The Rogue | Chapter One
Title: The Rogue (pending change)
Series: Torchwood
Pairing: Ha. Various but eventual Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood--I don't own anything but my own overactive imagination.
Author's note: First Torchwood fic and yes, this is going to be a fix-it. Whereas I like fiction to try and hold emotional realism, CoE was too much. I've also strangely grown attached to these characters (Jack, Ianto, and Gwen) and want to write them a happier existence.
CHAPTER ONE
They were called the Signa Armada. A living, breathing, sentient fleet run by humanoid computers. They were chimeras of mechanical and organic material, unusual life forms that Jack couldn’t have even imagined existed. (Which in truth, they really hadn’t; they were “constructed.”)
He had, of course, met one ship of a similar category, but it was almost unfair to compare. The Tardis was much more sophisticated and had much more advanced technological capabilities. She was also something far more…enchanting. Charming. With their hollow, emotionless eyes and human faces, the Signa computers were cold. They had about as much personality as a shoe.
Still, Jack was heavily impressed, and given all he’d seen, that was saying something. Rumor had it the Signa Armada managed to develop some form of time travel technology and probably weren’t very far from creating a ship close to the Tardis. Scary thought, that.
“Impressive, yeah?” John asked with a grin.
Jack nodded. “Something tells me you really shouldn’t, though.”
“Shouldn’t what?” John’s eyes were suddenly wide and innocent, a completely disconcerting look that honestly wouldn’t fool anyone.
“Try to steal one.”
His posture deflated. “True, true. I can’t help it, you know. I heard how those things work anyway and hijacking one simply isn’t possible,” he paused to give a defeated little sneer. “At least the pay is a comfort,” he added. “A very, very nice comfort.”
Jack agreed, the pay for playing guard duty was quite incredible. It was almost a shame how little it interested him. His main purpose for being here--in this near continent sized port--was just for distraction. The events of the 456 were still too fresh, too unbearable to deal with without some sort of escape.
Sex, naturally, provided an excellent distraction as well as work, but it didn’t last as long (well, not as long as Jack wished it would anyway) and he needed a different kind of satisfaction--the satisfaction of a job completed. Repetition.
The power cut.
There were small groans of irritation and a few muffled cries of fear, but other than that, nothing. Nothing out of control. Even so, Jack instantly had his guard up. It took a lot to bring down the power of this place for just five minutes.
He rolled his eyes. And just when he thought things were going smoothly too; he should’ve known his luck wouldn’t last.
When it clicked on again, he didn’t relax. For all his years working for Torchwood, Jack’s instincts were trained to worry at the first sign of something suspicious. Nothing ever went as simple as a glitch. Oh, no, one little blip and the whole universe could implode (although he doubted that now was such a case.)
As Jack had thought earlier, the pay was quite remarkable. Too remarkable. It was remarkable in the sense that the Signa were expecting something awful. He also suspected the pay was set high to weed out the young and inexperienced. They’d come, but quickly be discouraged by the veteran mercenaries and soldiers waiting to be on the payroll. Unfortunately, it also attracted the desperate. And the greedy.
Jack looked at John.
John noticed Jack’s stare. “You’re thinking something bad about me, aren’t you?”
Snickering, Jack glanced back to the massive convocation across his post. It reminded him of ballroom gatherings back in the 1800s. He remembered attending a few but luckily felt too distracted to form specific faces in his mind.
That was a glorious feeling.
His eyes fell on an abnormally tall woman beside the Signa Armada Commander. Her long purple hair was twisted and tucked with decorative rods into an ornate, abstract style. The white gown she wore was classier than the other Signa computers, but like all their attire, it held holes at certain sections of the body where they could “plug into” their respective vessels. She held an obvious alien mystique that the other Signa didn’t have. The shape of her head was elongated a bit--oval--and whereas all the computers were distinctly pale, she had a gray tinge to her skin.
She was beautiful in an eerie sort of way. Jack was attracted, but also noticed an unsettling feel about her. A different crackle in her energy. He identified it as something hidden--a secret that only she knew but probably wasn’t supposed to. And for some reason, that made Jack nervous.
John whistled very quietly beside him, and the controlled level of the sound was evidence that he felt what Jack felt. The two of them, as con-artists, had a heightened sense for those containing crucial information.
“That’s the Sere Signa,” John whispered gleefully. “I’d love to grab her. I could rule a part of the universe with that. Her vessel is about twice the size of the moon.”
“Which moon?”
John looked at him. “Terra’s Luna? You know, your good old, old, old, planet Earth’s lonely satellite.”
Jack flinched and turned his attention away from John and back at the floor. The man beside him sighed.
“You have to get over it at some point. What’s done is done. The lovely little human race stumbles onward because of what you did."
Jack made a disdainful noise. Out the corner of his eye, he saw John flicking dirt from underneath his nails, nonchalant and detached, judging and predictably ready to shoot his mouth off at something he had no business even thinking about.
“You have to get over Him at some point too. And Her,” he said.
The blood in Jack’s veins ran cold. He could feel it drain from his face and down into his heart--it had to be settling there for how heavy the muscle felt. It took all of his will power not to break John’s nose. Or skull. Or legs. Or just shoot the loose-mouthed son of a bitch between the legs.
Jack clenched his fists so tight that blood trickled in drops through the lines separating his fingers. Maybe the blood would drain enough to make his heart not feel so fucking heavy.
Seeing Jack’s reaction, John held up his hands in a gesture that was probably meant to look placating, but only served to make Jack’s anger flare. As if he didn’t know what saying that would do.
And then the hustle and bustle of the room abruptly fell silent, like hitting an off switch to every sound, including breath and movement--there wasn’t so much a tap from a foot hitting the floor or a piece of cloth rustling out of place in the silence. Jack and John’s attention immediately snapped back to duty.
Everyone held still.
A slightly skin creased, scar bitten man, the head of security (and their boss), came up beside them.
“Hold here until I say,” he whispered.
Jack and John obeyed and listened.
“It’s really a party now,” he said. He was a man of no words and to hear him speak without being prompted to was completely unexpected. But the statement seemed more for himself than anyone else. “Everyone here, everyone you see is with the Signa Armada. Members of different crews. It’s like a reunion.”
Jack glanced sidelong to their speaker while also keeping his attention to whatever was happening down on the floor. The threat (he assumed that’s what they would be dealing with) was at the first entrance, too far to see past the mass of people crowding around it. He didn’t like having his view blocked…
“I wasn’t---no one was expecting to see the Signa 18 again.”
“I thought that,” John jerked his thumb to one of the Signa computers. “was the Signa 18.”
“No, that’s the Signa 18 in the Second. Her replacement.”
It was a lie, Jack thought. They were expecting to see this Signa again. It was in the way they organized and trained their security. This was the “something awful” they’d been expecting, the deciding factor for the high pay. Jack shared a look with John.
He knew and understood too.
A woman materialized behind the Sere Signa. Jack swore and was ready to move to shoot but stilled when their commander put a hand on his shoulder.
Her black, skin tight suit had holes in all the same places as the white gowns the other Signa wore. Unlike them (and the Sere Signa), her hair was dark and cropped short in a classic bob, whereas the rest of the Signa had hair colors in ranges from white, to platinum blonde, to bright blue, grown long and twisted with rods. Jack kept his eyes trained on her movement. He’d shoot at the first threatening twitch.
He watched as she flexed her partially gloved hand, curling one finger at a time against her palm. She repeated the action several times before jutting her right hip to the side.
“Tell your pets to settle down, Big Mummy. Don’t they know that I was invited?”
Jack blinked. Her voice…it sounded young. Of course, all the Signa looked young, but none of them had said a word and that created the illusion of something more mechanical and therefore not necessary to label with age. They were just pieces of technology. Hearing the Signa 18 speak made the Signa computers look more like children.
The Sere Signa curved her lips in a regal smile. Her Commander spoke, “We never expect you to respond to our invitations. Tell me, is your crew here with you?”
Signa 18 shrugged.
The head of the Signa Armada gave a distinctly patronizing laugh. “Or perhaps the Rogue Signa 18 has no captain. Again. Surely you’ve reached 500 by now?”
“I have a captain,” she said, and Jack was under the impression she was puffing out her chest a little, suddenly defensive. “Number 308.”
“And how long will this one last?” The Commander raised his voice so everyone would hear. It was a humiliation tactic, which, to Jack, seemed like an odd thing to do against an opposing force. Why provoke attack, regardless however much she was outnumbered? “The average number of captains for a Signa vessel is 45. Of course, the number is steadily rising as the Signa Vessels age. But captains die young with you, don’t they? You’ve already surpassed the average by nearly seven times. It must be tiring to lose so many.”
Jack’s heart clenched.
The movement in Signa 18’s hand stuttered. “This one is for keeps.”
“Oh?” the syllable was delivered delicately, but Jack could hear the underlain spark of interest. “Last I heard, you were on some ridiculous crusade for an immortal captain.”
Oh.
“Did you find him?”
Jack’s heart pounded.
“In a way,” she said.
John was staring at him.
“Tell me, what is the Rogue Signa 18 really here for? I don’t’ believe for a second that you’ve come because you were systematically requested--”
“Upon the queen bee’s inquiry?” she interrupted. “Obviously not. I’m here because of a date with the universe. I’m maintaining the time line. Something I’m sure you can understand, being a time traveler yourself, eh, Mum?”
The Sere Signa’s expression turned grim and thoughtful. She inclined her head with a noticeable reluctance. The Commander fell silent.
“CAPTAIN JACK HARKNESS,” Signa 18 spoke Jack’s name like an announcement, without bellowing unceremoniously, but still loudly like a building intercom. She swiveled around to look at Jack and winked. “You’d be a shame to the Doctor right now. What kind of man, with all his experience dealing with…secret organizations, doesn’t check out his employer’s history thoroughly?”
One desperate to run away, he thought but didn’t answer her out loud.
“You look at me, right now,” she hissed. “You look at me and tell me what I look like to you---what do I sound like? I’m the CPU to a spaceship, and once upon a time I was dressed up in a white suit and had near transparent skin and blue hair just like them,” she flicked her head at the line of Signa computers arced around her. “But before that I didn’t; I looked like I do now, before that. What do I look like?”
The answer twisted in Jack’s stomach. He thought of a little boy attached to a monster in a gas chamber. He thought further back to one of his times with the Doctor and Rose--of a little boy and masses of people with gas masks attached to their faces. He thought of himself, attached to Time and the universe infinite.
And now, here were these humans, these too-old-children but too-young-adults, hollowed out and attached to massive ships. Attached to the military as weapons by their own kind.
Jack had the striking impulse to shoot the heavily scarred man beside him. And maybe John for his greed carrying the two of them into this mess.
The look on the Sere Signa’s face was thunderous.
John stepped close to Jack’s side. “Should I need to use you as a human shield, no hard feelings.”
Jack didn’t pay John any mind. He did, however, feel the heavy tension building in the room. Everyone was staring at him like he’d just formally announced to peeing in the punch bowl, when he honestly hadn’t said or done anything against them at all.
“You talk like you know me,” he said. “I’m guessing, in my future, I meet you for your first time?”
Tension building, building, building. “Oh, now, you know I can’t tell specifics. But I’ll point you in the right direction. I know you already, so I have to meet you for a first time--we’re fixed now. You want to keep the universe together, right, Captain?”
Jack laughed sharply. “Yeah, I know the deal. There’s no choice in anything now.”
“Exactly. And so, it’s time to go home, Captain,” she smiled. Her eyes blazed and turned a myriad of different colors. He’d seen it with the other Signa and assumed it occurred when they were thinking, but now he assumed it was caused by emotion. The Sere Signa’s eyes were burning a malicious red.
The tension was taught and ready to break.
“I don’t have a home. If you really know me, you should know that.”
The Signa 18’s grin broadened. “Home is where the heart is, eh? Where’s your heart, Captain? I believe you left it somewhere in the 21st century.”
John was fidgeting nervously beside him. No doubt in response to the room slowly crowding closer.
Jack’s heart beat painfully in his chest, the staccato thumping a sharp reminder of its heavy state and burdening presence. He didn’t need reminding, he needed forgetting. “If you mean who I think you mean, she’s the heart of Torchwood, not my…heart,” For some reason, the word stung his tongue. “My heart,” another sting and twinge of disgust. “was with someone who happened to die. Home is not the 21st century. Not anymore. Not until I feel right again.”
The tension was now dangling over a precipice. Fortunately, it was stalled by the need for a command to snap. Jack had small confidence he wouldn’t be harmed; the Signa 18 said the Sere Signa was a time traveler, and so she surely understood that fixed points were untouchable. He’d be a universal bomb in her fingers if she tried to pin him down.
“Then what‘s home, Jack? Your own time? Would you go back to yours, if you could?”
Before Jack could answer that heart shattering question, every alarm in the building went off.
The Signa 18 forced the Commander to push everything over the precipice and straight into the fire, straight into motion. Something big was going to happen to him. Again. It was the same feeling he had the morning before meeting the Doctor, and the morning before he died for the very first time.
The Commander was shouting orders to lock the wavelengths that allowed Signa teleportation, but the Signa 18 was already gone before the codes were fully entered. The order was cancelled and replaced with orders to board their vessels and find The Rogue. It was pandemonium as the Signa teleported away and their captains and crews scrambled to their individual ports.
And in the mess of frantic movement, the Sere Signa stood stock still, posture firm, back slightly arched and shoulders taut in a perfect line, her eyes blazing between red and orange. Jack felt the noise rapidly fade into silence.
Ah, a temporary psychic connection.
I’ll let you go, he heard her say. For now. But you’re a part of my future--possibly my present even, and if you side with the Signa 18, you’ll be an enemy of mine. My sons and daughters inform me of your infinite wavelength. I know what you are. Decide carefully your position, Captain 308. She terminated the connection and teleported to her vessel.
Jack and John ran.
Series: Torchwood
Pairing: Ha. Various but eventual Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood--I don't own anything but my own overactive imagination.
Author's note: First Torchwood fic and yes, this is going to be a fix-it. Whereas I like fiction to try and hold emotional realism, CoE was too much. I've also strangely grown attached to these characters (Jack, Ianto, and Gwen) and want to write them a happier existence.
CHAPTER ONE
They were called the Signa Armada. A living, breathing, sentient fleet run by humanoid computers. They were chimeras of mechanical and organic material, unusual life forms that Jack couldn’t have even imagined existed. (Which in truth, they really hadn’t; they were “constructed.”)
He had, of course, met one ship of a similar category, but it was almost unfair to compare. The Tardis was much more sophisticated and had much more advanced technological capabilities. She was also something far more…enchanting. Charming. With their hollow, emotionless eyes and human faces, the Signa computers were cold. They had about as much personality as a shoe.
Still, Jack was heavily impressed, and given all he’d seen, that was saying something. Rumor had it the Signa Armada managed to develop some form of time travel technology and probably weren’t very far from creating a ship close to the Tardis. Scary thought, that.
“Impressive, yeah?” John asked with a grin.
Jack nodded. “Something tells me you really shouldn’t, though.”
“Shouldn’t what?” John’s eyes were suddenly wide and innocent, a completely disconcerting look that honestly wouldn’t fool anyone.
“Try to steal one.”
His posture deflated. “True, true. I can’t help it, you know. I heard how those things work anyway and hijacking one simply isn’t possible,” he paused to give a defeated little sneer. “At least the pay is a comfort,” he added. “A very, very nice comfort.”
Jack agreed, the pay for playing guard duty was quite incredible. It was almost a shame how little it interested him. His main purpose for being here--in this near continent sized port--was just for distraction. The events of the 456 were still too fresh, too unbearable to deal with without some sort of escape.
Sex, naturally, provided an excellent distraction as well as work, but it didn’t last as long (well, not as long as Jack wished it would anyway) and he needed a different kind of satisfaction--the satisfaction of a job completed. Repetition.
The power cut.
There were small groans of irritation and a few muffled cries of fear, but other than that, nothing. Nothing out of control. Even so, Jack instantly had his guard up. It took a lot to bring down the power of this place for just five minutes.
He rolled his eyes. And just when he thought things were going smoothly too; he should’ve known his luck wouldn’t last.
When it clicked on again, he didn’t relax. For all his years working for Torchwood, Jack’s instincts were trained to worry at the first sign of something suspicious. Nothing ever went as simple as a glitch. Oh, no, one little blip and the whole universe could implode (although he doubted that now was such a case.)
As Jack had thought earlier, the pay was quite remarkable. Too remarkable. It was remarkable in the sense that the Signa were expecting something awful. He also suspected the pay was set high to weed out the young and inexperienced. They’d come, but quickly be discouraged by the veteran mercenaries and soldiers waiting to be on the payroll. Unfortunately, it also attracted the desperate. And the greedy.
Jack looked at John.
John noticed Jack’s stare. “You’re thinking something bad about me, aren’t you?”
Snickering, Jack glanced back to the massive convocation across his post. It reminded him of ballroom gatherings back in the 1800s. He remembered attending a few but luckily felt too distracted to form specific faces in his mind.
That was a glorious feeling.
His eyes fell on an abnormally tall woman beside the Signa Armada Commander. Her long purple hair was twisted and tucked with decorative rods into an ornate, abstract style. The white gown she wore was classier than the other Signa computers, but like all their attire, it held holes at certain sections of the body where they could “plug into” their respective vessels. She held an obvious alien mystique that the other Signa didn’t have. The shape of her head was elongated a bit--oval--and whereas all the computers were distinctly pale, she had a gray tinge to her skin.
She was beautiful in an eerie sort of way. Jack was attracted, but also noticed an unsettling feel about her. A different crackle in her energy. He identified it as something hidden--a secret that only she knew but probably wasn’t supposed to. And for some reason, that made Jack nervous.
John whistled very quietly beside him, and the controlled level of the sound was evidence that he felt what Jack felt. The two of them, as con-artists, had a heightened sense for those containing crucial information.
“That’s the Sere Signa,” John whispered gleefully. “I’d love to grab her. I could rule a part of the universe with that. Her vessel is about twice the size of the moon.”
“Which moon?”
John looked at him. “Terra’s Luna? You know, your good old, old, old, planet Earth’s lonely satellite.”
Jack flinched and turned his attention away from John and back at the floor. The man beside him sighed.
“You have to get over it at some point. What’s done is done. The lovely little human race stumbles onward because of what you did."
Jack made a disdainful noise. Out the corner of his eye, he saw John flicking dirt from underneath his nails, nonchalant and detached, judging and predictably ready to shoot his mouth off at something he had no business even thinking about.
“You have to get over Him at some point too. And Her,” he said.
The blood in Jack’s veins ran cold. He could feel it drain from his face and down into his heart--it had to be settling there for how heavy the muscle felt. It took all of his will power not to break John’s nose. Or skull. Or legs. Or just shoot the loose-mouthed son of a bitch between the legs.
Jack clenched his fists so tight that blood trickled in drops through the lines separating his fingers. Maybe the blood would drain enough to make his heart not feel so fucking heavy.
Seeing Jack’s reaction, John held up his hands in a gesture that was probably meant to look placating, but only served to make Jack’s anger flare. As if he didn’t know what saying that would do.
And then the hustle and bustle of the room abruptly fell silent, like hitting an off switch to every sound, including breath and movement--there wasn’t so much a tap from a foot hitting the floor or a piece of cloth rustling out of place in the silence. Jack and John’s attention immediately snapped back to duty.
Everyone held still.
A slightly skin creased, scar bitten man, the head of security (and their boss), came up beside them.
“Hold here until I say,” he whispered.
Jack and John obeyed and listened.
“It’s really a party now,” he said. He was a man of no words and to hear him speak without being prompted to was completely unexpected. But the statement seemed more for himself than anyone else. “Everyone here, everyone you see is with the Signa Armada. Members of different crews. It’s like a reunion.”
Jack glanced sidelong to their speaker while also keeping his attention to whatever was happening down on the floor. The threat (he assumed that’s what they would be dealing with) was at the first entrance, too far to see past the mass of people crowding around it. He didn’t like having his view blocked…
“I wasn’t---no one was expecting to see the Signa 18 again.”
“I thought that,” John jerked his thumb to one of the Signa computers. “was the Signa 18.”
“No, that’s the Signa 18 in the Second. Her replacement.”
It was a lie, Jack thought. They were expecting to see this Signa again. It was in the way they organized and trained their security. This was the “something awful” they’d been expecting, the deciding factor for the high pay. Jack shared a look with John.
He knew and understood too.
A woman materialized behind the Sere Signa. Jack swore and was ready to move to shoot but stilled when their commander put a hand on his shoulder.
Her black, skin tight suit had holes in all the same places as the white gowns the other Signa wore. Unlike them (and the Sere Signa), her hair was dark and cropped short in a classic bob, whereas the rest of the Signa had hair colors in ranges from white, to platinum blonde, to bright blue, grown long and twisted with rods. Jack kept his eyes trained on her movement. He’d shoot at the first threatening twitch.
He watched as she flexed her partially gloved hand, curling one finger at a time against her palm. She repeated the action several times before jutting her right hip to the side.
“Tell your pets to settle down, Big Mummy. Don’t they know that I was invited?”
Jack blinked. Her voice…it sounded young. Of course, all the Signa looked young, but none of them had said a word and that created the illusion of something more mechanical and therefore not necessary to label with age. They were just pieces of technology. Hearing the Signa 18 speak made the Signa computers look more like children.
The Sere Signa curved her lips in a regal smile. Her Commander spoke, “We never expect you to respond to our invitations. Tell me, is your crew here with you?”
Signa 18 shrugged.
The head of the Signa Armada gave a distinctly patronizing laugh. “Or perhaps the Rogue Signa 18 has no captain. Again. Surely you’ve reached 500 by now?”
“I have a captain,” she said, and Jack was under the impression she was puffing out her chest a little, suddenly defensive. “Number 308.”
“And how long will this one last?” The Commander raised his voice so everyone would hear. It was a humiliation tactic, which, to Jack, seemed like an odd thing to do against an opposing force. Why provoke attack, regardless however much she was outnumbered? “The average number of captains for a Signa vessel is 45. Of course, the number is steadily rising as the Signa Vessels age. But captains die young with you, don’t they? You’ve already surpassed the average by nearly seven times. It must be tiring to lose so many.”
Jack’s heart clenched.
The movement in Signa 18’s hand stuttered. “This one is for keeps.”
“Oh?” the syllable was delivered delicately, but Jack could hear the underlain spark of interest. “Last I heard, you were on some ridiculous crusade for an immortal captain.”
Oh.
“Did you find him?”
Jack’s heart pounded.
“In a way,” she said.
John was staring at him.
“Tell me, what is the Rogue Signa 18 really here for? I don’t’ believe for a second that you’ve come because you were systematically requested--”
“Upon the queen bee’s inquiry?” she interrupted. “Obviously not. I’m here because of a date with the universe. I’m maintaining the time line. Something I’m sure you can understand, being a time traveler yourself, eh, Mum?”
The Sere Signa’s expression turned grim and thoughtful. She inclined her head with a noticeable reluctance. The Commander fell silent.
“CAPTAIN JACK HARKNESS,” Signa 18 spoke Jack’s name like an announcement, without bellowing unceremoniously, but still loudly like a building intercom. She swiveled around to look at Jack and winked. “You’d be a shame to the Doctor right now. What kind of man, with all his experience dealing with…secret organizations, doesn’t check out his employer’s history thoroughly?”
One desperate to run away, he thought but didn’t answer her out loud.
“You look at me, right now,” she hissed. “You look at me and tell me what I look like to you---what do I sound like? I’m the CPU to a spaceship, and once upon a time I was dressed up in a white suit and had near transparent skin and blue hair just like them,” she flicked her head at the line of Signa computers arced around her. “But before that I didn’t; I looked like I do now, before that. What do I look like?”
The answer twisted in Jack’s stomach. He thought of a little boy attached to a monster in a gas chamber. He thought further back to one of his times with the Doctor and Rose--of a little boy and masses of people with gas masks attached to their faces. He thought of himself, attached to Time and the universe infinite.
And now, here were these humans, these too-old-children but too-young-adults, hollowed out and attached to massive ships. Attached to the military as weapons by their own kind.
Jack had the striking impulse to shoot the heavily scarred man beside him. And maybe John for his greed carrying the two of them into this mess.
The look on the Sere Signa’s face was thunderous.
John stepped close to Jack’s side. “Should I need to use you as a human shield, no hard feelings.”
Jack didn’t pay John any mind. He did, however, feel the heavy tension building in the room. Everyone was staring at him like he’d just formally announced to peeing in the punch bowl, when he honestly hadn’t said or done anything against them at all.
“You talk like you know me,” he said. “I’m guessing, in my future, I meet you for your first time?”
Tension building, building, building. “Oh, now, you know I can’t tell specifics. But I’ll point you in the right direction. I know you already, so I have to meet you for a first time--we’re fixed now. You want to keep the universe together, right, Captain?”
Jack laughed sharply. “Yeah, I know the deal. There’s no choice in anything now.”
“Exactly. And so, it’s time to go home, Captain,” she smiled. Her eyes blazed and turned a myriad of different colors. He’d seen it with the other Signa and assumed it occurred when they were thinking, but now he assumed it was caused by emotion. The Sere Signa’s eyes were burning a malicious red.
The tension was taught and ready to break.
“I don’t have a home. If you really know me, you should know that.”
The Signa 18’s grin broadened. “Home is where the heart is, eh? Where’s your heart, Captain? I believe you left it somewhere in the 21st century.”
John was fidgeting nervously beside him. No doubt in response to the room slowly crowding closer.
Jack’s heart beat painfully in his chest, the staccato thumping a sharp reminder of its heavy state and burdening presence. He didn’t need reminding, he needed forgetting. “If you mean who I think you mean, she’s the heart of Torchwood, not my…heart,” For some reason, the word stung his tongue. “My heart,” another sting and twinge of disgust. “was with someone who happened to die. Home is not the 21st century. Not anymore. Not until I feel right again.”
The tension was now dangling over a precipice. Fortunately, it was stalled by the need for a command to snap. Jack had small confidence he wouldn’t be harmed; the Signa 18 said the Sere Signa was a time traveler, and so she surely understood that fixed points were untouchable. He’d be a universal bomb in her fingers if she tried to pin him down.
“Then what‘s home, Jack? Your own time? Would you go back to yours, if you could?”
Before Jack could answer that heart shattering question, every alarm in the building went off.
The Signa 18 forced the Commander to push everything over the precipice and straight into the fire, straight into motion. Something big was going to happen to him. Again. It was the same feeling he had the morning before meeting the Doctor, and the morning before he died for the very first time.
The Commander was shouting orders to lock the wavelengths that allowed Signa teleportation, but the Signa 18 was already gone before the codes were fully entered. The order was cancelled and replaced with orders to board their vessels and find The Rogue. It was pandemonium as the Signa teleported away and their captains and crews scrambled to their individual ports.
And in the mess of frantic movement, the Sere Signa stood stock still, posture firm, back slightly arched and shoulders taut in a perfect line, her eyes blazing between red and orange. Jack felt the noise rapidly fade into silence.
Ah, a temporary psychic connection.
I’ll let you go, he heard her say. For now. But you’re a part of my future--possibly my present even, and if you side with the Signa 18, you’ll be an enemy of mine. My sons and daughters inform me of your infinite wavelength. I know what you are. Decide carefully your position, Captain 308. She terminated the connection and teleported to her vessel.
Jack and John ran.