name alone had been enough to earn Richie a file at Torchwood One, so they would be equipped to 'deal' with him should he ever set foot on British soil. What Torchwood ever thought they would have to 'deal' with continued to elude Jack's common sense processor.
Even after decades and a few close brushes back in the last world war, jack had never managed to touch base with Duncan MacLeod. Not in any way that wouldn't be received as creepy, stalkerish, entirely planned and/or manipulated. And there was virtually no way he'd be able to get MacLeod to part with that he wanted to know willingly, not without torture or something.
Richie Ryan, on the other hand, was the immortal equivalent of a deer who'd never seen a hunting season. And as far as Jack was concerned, it was lock and load.
He sat at the bar, ordered a bad glass of whisky that he would be justified in ignoring and hunched his shoulders. Richie tossed his bike helmet on the bar and it hit a bowl of something, spilling snacks all over the bar. The 'tender gave him a dirty look.
"Careful," Jack said. "If he spits in your drink I think you might actually catch something."
Richie laughed and the bartender glared at him from across the expanse of the room.
"Hey man," the Richie said, raising his hands out in front of him. "I'm not here to cause trouble. I just wanted to get a drink."
Jack threw a roll of Francs on the bar. "Get the boy a drink," he said to the tender. "He needs one."
Richie glanced at him before sliding onto the stool next to him. "I need one?"
Jack saluted the race on the telly above the bar. "Who wouldn't? Look at that."
Richie grimaced, nodded to the bartender when he put a neat glass of something that was probably spit-free whisky in front of him. "Yeah, I wiped out good," he said as the footage rolled his tumble over and over and over and rapid fire described it in French.
Jack watched the man on the screen bounce up and wave his hands in the international signal for 'I'm okay!' He chuckled into his water down drink and wondered when the French had decided that they were going to skimp on drinks as a whole. The French never skimped when alcohol was in play. Or anything made with butter.
"Do you ever actually finish a race?" Jack asked, and Richie had the grace to look appropriately affronted.
"Oh fuck you," he mumbled, but saluted Jack with his drink. "You should have been here last week…"
About three drinks later, they were in a natural lull, since Richie had just finished a descriptive tale about the track in Le Havre (and some of the ladies there) and Jack found himself genuinely amused by the story. Richie was easy and amiable, he liked talking engines and women, and Jack was happy to oblige, though really, he had a schedule to follow, so this couldn't go on forever. It was time to speed things up. Richie seemed loosened enough by drink that if Jack couldn't coax the information out of him one way, he could probably use the other method. He liked the other method better, anyway.
"I gotta get going," Jack said, and the metal rabbit trap went like this in his head: click click click. "It's been nice meeting you, Rich."
Richie saluted him with his drink again, but didn't offer to shake hands. That was the young for you, Jack figured.
"Oh, one more thing," he said, turning back to him before he slid off his barstool. "You know a guy named Methos?" he asked Richie, glancing away in feigned non-nonchalance as he tossed a tip on the bar. It was deliberate yeah, but he was fishing, and in fishing it was useless to look like you weren't interested. It was fucking fishing. And Jesus, what was with him and the hunting metaphors?
Richie's head swiveled back to him, and he knew he'd hit on something. Jack deliberately reached for something so that he could flash his tattoo-free left wrist.
"Nope, can't say I do," Richie fumbled. For a juvenile delinquent and history of crime, he was a bad liar. "What kind of person is named 'Methos', anyway?"
Jack shoved off from the bar and shrugged. "Dunno. That's what I was trying to find out," he told Richie and then clapped his shoulder. "See you around."
Richie's eyes followed him all the way to the door, and Jack pushed out into the dim lights of twilight and ambled through the buildings that had sprung up near the racetrack-garages, small manky grocers and cheap-ass housing.
"I'm not a watcher, and I don't care about your bullshit," Jack said wearily, not even bothering to look behind him when he heard the slick metal silken grinding of a sword being pulled from a scabbard.
"Man throws a name like that around," Richie told him, "he's got an agenda."
Jack raised his hands and turned-the sword brushed his jaw and he froze. Becoming headless and then suddenly not being headless anymore in front of Richie had not been one of the planned methods.
"What if I said it was a harmless agenda?" he offered.
"I'm not in the habit of killing mortals," Richie said slowly, "but it's been a bad few years."
Jack nodded and he action sent the blade against his skin, cutting the flesh minutely enough to hurt but not bleed. "Yeah, I know the feeling." He held his hands out. "If you don't know him, you don't know him. Not expecting to find him anyway. More like the other way around."
Richie's eyes narrowed. "What for?"
"Idle curiosity," Jack answered, expecting to be called on it. "I'm not one of you, and I don't care about the Game, whatever the fuck that is." Jack shrugged. "Wouldn't you want to meet a five thousand-year-old man?"
Richie pulled the sword from Jack's neck but he didn't sheathe or even lower it much. His feet shifted in the dirt, as if he was preparing for something, or indecisive, perhaps. Jack didn't blame him.
"You might be disappointed," Richie murmured, and then smiled to cover it. He was too young for that to be a successful tactic. "Nothing could ever live up to that hype."
"Oh I don't know," Jack said, inching away from the sword a little before finishing. "That other pub you mentioned with the chicks and the jukebox full of Stones albums sounded promising." He grinned. Where Richie was too young for the smile tactic, he was a genius. "Let you buy me a drink."
Three hours later Richie slung an arm over his shoulder and laughed into the night as they staggered through the tiny little streets of the village. Jack hadn't planned on staying this long, but Richie had bought him a drink, and then three, and then a google, and they were both a hundred and ten percent incapable of driving a vehicle except for the part where Jack had poured off most of his drinks and so was more than capable of navigating the nearly identical narrow lanes. And he was just buzzed enough that a hand on the back of Richie's head wasn't out of order; for a second, Richie just paused, hand on Jack's arm, blinkingin confusion.
"I'm straight, dude."
Jack smiled and pressed a little further. "Of course you are."
Richie's mouth closed over his, hands gripping his jacket and twisting it. Jack loved this part, the knee between the thighs, cocks hard, the slight groan of leather and denim. Then it was all, 'wait wait, come back to mine,' and then peeling clothes and grunting and sweat and road dirt and oh yeah, Richie was a biter.
"Methos is dead," Richie told him later in a blissed-out state. Jack had to admit that he hadn't intended on getting the man so drunk, but there had been a bottle of Patu and Richie had smelled like road and leather and Jesus, cock, and he just had to lay on the charm. Richie had taken him in hand, too, all protests about being straight aside. Immortality was too long not to try to stick your cock into everything you could, not that Jack had ever needed that excuse.
Jack stubbed his cigarette out on the windowsill and threw it into the bushes outside. "That's a bummer," he said. God, just hanging out with Richie for about three hours was mutating his vocabulary. Alex was going to make fun of him.
Richie was half asleep anyway, and it wouldn't take much to retcon him, except for the fact that the retcon didn't stick, not with them. Besides, if he didn't remember, then he couldn't tell anyone, could he?
5. 2008: The dark, cold emptiness that stretches out for centuries behind you.
"I imagined you'd be taller," Jack said as Methos sat next to him at the bar. "Monolithic. Epic."
Methos shrugged. "I imagined that you'd have more guns," he said. "Torchwood does love its guns."
Jack smiled and raised his glass. He was going to drink. He wanted to drink. "I thought you wouldn't like them."
Methos shrugged. "I like guns. Just not when they're pointed at me." He glanced at Jack. "You're not pointing one at me right now, are you?"
Jack laughed. "No. Torchwood still doesn't know about you," he said, trying to sound reassuring.
"The Watchers have a file on you," Methos answered. The bartender brought Methos a glass, and he sniffed it.
"I know." Jack smiled. "I put it there." He paused. "That sounds counter-productive."
Methos poured himself a drink from the bottle in front of Jack. "It was clever, putting all the feelers out there where I'd find them. The 'classified as sexy but harmless' was a but much, though." He tilted his glass in the light and looked through the whisky. "Ryan called me over ten years ago, frantic, wracked with guilt that he'd outed me to some nefarious organisation." He turned and blinked at Jack through the glass. "I wouldn't call that harmlesss."
Jack laughed and sipped his drink. It burned like hell. "Why'd you wait so long? I've been expecting you forever."
Methos belted the drink and set the glass down. "I have little respect for timelines. Then there's the advent of email and google." Jack lifted the bottle and he gestured with his hand. "And Amanda spoke highly of you. She seems to think this is a date."
Jack gave Methos the once over: lean, lanky build, a set of shoulders that probably had a fantastic set of accompanying arms. Lickable neck, a nose, dear god a Northern face. And hands, well, Jack was a sucker for men's hands. He would, he decided, he really would.
"How is Richie?" he asked instead.
Methos raised an eyebrow. "Dead." He stared at the bad painting of a seaside landscape over the bar and wrinkled his nose at it. "It's complicated."
"Always is," Jack told him. "I'm sorry."
Methos glanced at him, a furtive thing, as if he was checking for something, something Jack couldn't fathom. He must have found it, or not found it, because he shrugged. "So, Jack Harkness, how did we get here?"
Jack thought about where to start. How much should he tell him? Hell, he'd been looking for the man for about fifteen years, so it would be pointless not to tell him everything. Jack contemplated the curves of his glass and turned an ear to the song on the overhead-something about kissing a girl, which was only slightly interesting because a girl was singing. It must have been a novelty. Not for the first time Jack wished this century would hurry and catch up to him.
"It's complicated," he began, and then stopped.
Methos refilled his glass from the bottle on the bar and shrugged. "Isn't it always? Just go with your gut."
Jack closed his eyes. "There was a man," he said, "with a time machine."
"Ah yes, the Doctor, and his big blue box," Methos said, sighing, and Jack's eyes flew open. "A wonder it doesn't collapse with the weight of its own symbolism."
Jack raised his eyebrows. He had been about to ask, when he remembered the first tenet they'd settled on in their correspondence, in which they had agreed on a singular pact: I don't owe you secrets.
Because he had never mentioned the Doctor, not really, just a few things about Torchwood, because it wasn't as if Methos couldn't find it (oh he already had, for god's sake, the letter had come in the post addressed to Jack Harkness, come in the post at the tourist centre. It had been odd enough that Ianto's brows had lodged in his hairline for a full minute as he handed the letter over and then made a pot of coffee.) And it wasn't as if the Doctor belonged to him, anyway.
"Does he still wear that fucking scarf?" Methos asked.
Jack shook his head. "That one isn't mine." He shrugged. "Not that he ever was mine."
Methos clinked glasses with his stationary one and slumped a little, tall frame compacting into the hunch of the twenty-first century male at the pub, the one that said, 'I'm busy; do not approach.'
They sat there and Jack realised that he hadn't actually said anything towards his goal. "I can't die," he said suddenly. "I'm two hundred-no, two thousand some years old, and I can't die." He coughed. "Believe me, I've tried."
The hen night table let out a screech and Jack glanced at them in the mirror behind the bar. Oh hey, they'd given her one of those. He'd got Gwen one for her wedding shower-it had sixteen speeds-and she'd given it to Ianto, who'd left it on Jack's chair. None of this fond memory lane was helping him in his current predicament, except reminding him of why he needed to speak to Methos in the first place.
When he'd first started to look for him, it had been idle curiosity, like he'd told Richie. But the past few months had increased the urgency, and it had been dumb luck that the immortal had bothered to mail him.
"So, I take it that you have questions," Methos said suddenly. "I ask because your emails were cryptic, and no one ever asks me out, knowing who I am, unless they have something to ask about my age." He picked up his glass with two fingers and slid off the stool. The left side of his coat hit the barstool with a thunk. "Come on. We need a table." And then as Jack watched him walk away, he glanced back over his shoulder, and something in his eyes was terrifying and electric. Exciting. "Bring the bottle."
They settled in the corner, where they both had their backs to walls but could still see the room, and there was less chance of being overheard or hit on by the drunken ladies on hen night at the other end of the bar. Jack had already had to forlornly let them down twice; the first time, they'd thought he was the stripper they'd ordered.
"All right then," Methos said, finishing his glass and pouring them both more, even though Jack's was still half full, in the manner of Chinese tea custom: always pour for the rest of the rest of the table before filling your own. "What do you want to know?"
Jack thought about pulling out the list he'd written over the years, except that looked and sounded mindnumbingly idiotic. He had the list memorised anyway. And if he cut out all of the sex questions that he usually added when he was in a humorous mood (oh, he would admit it, he wants to fuck Methos, fuck him right into the wall right here, give those hen night girls a show), then he only had one. Well, one left now that he had met up with the Doctor and found out how and why he was.
"How long have you really been…?" he wanted to say it smartly. He wanted to ask it like it deserved to be asked. He wanted to ask it in a clever way that would charm Methos, a clever way he hadn't heard before. There wasn't really a way for that, he suspected. Not anymore.
Methos shrugged. "Five thousand years. Give or take."
Jack leaned forward. This was the question here. This was the moment in which he would be disappointed, he could feel it. "How did you…." He paused. "How do you even process it?"
Methos sighed. "I took notes. I take notes." He held up an arm, the palm of his hand stained with marker. "See? 'Jack, seven-thirty p.m. The Rare Oyster'." He flipped his coaster over so that the pub's name showed. "Voila."
Jack closed his eyes and breathed in deep. One of Methos's hands closed on his over the table, and when he opened his eyes again, Methos's face was dark and sympathetic.
"We need a few more drinks before we get closer to the truth, Jack."
Closer to the truth, slapped on the table for them like a three-dollar tip at the local watering hole, sticky and damp with water rings, and Jack wavered a bit when he brought his glass to his mouth. He'd talked a lot. Too much. Too drunk.
Methos glanced away. "I envy you, Jack," he said softly.
Jack almost threw the bottle at him. Unfortunately, there were about fifteen bottles on the table, but only one of them was solid, and he didn't manage to get the right one before Methos took the real bottle away and made a serious statement about their brief relationship with that one action alone.
"Tell me," Methos said, rolling his glass in his hand, "does knowing why it happened, how it happened, make it any easier, do you think?"
Jack shrugged. The answer came out fast, slippery. "No."
Methos sighed. The bartender brought them another bottle, but they waved it away. "Ah. I thought as much. And you think that I can offer words of wisdom."
"I am a blank slate."
"All right then." Methos ignored the easy jab and leant in placing both hands flat on the table. "I'll cut to the chase."
Jack blinked at him and his hands, long tapered fingers that could do all manner of things.
"I lived in Troy," Methos told him. "Once, twice, maybe three times." He shrugged. "In and out, hard to remember, which is part of my point but not."
Jack looked at the bottle in Methos's hand and wondered if the whisky possessed a language muddling nanite in it or something.
Methos set the bottle back on the table, but it was empty, and he'd poured the last finger into his own glass. "Years ago, they discovered the ruins." He reached out with his free hands and turned the flat coaster over and over like a man fiddling with a playing card. "And what was under those ruins?" He flipped the coaster again. "More ruins." Flip. "And probably more ruins under that." Methos flipped the coaster one final time and showed Jack the logo for The Rare Oyster, calling up his comment earlier. "That is your mind."
"My brain is a coaster with an oyster on one side and a Brains logo on the other," Jack mumbled and then barked a laugh. "That says everything."
Methos didn't bother to make fun of him or claim that he was drunk, or that he was being irreverent or silly. He just sat back and folded the coaster between two fingers. "Nothing is perfect."
The room experienced a long drawn out quiet murmur, everyone pausing for breath at once, perhaps, or maybe it was just one of those perfect moments, a signal from the universe that now was a time to reflect.
Well Jack wasn't about to start listening to the universe now.
"Don't you ever forget anything?" he asked, aware that he sounded drunken and sullen, like a sailor on shore leave who'd just discovered the whores were all taken for the night.
Methos gave him a smile, but it was rueful. "All the time. Just depends on when and why."
That answered that. Sort of. Jack took in a huge breath through his clenched teeth. He'd been worried when he'd woken up the other day and couldn't remember his first wife's name, just the colour of her hair and the sound of her laugh.
"I keep journals," Methos said. "I write a lot of things down. It's amazing what you think is important and ends up not being so. Or the number of things it seemed very important that I make note of that I don't even understand in the slightest now." Methos leant forward. "You know what I would like to remember? The smell of my sixth's wife's bread." He smiled at Jack and rotated the coaster end on end one end in his fingers. "The way a certain lover's hair felt on my skin. I don't even remember her name. The sound of an amphitheatre full of people, and the way my heart thudded."
Jack looked at the coaster, now bent in half, the outer seam of the fold ragged and torn with the pressure of the fold. "I don't want to forget them," he murmured.
Methos reached out with the cardboard and tipped Jack's chin up so that he could stare at him. Jack wondered what thousands of years looked like, and what was just Methos the man. It was easy to see the age in the Doctor's face, in his eyes when he looked at Jack and called him an abomination, or any number of other times; the Doctor's spirit didn't age well.
What did his eyes look like already? Over two thousand years; did Ianto see it when they pressed their chests together in the dim light of the Hub and stared at each other for long drawn out moments of surprise?
Methos ran the coaster up along Jack's cheek. "You won't. Not until it doesn't matter anymore."
"I've already forgotten things."
"You haven't forgotten those things. You've misfiled them," Methos said, tossing the coaster on the table and standing. He dug about in his coat for a wad of bills. "Those things will come back when you need them, but someday, you're going to forget my face, and I'll forget yours." And here he smiled, all warmth and amber. "And that's a damn shame."
Jack grinned. "Never. I'm emblazoned on your mind." He reached up to grab the man's sleeve, but missed, swiping at the air in a drunken move that made him look like a bad dancer in Cats.
"I'll put you in a taxi," Methos said, reaching down and pulling one of Jack's arms over his shoulder and hoisting him upright. "And up!"
The night air was cool, but not cold, and Cardiff was blossoming the way it did in the after hours, when people stopped working and went out for a bit of fun, to enjoy themselves, enjoy each other. This was human Cardiff, mortal Cardiff-the city that he protected, along with the rest of England and ultimately, he reminded himself, the whole planet. This was the Cardiff that belonged to the people walking around, hopping off to nightclubs or a late dinner down by the Quay, the Cardiff of closed arcades and roaming street sweepers hiding in the corners, waiting to come alive.
Methos leant Jack against the wall for a moment, patting himself down as if he were looking for something in his coat. Jack watched the fringe of his lashes close with a long blink and took advantage, reaching out to grab the man's shoulder and press him back into the wall, sealing his mouth over Methos's before breaking off suddenly and nosing the man's neck, a move which made him tense perceptibly.
"No, Jack," Methos said when he pushed against him. "This isn't going to make it better."
Jack dug his hands into Methos coat, into his shirt, his mouth into the crook of Methos neck, tasting, pressing, smelling, looking, searching. There had to be some sort of plug for him to get into, something to make him understand. He could press Methos and the man would open like a flower, open and spill it all out for Jack to see, to process, to understand.
He ignored him and just leaned on his with his full weight, waiting. Maybe he was waiting to be embraced. Maybe this was the thing that would get Methos to confess the secret of living with the ages, this was the position that would convince him how desperate Jack was to learn it.
Instead, Methos smiled on his neck; he could feel it. "I've someone waiting for me," he whispered. "And so do you."
Jack let go of one of Methos's lapels but not the other. Not yet, this hand uncurling, not yet. Not when he had been so close to a resolution that he might have found comforting. "He's Welsh."
Methos pulled his other hand from his lapel and gathered them both in his. "I know what that's like," he said quietly, without telling Jack what he knew at all. Instead, he leaned in and kissed Jack on the cheek, and then the lips, and Jack sighed into it. It was whisky and blood and phantom sadness, Troy and Boe and Welsh soil in his mouth, any number of flashes that his brain ignited like a rampant loose firework, jarred loose by smell, sensation, hearing.
Methos had warned him that he was just a guy, and Jack hadn't believed him, but that was because he hadn't understood what he had meant.
"Take care of yourself, Jack Harkness," Methos said softly when they had broken apart and stood in the darkness of the sidestreet, arms loosely wrapped around each other, two ageless men waiting for the city to evolve around them like the desert around a monolith.
Jack hiccuped. "May the force be with you," he mumbled. That didn't sound right.
The taxi was cold and dark, and Methos might have been a little tender when he tucked him in the backseat, gave the address to Ianto's flat, as if he'd known all along where Jack would end up, and he probably did. Methos probably knew everything, right down to Ianto's dick size and where Gwen was on her menstrual cycle.
He didn't say any parting words, and Jack hadn't expected him to. It was a let down in some ways, he mused, not because he'd expected more, but because he had expected more. The door shut with the dull thunk and the taxi started forward. He didn't even open his eyes as the car trundled along the street, but he mapped the way in his head, tracing the birds-eye view of the roadwork in his mind's eye, burning it onto memory, just to see how long he could make it last. He could remember this route for days, even, before it faded, fell back into is memory, and he'd never even miss it.
That was what was going to happen to everything, really. People, places, experiences, loves and hates might all get erased eventually, ruins over ruins, and all his keepsakes might become curious novelties without meaning. He might become another man eventually. That was a comforting thought. Maybe he'd be a better man the next few times, then.
Ianto wasn't too pleased to be prying him out of the back of the taxi like the shoehorn for a drunken loafer. But he hoisted and dragged and finally deposited Jack on the bed, pulling him upright long enough to get the coat off him, and then pushing him back onto the bed to divest him of his shoes and socks.
"What have you been doing, Jack," Ianto murmured to him, though he probably knew exactly what Jack had been doing. Ianto was like that; he knew everything.
Jack flailed as he tried to sit up, but it was easier just to lie back and let Ianto roll him out of his shirt and throw it off…somewhere.
"If you're going to be sick, please do it in the loo," Ianto reminded him resignedly.
"I'm never sick," Jack drawled. "I don't remember ever being sick." He groped in his trouser pocket and felt the coaster there, bent and compacted. "Oh hey, you," he said to the Brains logo as he unfolded it with two fingers.
Ianto snorted. "Did you at least find out what you wanted to know?"
Jack flipped the coaster in his fingers before reaching out and running it down Ianto's cheek to cup his chin.
Ianto batted his hand away. "Question answered."
Jack tasted the edge of the coaster-it was salty and sour like eating crepe paper. Then he tucked it back into his pocket, to put in his box, a memento of an experience, the end of a quest, the start of an experiment. A long sad experiment he'd probably forget one day, which would be the result anyway.
"Yeah," he said into the dark when Ianto turned out the light. "I think I did."
END
Author: amand_r
Fandom:Torchwood/Highlander
Characters: (in order of appearance) Jack, Amanda, Duncan, Fitz, [k'immie], Richie, Methos, Ianto.
Rating: PG-13 for language and shit
Author's Notes: You know I can't keep the peanut butter out of the chocolate. Or something. Thanks to lastrega for the beta magic.
Summary: They're like him, but not like him. They know less than he does, and they cannot teach him anything new.
A doll in the doll-maker's house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
'That is an insult to us.'
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Out-screams the whole shelf: 'Although
There's not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.'
Hearing him groan and stretch
The doll-maker's wife is aware
Her husband has heard the wretch,
And crouched by the arm of his chair,
She murmurs into his ear,
Head upon shoulder leant:
'My dear, my dear, O dear,
It was an accident.'
--(Yeats, 'The Dolls')
1. 1907: We are not alone (well, but you are, Jack-o).
Apparently, the other immortals could sense each other. They all had some inner radar that went off when they were near each other. Each other, as in there was more than one of them.
When Amanda had told him about that, he'd felt pretty damn deflated at the time. Her big brown eyes batted as she laid next to him in her giant four-poster canopied bed (she had given him a blow job that rivaled the skills of the six-tongued Pon-Tons of the Lotus Nebula), and she'd described the feeling in detail: throbbing, burning, sometimes, a stretching sensation, standing up too quickly, pins and needles in the skull. Nothing he'd ever felt, well, nothing from just being near another human being. Well, except for Torchwood's brief flirtation with electroshock therapy.
And her hand, sliced open to show him the spark of energy as the skin healed. When he cut himself like that, he healed like a normal human, and no spark. No fire.
Where did she come from? Where did they all come from? What did she do now? Every answer shoved them further apart on the spectrum. He'd never really ever seen the need for a blade, aside from the occasional pocketknife.
Jack left Amanda's bed feeling more alone than ever, distinctly wondering if he had been cheated in some way, and that hadn't just been because she'd lifted his billfold.
2. 1920: Two ships passing.
So fine, he didn't have a sensor, but he could see them from the way they moved-every immortal with fifty years under his or her belt had a certain savoir faire about the way they moved, the way they talked, the way they interacted with strangers.
Case in point-the man in front of him on the street. He was handsome, Jack'd happily admit, cropped hair of the fashion, suit and shiny shoes and the air of a dapper dom out to meet some lass at the café. But his hands had unmistakable calluses, and his feet rested too often on the balls when he was still, and his eyes, even when they laughed, moved along the figures that strolled past his wire chair in the Quarter.
Once seated, his companion wasn't much different: more laughing, more dangerous movement, a shoulder thrown back so that the sword was harder to see.
Jack was somewhat fresh from war and the things he had seen there, and he brushed past the flower sellers when they crushed him with blossoms, their quick and cheerful voices babbling, 'lush,' and 'beautiful'. Instead, he settled in the corner of the café, let the waitress bring him something, something, he waved a hand n'importe quoi. Then he opened the paper and skimmed the news, not really seeing it because he was looking at the two men on the other side of the square.
The one he had followed, Duncan MacLeod, was something or other on the Torchwood watch list-do-gooder, good man, saver of things, Scottish (therefore threat to the Empire). Jack found that he liked a great many of the threats to the Empire. They were usually his idea of a good time. Besides, Amanda was fond of MacLeod.
The other, ragged-haired Englishman with a mop of curls he'd rather have placed on a sixties singer, except that this was time linear, and not Time Agency time, not anymore, not even Doctor time. He sipped his coffee with his pinky out, but manly, mannish, rather, virile. Both of them actually. Jack didn't know why he was bothering, except that they were there, and he could never look away from immortals, not when they thrummed and moved and taunted him with what they knew that he didn't, which, as far as he was capable of gleaning, was just as little as he knew about everything to do with this energy, this thing that kept them alive.
He hadn't really meant to follow them here. He had just been in the area when MacLeod had caught his eye, tight arse in trousers, strong forearms cording out from rolled shirtsleeves, jacket draped over the back of the chair. And he could never pass up an opportunity, could he? Not that he'd met MacLeod, not officially. He might have spent a few leisurely hours perusing Torchwood's file on the man, on all of them (they had choice words about Amanda, too, didn't they, like thief, and Threat to the Empire. Jack still liked her too. Liked her immensely, right down to the cockles of his, well, just his cock, actually.)
He had a lot of questions, and while he could have had them answered by chatting up the gorgeous Watcher that shadowed MacLeod about in a manner that made him wonder how she hadn't yet been caught, he wanted to ask the man himself. He knew what he would probably get for his trouble, but it didn't change anything, really. Jack stared at the girl on the corner scribbling into a notebook, little bob of a haircut curling about her ears; lickable.
She'd be able to tell him, probably, about what happened when the sword hit the neck, when the head fell, why it fell and didn't reattach. Why his always did. He could even give her a good night of it, a liberated girl like that-in two years her skirt would probably be even shorter, her naked lips painted red kewpie. He could probably slip her a little retcon in a bottle of champagne, kiss her senseless while picking her brain. He shook his head; she looked too much like a few other someones he wasn't done with yet, not in his mind, really, someones he was trying to get over still.
They must have stayed there for an hour, eyes moving like scanners on the street, on the people, their bodies woefully relaxed but armed, decommissioned but still looking for something to kill. Jack had been reading the same article for the last twenty minutes. They never seemed to notice him, tucked away on the opposite corner, hands clenching the newspaper, his uniform faded and not nearly as smart as he'd like it to be. When they left, MacLeod came close enough that he could smell the man's pomade, something musky, not Brilliantine at all. The linen of his suit was delightfully wrinkled in that casual way, and his leather braces creaked when he twisted sideways a little to avoid two girls trying to squeeze through the café entrance gate with him.
Jack wanted to reach out and snag the man's sleeve when he passed, to grab his hand; the Northernness of his face reminded him of someone else, someone else whose approval he'd ended up yearning for, and had somehow, apparently, lost. Maybe he'd never had it to begin with.
Jack turned away, not letting his eyes track MacLeod down the street. His coffee was cold.
3. 1968: Yeah, but they were all bad.
And apparently, some immortals weren't particularly scrupulous. Jack could sympathise, though he generally preferred theft and a good con game; he hadn't done either in a long time, and sometimes he missed it. Then again, it was easy to lose sight of the long-term con, the one he'd been pulling for the past eighty years.
Sharon was out cold, but Robert was still awake, and he had her frame in his arms, dragging her clear of the warehouse. Jack didn't know where the rest of the team was, but he wasn't particularly curious about that right now.
Kyle Kintrall was a serial killer, and currently peddling alien tech in the guise of hallucinogens to the drugged out crowds of teenagers who had all decided that they didn't want to live in this reality anymore. Jack wanted to tell them all to have a good time, but to try not to be too disappointed. The tech spit out the poison pills in batches, little luminescent beads shaped like peace signs, (oh ha ha), and Kintrall hadn't been making them long, but long enough for some kids to have sprouted very real and non-hallucinogenic tentacles. Tentacles wouldn't be in-vogue modifications until the forty-fifth century, and even then only for about three weeks, and only because Madonnaclone24 had them.
He had already been shot once, and Kintrall had definitely seen it. In its own way it was pretty fucking funny, freaking another immortal out by being inexplicably immortal oneself. Kintrall had to know that he wasn't one of them, with his lack of telltale buzz.
Jack grimaced at his bloody shirt and sighed. "Do you know how hard it is to explain these things?" he griped, then shrugged. "Oh wait-you probably do. Finally we have something else in common." He glanced at Kintrall's cheesecloth shirt. "Well, thankfully not our fashion sense."
The man's eyes widened. "You were dead." When Jack stooped to pick up his sword, Kintrall scrambled backwards and nearly brained himself on a steel support beam. Jack took a second to inspect the blade, a two-edged beauty, actually, high carbon, folded steel, almost a little ahead of its time, actually. He wondered if it had fallen through the rift, too, a precursor of violence to come.
"Kyle, Kyle, Kyle," Jack said, swinging the sword around in an arc. "The bad ones always have the names that start with K. Why is that?"
"Y-Y-You can't use that," Kyle stammered, his eyes wide. "It's against the rules."
Jack smacked the flat of the blade off one of the steel supports and let the vibration rattle his hand almost painfully. The blade wobbled perceptibly. "Really? What rules?" He spread his hands and tried the smile that Sharon often told him was not, quote, reassuring. "I don't remember being given any rules."
Kyle pressed backwards into the beam before sliding around it, but he glanced over his shoulder, and Jack followed his gaze to the gun fifteen feet away. "You can't kill an unarmed man."
"You mean like you did, earlier?" Jack lunged forward and stabbed the tip of the blade into Kyle's belly. "To me?" He shrugged and dug the blade in deeper, and Kyle screamed. "Well, okay, I was armed, but you didn't know that." He turned the pommel. "Hrm. Pointy."
"Look, we can come to an arrangement," Kyle gasped, one hand propping himself up, the other one holding his bleeding gut. Jack glanced about for Robert and Sharon, but they had cleared out. Jack considered just running them an through and leaving him, but it seemed much like a slap in the wrist, really. Did dying ever stop him either?
"I doubt it," he said. "Get up." And when Kyle didn't move, he reached forward and yanked the man up to his knees.
Kyle didn't whine or beg of curse. Jack had to give him credit for grace. Or fear, maybe. "What are you?" he whispered.
Jack pulled back. This had to be just right; be the ball. "Good question."
He didn't stay for the lightshow. It didn't want him, anyway.
4. 1996: So he doesn't wear a suit, but he has a great ass.
Jack hated races. They were boring to watch when one wasn't out there on a bike themselves, gunning the throttle and surging over the track in its deadly paces. The tracks here were small and filthy and littered with loose women, and that last bit might have been more intriguing if Jack hadn't been there on business. Personal business, not Torchwood business, or Whitehall business.
His personal business came in an attractive, leather-clad, tight-arsed package: Richard Ryan, aka Richard Redstone. Born in Seacouver in 1975, orphan, juvenile delinquent, all but legally adopted by Duncan MacLeod. That name alone had been enough to earn Richie a file at Torchwood One, so they would be equipped to 'deal' with him should he ever set foot on British soil. What Torchwood ever thought they would have to 'deal' with continued to elude Jack's common sense processor.
Even after decades and a few close brushes back in the last world war, jack had never managed to touch base with Duncan MacLeod. Not in any way that wouldn't be received as creepy, stalkerish, entirely planned and/or manipulated. And there was virtually no way he'd be able to get MacLeod to part with that he wanted to know willingly, not without torture or something.
Richie Ryan, on the other hand, was the immortal equivalent of a deer who'd never seen a hunting season. And as far as Jack was concerned, it was lock and load.
He sat at the bar, ordered a bad glass of whisky that he would be justified in ignoring and hunched his shoulders. Richie tossed his bike helmet on the bar and it hit a bowl of something, spilling snacks all over the bar. The 'tender gave him a dirty look.
"Careful," Jack said. "If he spits in your drink I think you might actually catch something."
Richie laughed and the bartender glared at him from across the expanse of the room.
"Hey man," the Richie said, raising his hands out in front of him. "I'm not here to cause trouble. I just wanted to get a drink."
Jack threw a roll of Francs on the bar. "Get the boy a drink," he said to the tender. "He needs one."
Richie glanced at him before sliding onto the stool next to him. "I need one?"
Jack saluted the race on the telly above the bar. "Who wouldn't? Look at that."
Richie grimaced, nodded to the bartender when he put a neat glass of something that was probably spit-free whisky in front of him. "Yeah, I wiped out good," he said as the footage rolled his tumble over and over and over and rapid fire described it in French.
Jack watched the man on the screen bounce up and wave his hands in the international signal for 'I'm okay!' He chuckled into his water down drink and wondered when the French had decided that they were going to skimp on drinks as a whole. The French never skimped when alcohol was in play. Or anything made with butter.
"Do you ever actually finish a race?" Jack asked, and Richie had the grace to look appropriately affronted.
"Oh fuck you," he mumbled, but saluted Jack with his drink. "You should have been here last week…"
About three drinks later, they were in a natural lull, since Richie had just finished a descriptive tale about the track in Le Havre (and some of the ladies there) and Jack found himself genuinely amused by the story. Richie was easy and amiable, he liked talking engines and women, and Jack was happy to oblige, though really, he had a schedule to follow, so this couldn't go on forever. It was time to speed things up. Richie seemed loosened enough by drink that if Jack couldn't coax the information out of him one way, he could probably use the other method. He liked the other method better, anyway.
"I gotta get going," Jack said, and the metal rabbit trap went like this in his head: click click click. "It's been nice meeting you, Rich."
Richie saluted him with his drink again, but didn't offer to shake hands. That was the young for you, Jack figured.
"Oh, one more thing," he said, turning back to him before he slid off his barstool. "You know a guy named Methos?" he asked Richie, glancing away in feigned non-nonchalance as he tossed a tip on the bar. It was deliberate yeah, but he was fishing, and in fishing it was useless to look like you weren't interested. It was fucking fishing. And Jesus, what was with him and the hunting metaphors?
Richie's head swiveled back to him, and he knew he'd hit on something. Jack deliberately reached for something so that he could flash his tattoo-free left wrist.
"Nope, can't say I do," Richie fumbled. For a juvenile delinquent and history of crime, he was a bad liar. "What kind of person is named 'Methos', anyway?"
Jack shoved off from the bar and shrugged. "Dunno. That's what I was trying to find out," he told Richie and then clapped his shoulder. "See you around."
Richie's eyes followed him all the way to the door, and Jack pushed out into the dim lights of twilight and ambled through the buildings that had sprung up near the racetrack-garages, small manky grocers and cheap-ass housing.
"I'm not a watcher, and I don't care about your bullshit," Jack said wearily, not even bothering to look behind him when he heard the slick metal silken grinding of a sword being pulled from a scabbard.
"Man throws a name like that around," Richie told him, "he's got an agenda."
Jack raised his hands and turned-the sword brushed his jaw and he froze. Becoming headless and then suddenly not being headless anymore in front of Richie had not been one of the planned methods.
"What if I said it was a harmless agenda?" he offered.
"I'm not in the habit of killing mortals," Richie said slowly, "but it's been a bad few years."
Jack nodded and he action sent the blade against his skin, cutting the flesh minutely enough to hurt but not bleed. "Yeah, I know the feeling." He held his hands out. "If you don't know him, you don't know him. Not expecting to find him anyway. More like the other way around."
Richie's eyes narrowed. "What for?"
"Idle curiosity," Jack answered, expecting to be called on it. "I'm not one of you, and I don't care about the Game, whatever the fuck that is." Jack shrugged. "Wouldn't you want to meet a five thousand-year-old man?"
Richie pulled the sword from Jack's neck but he didn't sheathe or even lower it much. His feet shifted in the dirt, as if he was preparing for something, or indecisive, perhaps. Jack didn't blame him.
"You might be disappointed," Richie murmured, and then smiled to cover it. He was too young for that to be a successful tactic. "Nothing could ever live up to that hype."
"Oh I don't know," Jack said, inching away from the sword a little before finishing. "That other pub you mentioned with the chicks and the jukebox full of Stones albums sounded promising." He grinned. Where Richie was too young for the smile tactic, he was a genius. "Let you buy me a drink."
Three hours later Richie slung an arm over his shoulder and laughed into the night as they staggered through the tiny little streets of the village. Jack hadn't planned on staying this long, but Richie had bought him a drink, and then three, and then a google, and they were both a hundred and ten percent incapable of driving a vehicle except for the part where Jack had poured off most of his drinks and so was more than capable of navigating the nearly identical narrow lanes. And he was just buzzed enough that a hand on the back of Richie's head wasn't out of order; for a second, Richie just paused, hand on Jack's arm, blinkingin confusion.
"I'm straight, dude."
Jack smiled and pressed a little further. "Of course you are."
Richie's mouth closed over his, hands gripping his jacket and twisting it. Jack loved this part, the knee between the thighs, cocks hard, the slight groan of leather and denim. Then it was all, 'wait wait, come back to mine,' and then peeling clothes and grunting and sweat and road dirt and oh yeah, Richie was a biter.
"Methos is dead," Richie told him later in a blissed-out state. Jack had to admit that he hadn't intended on getting the man so drunk, but there had been a bottle of Patu and Richie had smelled like road and leather and Jesus, cock, and he just had to lay on the charm. Richie had taken him in hand, too, all protests about being straight aside. Immortality was too long not to try to stick your cock into everything you could, not that Jack had ever needed that excuse.
Jack stubbed his cigarette out on the windowsill and threw it into the bushes outside. "That's a bummer," he said. God, just hanging out with Richie for about three hours was mutating his vocabulary. Alex was going to make fun of him.
Richie was half asleep anyway, and it wouldn't take much to retcon him, except for the fact that the retcon didn't stick, not with them. Besides, if he didn't remember, then he couldn't tell anyone, could he?
5. 2008: The dark, cold emptiness that stretches out for centuries behind you.
"I imagined you'd be taller," Jack said as Methos sat next to him at the bar. "Monolithic. Epic."
Methos shrugged. "I imagined that you'd have more guns," he said. "Torchwood does love its guns."
Jack smiled and raised his glass. He was going to drink. He wanted to drink. "I thought you wouldn't like them."
Methos shrugged. "I like guns. Just not when they're pointed at me." He glanced at Jack. "You're not pointing one at me right now, are you?"
Jack laughed. "No. Torchwood still doesn't know about you," he said, trying to sound reassuring.
"The Watchers have a file on you," Methos answered. The bartender brought Methos a glass, and he sniffed it.
"I know." Jack smiled. "I put it there." He paused. "That sounds counter-productive."
Methos poured himself a drink from the bottle in front of Jack. "It was clever, putting all the feelers out there where I'd find them. The 'classified as sexy but harmless' was a but much, though." He tilted his glass in the light and looked through the whisky. "Ryan called me over ten years ago, frantic, wracked with guilt that he'd outed me to some nefarious organisation." He turned and blinked at Jack through the glass. "I wouldn't call that harmlesss."
Jack laughed and sipped his drink. It burned like hell. "Why'd you wait so long? I've been expecting you forever."
Methos belted the drink and set the glass down. "I have little respect for timelines. Then there's the advent of email and google." Jack lifted the bottle and he gestured with his hand. "And Amanda spoke highly of you. She seems to think this is a date."
Jack gave Methos the once over: lean, lanky build, a set of shoulders that probably had a fantastic set of accompanying arms. Lickable neck, a nose, dear god a Northern face. And hands, well, Jack was a sucker for men's hands. He would, he decided, he really would.
"How is Richie?" he asked instead.
Methos raised an eyebrow. "Dead." He stared at the bad painting of a seaside landscape over the bar and wrinkled his nose at it. "It's complicated."
"Always is," Jack told him. "I'm sorry."
Methos glanced at him, a furtive thing, as if he was checking for something, something Jack couldn't fathom. He must have found it, or not found it, because he shrugged. "So, Jack Harkness, how did we get here?"
Jack thought about where to start. How much should he tell him? Hell, he'd been looking for the man for about fifteen years, so it would be pointless not to tell him everything. Jack contemplated the curves of his glass and turned an ear to the song on the overhead-something about kissing a girl, which was only slightly interesting because a girl was singing. It must have been a novelty. Not for the first time Jack wished this century would hurry and catch up to him.
"It's complicated," he began, and then stopped.
Methos refilled his glass from the bottle on the bar and shrugged. "Isn't it always? Just go with your gut."
Jack closed his eyes. "There was a man," he said, "with a time machine."
"Ah yes, the Doctor, and his big blue box," Methos said, sighing, and Jack's eyes flew open. "A wonder it doesn't collapse with the weight of its own symbolism."
Jack raised his eyebrows. He had been about to ask, when he remembered the first tenet they'd settled on in their correspondence, in which they had agreed on a singular pact: I don't owe you secrets.
Because he had never mentioned the Doctor, not really, just a few things about Torchwood, because it wasn't as if Methos couldn't find it (oh he already had, for god's sake, the letter had come in the post addressed to Jack Harkness, come in the post at the tourist centre. It had been odd enough that Ianto's brows had lodged in his hairline for a full minute as he handed the letter over and then made a pot of coffee.) And it wasn't as if the Doctor belonged to him, anyway.
"Does he still wear that fucking scarf?" Methos asked.
Jack shook his head. "That one isn't mine." He shrugged. "Not that he ever was mine."
Methos clinked glasses with his stationary one and slumped a little, tall frame compacting into the hunch of the twenty-first century male at the pub, the one that said, 'I'm busy; do not approach.'
They sat there and Jack realised that he hadn't actually said anything towards his goal. "I can't die," he said suddenly. "I'm two hundred-no, two thousand some years old, and I can't die." He coughed. "Believe me, I've tried."
The hen night table let out a screech and Jack glanced at them in the mirror behind the bar. Oh hey, they'd given her one of those. He'd got Gwen one for her wedding shower-it had sixteen speeds-and she'd given it to Ianto, who'd left it on Jack's chair. None of this fond memory lane was helping him in his current predicament, except reminding him of why he needed to speak to Methos in the first place.
When he'd first started to look for him, it had been idle curiosity, like he'd told Richie. But the past few months had increased the urgency, and it had been dumb luck that the immortal had bothered to mail him.
"So, I take it that you have questions," Methos said suddenly. "I ask because your emails were cryptic, and no one ever asks me out, knowing who I am, unless they have something to ask about my age." He picked up his glass with two fingers and slid off the stool. The left side of his coat hit the barstool with a thunk. "Come on. We need a table." And then as Jack watched him walk away, he glanced back over his shoulder, and something in his eyes was terrifying and electric. Exciting. "Bring the bottle."
They settled in the corner, where they both had their backs to walls but could still see the room, and there was less chance of being overheard or hit on by the drunken ladies on hen night at the other end of the bar. Jack had already had to forlornly let them down twice; the first time, they'd thought he was the stripper they'd ordered.
"All right then," Methos said, finishing his glass and pouring them both more, even though Jack's was still half full, in the manner of Chinese tea custom: always pour for the rest of the rest of the table before filling your own. "What do you want to know?"
Jack thought about pulling out the list he'd written over the years, except that looked and sounded mindnumbingly idiotic. He had the list memorised anyway. And if he cut out all of the sex questions that he usually added when he was in a humorous mood (oh, he would admit it, he wants to fuck Methos, fuck him right into the wall right here, give those hen night girls a show), then he only had one. Well, one left now that he had met up with the Doctor and found out how and why he was.
"How long have you really been…?" he wanted to say it smartly. He wanted to ask it like it deserved to be asked. He wanted to ask it in a clever way that would charm Methos, a clever way he hadn't heard before. There wasn't really a way for that, he suspected. Not anymore.
Methos shrugged. "Five thousand years. Give or take."
Jack leaned forward. This was the question here. This was the moment in which he would be disappointed, he could feel it. "How did you…." He paused. "How do you even process it?"
Methos sighed. "I took notes. I take notes." He held up an arm, the palm of his hand stained with marker. "See? 'Jack, seven-thirty p.m. The Rare Oyster'." He flipped his coaster over so that the pub's name showed. "Voila."
Jack closed his eyes and breathed in deep. One of Methos's hands closed on his over the table, and when he opened his eyes again, Methos's face was dark and sympathetic.
"We need a few more drinks before we get closer to the truth, Jack."
Closer to the truth, slapped on the table for them like a three-dollar tip at the local watering hole, sticky and damp with water rings, and Jack wavered a bit when he brought his glass to his mouth. He'd talked a lot. Too much. Too drunk.
Methos glanced away. "I envy you, Jack," he said softly.
Jack almost threw the bottle at him. Unfortunately, there were about fifteen bottles on the table, but only one of them was solid, and he didn't manage to get the right one before Methos took the real bottle away and made a serious statement about their brief relationship with that one action alone.
"Tell me," Methos said, rolling his glass in his hand, "does knowing why it happened, how it happened, make it any easier, do you think?"
Jack shrugged. The answer came out fast, slippery. "No."
Methos sighed. The bartender brought them another bottle, but they waved it away. "Ah. I thought as much. And you think that I can offer words of wisdom."
"I am a blank slate."
"All right then." Methos ignored the easy jab and leant in placing both hands flat on the table. "I'll cut to the chase."
Jack blinked at him and his hands, long tapered fingers that could do all manner of things.
"I lived in Troy," Methos told him. "Once, twice, maybe three times." He shrugged. "In and out, hard to remember, which is part of my point but not."
Jack looked at the bottle in Methos's hand and wondered if the whisky possessed a language muddling nanite in it or something.
Methos set the bottle back on the table, but it was empty, and he'd poured the last finger into his own glass. "Years ago, they discovered the ruins." He reached out with his free hands and turned the flat coaster over and over like a man fiddling with a playing card. "And what was under those ruins?" He flipped the coaster again. "More ruins." Flip. "And probably more ruins under that." Methos flipped the coaster one final time and showed Jack the logo for The Rare Oyster, calling up his comment earlier. "That is your mind."
"My brain is a coaster with an oyster on one side and a Brains logo on the other," Jack mumbled and then barked a laugh. "That says everything."
Methos didn't bother to make fun of him or claim that he was drunk, or that he was being irreverent or silly. He just sat back and folded the coaster between two fingers. "Nothing is perfect."
The room experienced a long drawn out quiet murmur, everyone pausing for breath at once, perhaps, or maybe it was just one of those perfect moments, a signal from the universe that now was a time to reflect.
Well Jack wasn't about to start listening to the universe now.
"Don't you ever forget anything?" he asked, aware that he sounded drunken and sullen, like a sailor on shore leave who'd just discovered the whores were all taken for the night.
Methos gave him a smile, but it was rueful. "All the time. Just depends on when and why."
That answered that. Sort of. Jack took in a huge breath through his clenched teeth. He'd been worried when he'd woken up the other day and couldn't remember his first wife's name, just the colour of her hair and the sound of her laugh.
"I keep journals," Methos said. "I write a lot of things down. It's amazing what you think is important and ends up not being so. Or the number of things it seemed very important that I make note of that I don't even understand in the slightest now." Methos leant forward. "You know what I would like to remember? The smell of my sixth's wife's bread." He smiled at Jack and rotated the coaster end on end one end in his fingers. "The way a certain lover's hair felt on my skin. I don't even remember her name. The sound of an amphitheatre full of people, and the way my heart thudded."
Jack looked at the coaster, now bent in half, the outer seam of the fold ragged and torn with the pressure of the fold. "I don't want to forget them," he murmured.
Methos reached out with the cardboard and tipped Jack's chin up so that he could stare at him. Jack wondered what thousands of years looked like, and what was just Methos the man. It was easy to see the age in the Doctor's face, in his eyes when he looked at Jack and called him an abomination, or any number of other times; the Doctor's spirit didn't age well.
What did his eyes look like already? Over two thousand years; did Ianto see it when they pressed their chests together in the dim light of the Hub and stared at each other for long drawn out moments of surprise?
Methos ran the coaster up along Jack's cheek. "You won't. Not until it doesn't matter anymore."
"I've already forgotten things."
"You haven't forgotten those things. You've misfiled them," Methos said, tossing the coaster on the table and standing. He dug about in his coat for a wad of bills. "Those things will come back when you need them, but someday, you're going to forget my face, and I'll forget yours." And here he smiled, all warmth and amber. "And that's a damn shame."
Jack grinned. "Never. I'm emblazoned on your mind." He reached up to grab the man's sleeve, but missed, swiping at the air in a drunken move that made him look like a bad dancer in Cats.
"I'll put you in a taxi," Methos said, reaching down and pulling one of Jack's arms over his shoulder and hoisting him upright. "And up!"
The night air was cool, but not cold, and Cardiff was blossoming the way it did in the after hours, when people stopped working and went out for a bit of fun, to enjoy themselves, enjoy each other. This was human Cardiff, mortal Cardiff-the city that he protected, along with the rest of England and ultimately, he reminded himself, the whole planet. This was the Cardiff that belonged to the people walking around, hopping off to nightclubs or a late dinner down by the Quay, the Cardiff of closed arcades and roaming street sweepers hiding in the corners, waiting to come alive.
Methos leant Jack against the wall for a moment, patting himself down as if he were looking for something in his coat. Jack watched the fringe of his lashes close with a long blink and took advantage, reaching out to grab the man's shoulder and press him back into the wall, sealing his mouth over Methos's before breaking off suddenly and nosing the man's neck, a move which made him tense perceptibly.
"No, Jack," Methos said when he pushed against him. "This isn't going to make it better."
Jack dug his hands into Methos coat, into his shirt, his mouth into the crook of Methos neck, tasting, pressing, smelling, looking, searching. There had to be some sort of plug for him to get into, something to make him understand. He could press Methos and the man would open like a flower, open and spill it all out for Jack to see, to process, to understand.
He ignored him and just leaned on his with his full weight, waiting. Maybe he was waiting to be embraced. Maybe this was the thing that would get Methos to confess the secret of living with the ages, this was the position that would convince him how desperate Jack was to learn it.
Instead, Methos smiled on his neck; he could feel it. "I've someone waiting for me," he whispered. "And so do you."
Jack let go of one of Methos's lapels but not the other. Not yet, this hand uncurling, not yet. Not when he had been so close to a resolution that he might have found comforting. "He's Welsh."
Methos pulled his other hand from his lapel and gathered them both in his. "I know what that's like," he said quietly, without telling Jack what he knew at all. Instead, he leaned in and kissed Jack on the cheek, and then the lips, and Jack sighed into it. It was whisky and blood and phantom sadness, Troy and Boe and Welsh soil in his mouth, any number of flashes that his brain ignited like a rampant loose firework, jarred loose by smell, sensation, hearing.
Methos had warned him that he was just a guy, and Jack hadn't believed him, but that was because he hadn't understood what he had meant.
"Take care of yourself, Jack Harkness," Methos said softly when they had broken apart and stood in the darkness of the sidestreet, arms loosely wrapped around each other, two ageless men waiting for the city to evolve around them like the desert around a monolith.
Jack hiccuped. "May the force be with you," he mumbled. That didn't sound right.
The taxi was cold and dark, and Methos might have been a little tender when he tucked him in the backseat, gave the address to Ianto's flat, as if he'd known all along where Jack would end up, and he probably did. Methos probably knew everything, right down to Ianto's dick size and where Gwen was on her menstrual cycle.
He didn't say any parting words, and Jack hadn't expected him to. It was a let down in some ways, he mused, not because he'd expected more, but because he had expected more. The door shut with the dull thunk and the taxi started forward. He didn't even open his eyes as the car trundled along the street, but he mapped the way in his head, tracing the birds-eye view of the roadwork in his mind's eye, burning it onto memory, just to see how long he could make it last. He could remember this route for days, even, before it faded, fell back into is memory, and he'd never even miss it.
That was what was going to happen to everything, really. People, places, experiences, loves and hates might all get erased eventually, ruins over ruins, and all his keepsakes might become curious novelties without meaning. He might become another man eventually. That was a comforting thought. Maybe he'd be a better man the next few times, then.
Ianto wasn't too pleased to be prying him out of the back of the taxi like the shoehorn for a drunken loafer. But he hoisted and dragged and finally deposited Jack on the bed, pulling him upright long enough to get the coat off him, and then pushing him back onto the bed to divest him of his shoes and socks.
"What have you been doing, Jack," Ianto murmured to him, though he probably knew exactly what Jack had been doing. Ianto was like that; he knew everything.
Jack flailed as he tried to sit up, but it was easier just to lie back and let Ianto roll him out of his shirt and throw it off…somewhere.
"If you're going to be sick, please do it in the loo," Ianto reminded him resignedly.
"I'm never sick," Jack drawled. "I don't remember ever being sick." He groped in his trouser pocket and felt the coaster there, bent and compacted. "Oh hey, you," he said to the Brains logo as he unfolded it with two fingers.
Ianto snorted. "Did you at least find out what you wanted to know?"
Jack flipped the coaster in his fingers before reaching out and running it down Ianto's cheek to cup his chin.
Ianto batted his hand away. "Question answered."
Jack tasted the edge of the coaster-it was salty and sour like eating crepe paper. Then he tucked it back into his pocket, to put in his box, a memento of an experience, the end of a quest, the start of an experiment. A long sad experiment he'd probably forget one day, which would be the result anyway.
"Yeah," he said into the dark when Ianto turned out the light. "I think I did."
END