Canon/Plot!fic: To a wanderer the faces of all islands resemble one another…
{Backdated to May 1, 2010}
As a dog, he could doze.
One of many advantages.
He dreamed, too: a white-noise roar, shapes rising out of it like the corners of fallen buildings, running, liminal spaces between humanity and the canine mind. He could hear, and his ears made no distinction between the substance of his physical self and of his dreams. Nothing made sense, or tried to. Nothing meant anything, until he woke up with a boot on his side.
The boot was attached to a foot which was rolling him over, and when he looked up, half-startled and half-ready to bite, he saw Owen standing over him, and Owen looked a wreck.
For one, he reeked of blood and alcohol.
J couldn't tell if his color was off, but plenty of biological distress underwrote his scent. His expression was twisted, his eyes notably bleary, and his posture was nothing J had ever seen outside of a catastrophe. A bandage was wrapped around his hand.
"Get up," he said. "Put some fucking clothes on."
And then Owen, who'd just sought him out for the first time since his return, walked out of the room and into the hall.
J got up.
He'd worked out the dog shift fairly well, and pulled on his clothing as quickly as anyone Torchwood-trained learned to. Out in the hall, Owen was red-eyed and shaking, staring like he'd seen the dead.
"They're gone," he said, without pleasantry. "They got taken away. Right down to us."
That was how J woke up on May 1st, to an empty Kashtta and a shaken city. Not to a bang, but a confession.
-
Owen was in a bad way: shaking, half-drunk (self-sedation, he said) and snapping at everything, at the walls, at the ceiling, at the building and the city and by implication the entire universe and all its Rift activity and the journal network and everyone on it and everyone who had been on it but had been blotted out of the world.
"Entire building's -- fucking -- been screaming in my head," he said, spitting out the words through sharp tones and profanity. "Bloody city's gone up. Rifts. Missing. See also: the entire Torchwood staff. Ripped right up. Fucking -- felt it," and J had to control his hands, prevent them from reaching out. Owen, more than likely, would have bitten the hands off at the wrist.
J wasn't sure what was required of him.
"Back up," he said, not quite reaching for authority, but reaching for something. "Everyone's gone. A Rift flareup?" he asked, and then there was a Glock in his face.
The Glock, J noted with some disconnection, was not Owen's gun.
"Why didn't you do anything?" Owen asked, and while he didn't trip over the words any more, his voice was too quiet for comfort and dangerously unsteady. J froze, unsure of how he should respond, or if responding would provoke an attack. "You never fucking did anything. Everyone in Torchwood, and you--"
"Owen," J said. The gun wavered.
"How do we get out?"
J had no response to that.
"How do we get out?" Quieter, this time. J almost took a step toward him, but a cold ribbon at the bottom of his gut warned against it.
"Owen, you're beginning to speak in metaphor," he said. That was the obvious answer; Owen could be talking about "out, through the Rift and home again," but for all that the larger context would suggest it, the closer context seemed all wrong. "Knowing you and metaphor, I don't think that's a good--"
He didn't ignore the signs of Owen's gun hand steadying, the instant of anticipation before the muzzle flash. But he didn't duck from them, either.
-
The smell of blood was underwhelming. Strong, but cut with gunpowder, cut with conditioned air, cut with sweat. Sweat was how J worked out that Owen was sitting beside him; only then did he open his eyes.
Owen's breathing was ragged, with no attempt to disguise itself. J pushed himself off the ground and sat there with him, almost shoulder-to-shoulder, any possible response stuck in his throat.
"It's your fault, you know," Owen remarked. "You could've done something."
Now he wasn't speaking in metaphor, but he wasn't speaking about the Rift, still, either.
"Me," J said. You could have done something. Done what? For him, for them, for the city, for the world? For the Rift which dragged them here, dragged them back out? For Torchwood? ...maybe he could have. Someone could have, at any rate. "You mean Jack Harkness, don't you."
That wasn't a question. Owen certainly didn't look like he thought it was. He just turned over the Glock, staring at its safety. "Like there's a fucking difference."
J swallowed back the bitter taste in his throat, the heaviness under his lungs. "You don't think there is?"
Owen snarled. "Way I see it, the hotel, Torchwood, the Doctor, your fucking trial, Judas, J, John Doe, whatever, all of this -- it really is just all about you, isn't it?"
He finally turned to look at J again, and then his expression changed. It had been scorn. For a beat, it was shock, and then faded down to wariness and concealed hurt. J grimaced and brought a hand up to wipe the gore of his face, for all that he knew it wasn't the cause of that realization. A moment later, he realized he should school his own expression, too. Owen looked away.
"What is the difference, Jack?" The name was sharp, but the attack lacked strength. "You weren't ever a fucking saint. Half as clever as you thought you were. Fucking bastard, really, got more people killed -- just kept us going forward." He put his other hand over the Glock, knuckles white. "I'm not fucking playing your game any more," he said. "You wanna be locked up, drive yourself to the archangels. If there are any fucking archangels left."
The world, tenuous as it had been, felt less sure around him. Here they were in the hallway, Torchwood technically still with custodianship over him. What happened when there was no Torchwood? What happened when Torchwood tossed him aside?
"What do you want from me?"
Owen eyed him. The red in his eyes had receded; he looked like any Torchwood agent might, right at the end of the line. "My life back."
J spread his hands.
Owen snorted. "Thought not," he said.
He got up, and walked away.
-
As a dog, his normally-keen nose became even keener. Unable to believe that the world had emptied, he shifted back and searched. It was almost as Owen had said.
Everyone.
It wasn't quite everyone.
He passed the Pack's space, and picked up on their scents still thrumming strong. He didn't go in. Not all the rooms were empty, not all the people vanished, but a trail laid down by Sam abruptly ended in the middle of a stair, Gwen's scenttrail seemed to neither begin nor end, and while Suzie's room still smelled like her, the hallway outside was old and dead. Nothing was as it should be, and a disconnected stanza floated through his head.
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
He'd learned to read poetry. Studied it, used it as a way of studying Suzie at one remove. If Owen was right, if they'd all been taken, what was the use?
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
He kept walking, trying to read their last moments in the heiroglyphics of scent. Was there fear? Excitement? How many went together, how many alone?
It's everyone.
They went. And on every side yawned evidence of their absence. In the kitchen he caught a journal out of the corner of his eye, one which vanished a moment before he turned to look at it, and it transmuted to a cold shock straight to his stomach.
They're all gone, right down to us.
He bolted, clattering through the empty hallway, past the spaces which now implied ghosts, and found Owen slamming doors in the morgue. Even the morgue drawers were mostly unoccupied; scant comfort or bitter mockery, J wasn't sure. He shifted back human. Owen didn't look at him.
"Found fuckall, didn't you?" he asked.
J opened his mouth, and sense stuck in his throat.
"You and me." Another drawer slammed shut. "Think that's supposed to be funny, or is it just the universe saying, 'hmm, I know, haven't shat on Owen recently, how can we best fix that?" A door creaked open under Owen's hand, the hinge partly corroded. J marshalled his thoughts.
"There are still people in the Tower," he said.
"They're not Torchwood."
Ah. "I didn't know if there were civilians--"
The door creak-slammed shut. "They're not Torchwood," Owen said, whipping back around, and might have said more -- about Cardiff's Torchwood, born and bred, or at least beaten together in the same fires. Then he caught sight of what J was wearing, or rather, what he wasn't.
There was a silent moment.
"In the future," he said, turning to the next drawer in the row, "you could at least put on pants before you come to talk to me."
J snorted, and turned to leave the room.
Not fast enough to not hear Owen say "Trousers," correcting himself, his fading London accent heavy and a little bit forced.
-
Chicago, outside the windows, went along as it always had. As it seemed it always would. J watched for a long time, picking out the threads of panic, the individual people who wandered as though lost, and lost themselves in the general flow.
The buildings and the press of a mostly-mundane populace went impassively about their business.
Hard to miss someone you'd never accorded worth. Hard to see the loss in the people who had.
-
He found Owen in the lounge, looking like the alcohol had worn off. He was slumped over his knees on a couch, feet up against a table, fingers laced together, jaw tight. J edged in, and sat down.
"...Suzie told me that in her universe, before we recruited you--"
"--it was you and her, running around the city, acting Torchwood," Owen finished for him. "Yeah. Then you dragged me into it. Thanks for that, by the way."
It was hard to tell if he was being sarcastic or sincere. "Sorry," J said.
Owen snorted. J had the feeling that this would comprise a lot of their communication, for a bit.
"It's not like Torchwood can't rebuild," he said. It had taken a while to decide between Torchwood, you, and we. "People come through the Rift all the time. Remember in the Conrad--"
Owen snorted again.
"--when we all thought we heard Suzie come through, but by the time we made it to the Rift room--"
Owen turned back to glare at him. "If you're trying to cheer me up by saying your psychopathic girlfriend might show up for the third time in a row, you're even more rubbish at this than I thought," he said.
The dog in the back of J's mind growled, and he told it to shut up. This, at least, was familiar venom. "As I remember it," he said, "You went after her first."
"She went after me!" Owen protested. "I like to think I have better taste than that."
"Yes; but clearly, you don't," J said, and glanced to the hallway by reflex. Like at any moment he'd catch Suzie coming down the hall with a spanner. Like she'd exist to take umbrage.
No footsteps; no sharp rejoinder. J glanced at Owen, but couldn't tell if he'd been hit with the same familiar absence.
"See, by my count," Owen said, "counting Matoi, who's essentially Torchwood anyway, Gwen notwithstanding, we're three for two. Not counting--"
"No," J said. Not counting. "...and where are you getting 'two'? That's confidential data anyway. Besides, I've worked for Torchwood a lot longer than you have."
The look on Owen's face, while it didn't make anything better, still felt rather good.
"I hate you," Owen said.
The truth, for once, seemed to rest easily between them. J looked down, rubbing his hand. And you have every right to.
In Torchwood, things weren't allowed to be that simple.
"...how do we--" Owen started.
Get out. J filled in, and for a moment the possibility of those two words were paralyzing.
"--fix this?" Owen finished.
At last, J sat down.
He slid down the wall, staring up at the join of the walls and ceiling. Empty. The room was too empty, felt too sterile, too like something yet to be moved into. What was moving in?
An entire weight of history, save for Owen, had just disappeared.
He still didn't know if it was a chasm or a weight off his shoulders.
He supposed there was no reason to assume it wasn't both.
He opened his mouth to say I don't know or perhaps You're asking me?, but as in so many times when he didn't decide beforehand, what came out was neither option. "We try," he told Owen. "A hell of a lot harder than we've tried up 'til now."
Owen made a strangled noise in the back of his throat. "And when everything goes to shit again?"
J shrugged.
After a long silence, Owen said, "You first."
...what is that supposed to mean?
"Bastards probably went home," Owen muttered, before J could say anything. And J looked over.
"You think anywhere is going to feel like home, for them?"
Owen's mouth twisted. J caught himself thinking he'd spit, or scream, or burst out laughing or crying, and he was somewhat rewarded when Owen looked at him with a thin, sneering smile instead. "Serves 'em right," he said.
Torchwood humor.
J surprised himself by laughing.
It wasn't a very amused laugh. Nor was Owen's, when he joined in. But it was very Torchwood, and it was enough to hang onto.
-
Captain Jack Harkness.
And I wouldn't ask it of you, Suzie had said. And then there had been the Doctor, there for a moment and then vanished again, asking So here's the question: who out of all of that was useful? Who were you happiest being? Ignore fabrication for the time being...
And Owen. Like there's a fucking difference.
There was a difference. One of them had been trying.
You first, Owen had said.
He'd cracked the door on a room he never went into -- a room he'd thought of mostly as a mausoleum, a reliquary, holding all the effects of a man who didn't survive. It wasn't dusty. The air wasn't stale.
He'd felt the edges of his old wool coat -- too hot for an American summer. He kept tasting the name on his tongue. Captain.
Who was left to call him on the lie? If it was a lie, any more. Of all the people he'd hurt, from all the things he'd seen on the journals, Owen might be the only one with a stake in that history of names.
Jack.
It was only a lie in how arbitrary it wasn't. From here on out, to any new comers, a Jack was as arbitrary as a J.
He turned to the mirror in the room and smiled. "Jack Harkness," he said.
The smile looked plastic and tasted sour on his lips. He held onto it for a moment before it started feeling undead, and then let it drop from his expression.
For the first time in a long time, he examined his own face in the mirror. Physically, it was exactly as he remembered it. Exactly as it had been, and exactly as it would be. But he looked older, he thought. Or maybe that was him, reading into it all. Maybe he could pass, he thought, for every one of his two-century-plus years.
An entire history, resting on his shoulders. And who was going to carry it, here?
"I'm Captain Jack Harkness," he told the face in the mirror, and in the voice's weariness, the name slipped on like the coat he used to wear: battered and torn, but his at the end of the day.
He pushed his luck. Tried a sidelong smile. It turned bitter, but he held it.
"So I guess that's me," he said.
As a dog, he could doze.
One of many advantages.
He dreamed, too: a white-noise roar, shapes rising out of it like the corners of fallen buildings, running, liminal spaces between humanity and the canine mind. He could hear, and his ears made no distinction between the substance of his physical self and of his dreams. Nothing made sense, or tried to. Nothing meant anything, until he woke up with a boot on his side.
The boot was attached to a foot which was rolling him over, and when he looked up, half-startled and half-ready to bite, he saw Owen standing over him, and Owen looked a wreck.
For one, he reeked of blood and alcohol.
J couldn't tell if his color was off, but plenty of biological distress underwrote his scent. His expression was twisted, his eyes notably bleary, and his posture was nothing J had ever seen outside of a catastrophe. A bandage was wrapped around his hand.
"Get up," he said. "Put some fucking clothes on."
And then Owen, who'd just sought him out for the first time since his return, walked out of the room and into the hall.
J got up.
He'd worked out the dog shift fairly well, and pulled on his clothing as quickly as anyone Torchwood-trained learned to. Out in the hall, Owen was red-eyed and shaking, staring like he'd seen the dead.
"They're gone," he said, without pleasantry. "They got taken away. Right down to us."
That was how J woke up on May 1st, to an empty Kashtta and a shaken city. Not to a bang, but a confession.
-
Owen was in a bad way: shaking, half-drunk (self-sedation, he said) and snapping at everything, at the walls, at the ceiling, at the building and the city and by implication the entire universe and all its Rift activity and the journal network and everyone on it and everyone who had been on it but had been blotted out of the world.
"Entire building's -- fucking -- been screaming in my head," he said, spitting out the words through sharp tones and profanity. "Bloody city's gone up. Rifts. Missing. See also: the entire Torchwood staff. Ripped right up. Fucking -- felt it," and J had to control his hands, prevent them from reaching out. Owen, more than likely, would have bitten the hands off at the wrist.
J wasn't sure what was required of him.
"Back up," he said, not quite reaching for authority, but reaching for something. "Everyone's gone. A Rift flareup?" he asked, and then there was a Glock in his face.
The Glock, J noted with some disconnection, was not Owen's gun.
"Why didn't you do anything?" Owen asked, and while he didn't trip over the words any more, his voice was too quiet for comfort and dangerously unsteady. J froze, unsure of how he should respond, or if responding would provoke an attack. "You never fucking did anything. Everyone in Torchwood, and you--"
"Owen," J said. The gun wavered.
"How do we get out?"
J had no response to that.
"How do we get out?" Quieter, this time. J almost took a step toward him, but a cold ribbon at the bottom of his gut warned against it.
"Owen, you're beginning to speak in metaphor," he said. That was the obvious answer; Owen could be talking about "out, through the Rift and home again," but for all that the larger context would suggest it, the closer context seemed all wrong. "Knowing you and metaphor, I don't think that's a good--"
He didn't ignore the signs of Owen's gun hand steadying, the instant of anticipation before the muzzle flash. But he didn't duck from them, either.
-
The smell of blood was underwhelming. Strong, but cut with gunpowder, cut with conditioned air, cut with sweat. Sweat was how J worked out that Owen was sitting beside him; only then did he open his eyes.
Owen's breathing was ragged, with no attempt to disguise itself. J pushed himself off the ground and sat there with him, almost shoulder-to-shoulder, any possible response stuck in his throat.
"It's your fault, you know," Owen remarked. "You could've done something."
Now he wasn't speaking in metaphor, but he wasn't speaking about the Rift, still, either.
"Me," J said. You could have done something. Done what? For him, for them, for the city, for the world? For the Rift which dragged them here, dragged them back out? For Torchwood? ...maybe he could have. Someone could have, at any rate. "You mean Jack Harkness, don't you."
That wasn't a question. Owen certainly didn't look like he thought it was. He just turned over the Glock, staring at its safety. "Like there's a fucking difference."
J swallowed back the bitter taste in his throat, the heaviness under his lungs. "You don't think there is?"
Owen snarled. "Way I see it, the hotel, Torchwood, the Doctor, your fucking trial, Judas, J, John Doe, whatever, all of this -- it really is just all about you, isn't it?"
He finally turned to look at J again, and then his expression changed. It had been scorn. For a beat, it was shock, and then faded down to wariness and concealed hurt. J grimaced and brought a hand up to wipe the gore of his face, for all that he knew it wasn't the cause of that realization. A moment later, he realized he should school his own expression, too. Owen looked away.
"What is the difference, Jack?" The name was sharp, but the attack lacked strength. "You weren't ever a fucking saint. Half as clever as you thought you were. Fucking bastard, really, got more people killed -- just kept us going forward." He put his other hand over the Glock, knuckles white. "I'm not fucking playing your game any more," he said. "You wanna be locked up, drive yourself to the archangels. If there are any fucking archangels left."
The world, tenuous as it had been, felt less sure around him. Here they were in the hallway, Torchwood technically still with custodianship over him. What happened when there was no Torchwood? What happened when Torchwood tossed him aside?
"What do you want from me?"
Owen eyed him. The red in his eyes had receded; he looked like any Torchwood agent might, right at the end of the line. "My life back."
J spread his hands.
Owen snorted. "Thought not," he said.
He got up, and walked away.
-
As a dog, his normally-keen nose became even keener. Unable to believe that the world had emptied, he shifted back and searched. It was almost as Owen had said.
Everyone.
It wasn't quite everyone.
He passed the Pack's space, and picked up on their scents still thrumming strong. He didn't go in. Not all the rooms were empty, not all the people vanished, but a trail laid down by Sam abruptly ended in the middle of a stair, Gwen's scenttrail seemed to neither begin nor end, and while Suzie's room still smelled like her, the hallway outside was old and dead. Nothing was as it should be, and a disconnected stanza floated through his head.
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
He'd learned to read poetry. Studied it, used it as a way of studying Suzie at one remove. If Owen was right, if they'd all been taken, what was the use?
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
He kept walking, trying to read their last moments in the heiroglyphics of scent. Was there fear? Excitement? How many went together, how many alone?
It's everyone.
They went. And on every side yawned evidence of their absence. In the kitchen he caught a journal out of the corner of his eye, one which vanished a moment before he turned to look at it, and it transmuted to a cold shock straight to his stomach.
They're all gone, right down to us.
He bolted, clattering through the empty hallway, past the spaces which now implied ghosts, and found Owen slamming doors in the morgue. Even the morgue drawers were mostly unoccupied; scant comfort or bitter mockery, J wasn't sure. He shifted back human. Owen didn't look at him.
"Found fuckall, didn't you?" he asked.
J opened his mouth, and sense stuck in his throat.
"You and me." Another drawer slammed shut. "Think that's supposed to be funny, or is it just the universe saying, 'hmm, I know, haven't shat on Owen recently, how can we best fix that?" A door creaked open under Owen's hand, the hinge partly corroded. J marshalled his thoughts.
"There are still people in the Tower," he said.
"They're not Torchwood."
Ah. "I didn't know if there were civilians--"
The door creak-slammed shut. "They're not Torchwood," Owen said, whipping back around, and might have said more -- about Cardiff's Torchwood, born and bred, or at least beaten together in the same fires. Then he caught sight of what J was wearing, or rather, what he wasn't.
There was a silent moment.
"In the future," he said, turning to the next drawer in the row, "you could at least put on pants before you come to talk to me."
J snorted, and turned to leave the room.
Not fast enough to not hear Owen say "Trousers," correcting himself, his fading London accent heavy and a little bit forced.
-
Chicago, outside the windows, went along as it always had. As it seemed it always would. J watched for a long time, picking out the threads of panic, the individual people who wandered as though lost, and lost themselves in the general flow.
The buildings and the press of a mostly-mundane populace went impassively about their business.
Hard to miss someone you'd never accorded worth. Hard to see the loss in the people who had.
-
He found Owen in the lounge, looking like the alcohol had worn off. He was slumped over his knees on a couch, feet up against a table, fingers laced together, jaw tight. J edged in, and sat down.
"...Suzie told me that in her universe, before we recruited you--"
"--it was you and her, running around the city, acting Torchwood," Owen finished for him. "Yeah. Then you dragged me into it. Thanks for that, by the way."
It was hard to tell if he was being sarcastic or sincere. "Sorry," J said.
Owen snorted. J had the feeling that this would comprise a lot of their communication, for a bit.
"It's not like Torchwood can't rebuild," he said. It had taken a while to decide between Torchwood, you, and we. "People come through the Rift all the time. Remember in the Conrad--"
Owen snorted again.
"--when we all thought we heard Suzie come through, but by the time we made it to the Rift room--"
Owen turned back to glare at him. "If you're trying to cheer me up by saying your psychopathic girlfriend might show up for the third time in a row, you're even more rubbish at this than I thought," he said.
The dog in the back of J's mind growled, and he told it to shut up. This, at least, was familiar venom. "As I remember it," he said, "You went after her first."
"She went after me!" Owen protested. "I like to think I have better taste than that."
"Yes; but clearly, you don't," J said, and glanced to the hallway by reflex. Like at any moment he'd catch Suzie coming down the hall with a spanner. Like she'd exist to take umbrage.
No footsteps; no sharp rejoinder. J glanced at Owen, but couldn't tell if he'd been hit with the same familiar absence.
"See, by my count," Owen said, "counting Matoi, who's essentially Torchwood anyway, Gwen notwithstanding, we're three for two. Not counting--"
"No," J said. Not counting. "...and where are you getting 'two'? That's confidential data anyway. Besides, I've worked for Torchwood a lot longer than you have."
The look on Owen's face, while it didn't make anything better, still felt rather good.
"I hate you," Owen said.
The truth, for once, seemed to rest easily between them. J looked down, rubbing his hand. And you have every right to.
In Torchwood, things weren't allowed to be that simple.
"...how do we--" Owen started.
Get out. J filled in, and for a moment the possibility of those two words were paralyzing.
"--fix this?" Owen finished.
At last, J sat down.
He slid down the wall, staring up at the join of the walls and ceiling. Empty. The room was too empty, felt too sterile, too like something yet to be moved into. What was moving in?
An entire weight of history, save for Owen, had just disappeared.
He still didn't know if it was a chasm or a weight off his shoulders.
He supposed there was no reason to assume it wasn't both.
He opened his mouth to say I don't know or perhaps You're asking me?, but as in so many times when he didn't decide beforehand, what came out was neither option. "We try," he told Owen. "A hell of a lot harder than we've tried up 'til now."
Owen made a strangled noise in the back of his throat. "And when everything goes to shit again?"
J shrugged.
After a long silence, Owen said, "You first."
...what is that supposed to mean?
"Bastards probably went home," Owen muttered, before J could say anything. And J looked over.
"You think anywhere is going to feel like home, for them?"
Owen's mouth twisted. J caught himself thinking he'd spit, or scream, or burst out laughing or crying, and he was somewhat rewarded when Owen looked at him with a thin, sneering smile instead. "Serves 'em right," he said.
Torchwood humor.
J surprised himself by laughing.
It wasn't a very amused laugh. Nor was Owen's, when he joined in. But it was very Torchwood, and it was enough to hang onto.
-
Captain Jack Harkness.
And I wouldn't ask it of you, Suzie had said. And then there had been the Doctor, there for a moment and then vanished again, asking So here's the question: who out of all of that was useful? Who were you happiest being? Ignore fabrication for the time being...
And Owen. Like there's a fucking difference.
There was a difference. One of them had been trying.
You first, Owen had said.
He'd cracked the door on a room he never went into -- a room he'd thought of mostly as a mausoleum, a reliquary, holding all the effects of a man who didn't survive. It wasn't dusty. The air wasn't stale.
He'd felt the edges of his old wool coat -- too hot for an American summer. He kept tasting the name on his tongue. Captain.
Who was left to call him on the lie? If it was a lie, any more. Of all the people he'd hurt, from all the things he'd seen on the journals, Owen might be the only one with a stake in that history of names.
Jack.
It was only a lie in how arbitrary it wasn't. From here on out, to any new comers, a Jack was as arbitrary as a J.
He turned to the mirror in the room and smiled. "Jack Harkness," he said.
The smile looked plastic and tasted sour on his lips. He held onto it for a moment before it started feeling undead, and then let it drop from his expression.
For the first time in a long time, he examined his own face in the mirror. Physically, it was exactly as he remembered it. Exactly as it had been, and exactly as it would be. But he looked older, he thought. Or maybe that was him, reading into it all. Maybe he could pass, he thought, for every one of his two-century-plus years.
An entire history, resting on his shoulders. And who was going to carry it, here?
"I'm Captain Jack Harkness," he told the face in the mirror, and in the voice's weariness, the name slipped on like the coat he used to wear: battered and torn, but his at the end of the day.
He pushed his luck. Tried a sidelong smile. It turned bitter, but he held it.
"So I guess that's me," he said.