[fic][dp] (The World As) A Loaded Gun
Title: (The World As) A Loaded Gun
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke )
Sliding Scale of Slash: Confirmed, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Rating: T-M/Mostly just angst and vague adult themes
Beta Warning: Semibeta'd. You clicks your LJ-cuts and you takes your chances.
Fandoms: Life on Mars; Torchwood; Final Fantasy VIII
Summary: Questions of wrong, right, and picking up the pieces.
There was something to be said for thresholds.
Even if Sam couldn't process the metaphor, standing with his hand on the door to the lodge and staring out over the hoarfrost, the world was kind enough to narrow down his options to a binary. Step back into the room, with the heat of its furnace and the mess of its beds, with Jack standing right there too close and just out of reach, or-
Or walk into the tundra.
That made the decision simple when it wasn't easy. Nothing about the lodge made sense, but the tundra did. It offered one cold certainty: walk out and freeze between the impassive sky and ice. The choice was simple because it wasn't a choice. Not unless one expanded the options to suicide.
Standing there, shaking like his bones would escape his skin, the next step would have been to close the door and step away. One logical avenue had been closed, so it was time to focus on the others.
He didn't.
This not moving was a liminal point - untenable, maybe, but deceptively safe. And so long as he could hold on to that...
Jack's footsteps moved away from him. Sam closed his eyes and listened to every footfall, soft and solid, warm in the wide space. Jack was solid, human-warm, had had his arms around him-
He slammed the door and turned back to the room, averting his eyes from the light of the furnace, the mess of the bed, the bare skin of his feet, until his eyes found a patch of bare floor which neither threatened nor recalled anything. Jack approached again, one hand edging into Sam's field of vision, offering a familiar clay mug.
"Water," Jack said.
Sam swallowed, nodded and reached for it. In taking it his fingertip brushed Jack's knuckle, skin on skin, and for a moment that contact was too much - his hand jerked back with the mug, and the water splashed up and over the edge.
Jack watched. This was a skill he'd trained in lifetimes ago: reading the body, watching for signs. The drops of water on Sam's hands amplified the pattern of his shaking; the rigid lines of his neck, his shoulders and arms, even softened by the fur, told Jack where and how he was holding his tension.
Sam was watching, too, but he was seeing something different. His attention was anywhere but the body, anywhere but two human men standing in the middle of a wide and empty lodge - he saw the room, the floor, the human debris. He noticed the way their clothes were scattered, the way the furs were mussed. In an instant it struck him as horrible and familiar, and then the sense was gone - it seemed something he should have experience with, except if he was standing looking at it that usually meant that it had ended in murder or at least a missing person. He didn't fit here in any other way.
Jack shifted his weight and Sam flinched back, pulling in the mug, the hide, all his limbs even as his chin snapped up. "Don't," he said, and the word sounded absurd in the warm air - as though he or the room had forgotten language, and it was nothing but a dumb sound. "Ever again. Don't."
Jack nodded. The first thing to do was cut out any element of threat, anything that might be perceived as threat or coercion. "Never," he repeated, like a subordinate confirming an order. Maybe if he gave up all the power he could between them, what circumstance wouldn't let him drop would be enough to see them through.
He pulled himself back into a smaller posture, keeping head and voice low. Now that they were talking, maybe something could be done.
"Why didn't you stop me?"
Sam's gut knotted, pulling his entire chest tense. The tension pressed up against his jaw, gritting his teeth to keep anything from escaping his throat. If Jack asked that, if he considered answering it, then this reduced to him in some way - some action or inaction on his part, and that was enough to start heat burning at the base of his lungs. He looked up, straight at Jack's eyes finally, still unable to process the input but at least able to throw something back. "Why should I have had to?"
Anger. The cues for that one were easy enough to read, and Jack caught himself before he moved to soothe it. If Sam was confronting him, at least he was confronting something. As it was the anger was struggling up through the shock, and if they could just burn away shock without burning the problems beneath...
"Not the same question," Jack said, keeping his hands hidden beneath the hide, voice even, volume low, not stepping up against the challenge and not backing down. Each nuance had to be felt out to coax Sam up, and he'd always been better at bodies than people. "Right or wrong-" and I know to you it's wrong, "-why didn't you?"
Sam flinched away. Everything about Jack, his steadiness, his refusal to yield or react, the texture of his voice, was pressing into his awareness like fingers or lips; he turned away, eyes snapping back towards the door and away from it again. He was still trapped in the warm air. Jack was going to drag him back to that moment when he could have said no, if he could have, and fighting it rang in his ears and tightened his breathing. "Don't," he said again; easier to say, now that - what?
Now that it makes no difference.
Jack closed his eyes. Set his jaw. Sam wasn't watching; Sam was fighting through the same reaction, and for Jack, that was a blessing. He needed the moment to put his own controls back in place, to sweep away the idea that this was the moment when everything slipped through his fingers. That moment had been stretched out and laid over the entire night. Sam verged on hyperventilating, and the sound of his breath grated the air. Jack kept himself still.
By the time Sam had at least nominal control over himself, Jack did too. Sam glanced back out of the corner of his eye, looking in Jack's direction but not exactly seeing him. "What do you want me to say."
The way the words fell could hardly be considered a question. Jack took a breath, telling himself to keep steady with the stretch of his diaphragm, bracing his words against the contraction of his lungs. "I want to know what's wrong."
He couldn't say I want to help.
"What's wrong," Sam echoed, but his voice hollowed and hardened so he hardly recognized it as his own. "You don't find that obvious?"
Jack opened his mouth to respond. A moment later it occurred to him that response wasn't necessary - anything he could say would be meaningless or incendiary. Sam seemed to grasp that, too.
"Where are you from?" he asked. "You said the future, which from 1973 could be - the whole bloody universe," he finished in a mutter. "What - ten years? A hundred? A thousand? Do you really not-"
He bit the line off, looking rigid-jawed toward the door again. Far from being an escape, now it was a reminder: it was the same door they'd stood at when he'd said we're nowhere, when Jack had said a safe period, when he should have known that the current broken state of things was no guarantee against them breaking further.
Sam should have known a lot of things. It wasn't as though he'd never seen these patterns before.
"No matter what morality you claim, your actions have to stand," he shot, without knowing quite what he needed to say or how he could ever hope to say it. "And I - do you think I haven't seen madmen telling me that God told them to kill, or - you take it further, don't you? All this, safe periods and predestination and - you think that knowing the rules grants leave to circumvent them? I was in the middle of an investigation when you-!" He cut that off. "On Lusuosa you said your moral quality was 'exactly as advertised'. Is that how you justify yourself? Expect nothing, and anything good is laudable. You-"
The mug was good. It gave Sam something to hang onto until his fingers hurt and his knuckles bleached to bone, whereas Jack had only the ragged edge of the hide for himself. He watched while Sam fought back against the bear of his words clawing up his throat, and he held himself still.
"You never claimed to be a good person," Sam spat, voice twisting into a parody, forcing out the r. "So long as you make no claim you can't be held responsible. The worst part is, you think you can make it charming; you parade it, dress it up as honesty-"
And I asked for that.
Sam stepped away, tossing his head, but couldn't toss out the words or the image or the sense of where he was and where he'd been. Some little stopover planet whose name he couldn't remember or never learned, Jack had asked What do you want from me? and he'd, with the sun casting shadows through the windows onto his hands, with no idea how any of this worked, he'd said Honesty as if that was a guarantee of anything.
The mug was hard as stone against his fingers and he wanted to throw it - at Jack, at the furnace, at the door, at the wall, at anything. He wanted to break it, watch the pieces fall over each other to the ground and be something, mean something, some markable event standing between him and what had happened. It wasn't rational. It wasn't dignified or controlled and for a moment he didn't care, and the instant he realized that he wrapped his other hand around it to keep himself from throwing. The fur came loose over his shoulders, flapping open enough to let cool air edge along his stomach, his ribs, and he let go of the mug to snatch at the edges. The mug hit the floor and the water splashed up onto the leather, in between his toes, and he stepped back against the wall and sunk to the ground after it.
He bit down, held himself still. God, he thought, he was losing it, like he'd lived in 1973 half-expecting them to find a reason to haul him off to a madhouse on any given day and still wearing madness as a cover for his twenty-first century sensibilities when he wasn't wearing them as a cover for it. Jack was just watching him, quiet after having both barrels emptied at him, and Sam had the sudden urge to apologise.
As if he was the one who should be apologising. As if he thought Jack cared what he thought, as if he thought he should care what Jack felt. He held onto the fur with both hands, dropped his head, then turned his head away when resting his chin on his chest filled his nostrils with the smell of his own sweat. He needed to be stable again; needed to get out of this incriminating position, to destroy the evidence - get cleaned up, get dressed, get on his feet. He couldn't focus. Thinking about walking to the furnace, washing up, pulling on articles of clothing one by one made him want to turn his head again, get away from the thought like he'd get away from the smell like he'd get away from the air working its way between his fingers. His toes curled against the dirt, the mud that had formed between them. He couldn't get away from anything.
"Help me," he said. The words were tenuous to his own ears. Jack was the person who'd dragged him out here, who'd broken him down, who he'd just said had a moral core only nominally better than a sociopath's and that only from a certain point of view - and he was the only one to ask, here, when Sam could barely breathe.
Jack crouched down. When he'd come close was a question Sam couldn't answer, but they seemed to keep the same distance, and he had to ask when that had started and if it was ever going to end. Jack moved away, he moved away, Jack came closer - too much closer - but they'd been at the same equilibrium since they met each other, hadn't they?
Jack offered a hand.
Sam closed his eyes.
He was expecting Jack's fingers to close around his wrist, take his pulse, pull him up, hold him there, anything, but Jack didn't move. When he opened his eyes again Jack was still crouched, one hand hidden under the fur wrapped around him, one hand open and offered.
Sam looked away.
He had it in him to be calm and rational. If he could just push everything else away, if he could just find that-
"I can't help you unless you let me," Jack said.
Sam looked at the ground. The ground was dirt - swept dirt; not quite clean, but not dirty enough to bear footsteps. Nothing but its barrenness implying that humans had been here. "Maybe I don't want your help."
Jack let his hand drop, forearm resting on his knee, but he didn't pull back. "Then why do you keep asking for it?"
Why. It always turned back to why, and Sam bit back the pressure pushing up his throat. Why say the things he said when he was pushed past thinking, why not resist when he couldn't consider resisting, why stay in this room in this place with this man when the door was right there and seemed such an obvious answer-
"I can't get out," Sam heard himself saying, and Jack heard the way his voice dropped back and went unstable. Sam looked back toward the intersection of wall and floor, the hides that kept the furnace's warmth in and the deadly cold out, and pulled his own fur tighter around his shoulders. He'd said that before, hadn't he?-I can't, and he couldn't make it make sense in context, couldn't bridge the gap between the words he knew and what he needed to express.
Jack turned his hand over again, turning his palm again into an open offer. Sam stared at it, at the distance between them. Close enough to touch, if touching was that easy. For Jack it was. To Jack everything must have seemed so straightforward. He was on the outside; he watched and could mock the culture Sam was still buried in. I know you early-twenty-first-century types tend to worry.
Jack followed his gaze. He turned his wrist, letting his fingers close into his palm and open again. His lips pulled toward something neither a smile nor a grimace.
"It's just a hand," he said. "It's not a threat or a contract or-" He stopped. To Sam, he thought, it was probably the first step down a slippery slope. Make one advance and everything fell apart; there was no turning back.
As if there ever had been. As if all that holding himself back was helping him now.
Jack wanted to push his hand forward, but he didn't. "It's just a hand," he said again. No expectations, no promises. "That's it."
And if this means nothing, all that means anything is whether you want to take it.
Sam stopped a noise at the pit of his throat. It was just a hand in the way that 1970 had been just another decade or whatever had happened had been just sex; it was a euphemism at best, a Trojan horse at worst, and he-
Jack wasn't exactly subtle. Never had been. Sam could remember meeting him, watching Gene throw him into a wall for too careless a word or phrase, watching him stuck in a holding cell trying to charm his way out; he could remember the bar they'd hit early on, Jack offering him that same hand out onto the dance floor; Lusuosa and the cave after Lusuosa, both of them drunk past thinking, waking up pinned under a sprawl of limbs with his head turned in and resting against Jack's shoulder and choosing to do nothing. Nothing was easy. He'd decided, he'd convinced himself, that with that incident brushed out of sight and mind nothing could happen, and here he hadn't stopped it - hadn't tried, whether or not he'd had a choice.
What would reaching out do? What could it do, here? Admit that he was powerless in a place where he had no power anyway, invite what he couldn't ignore. But as long as he didn't move, all of this was done to him; he had something to escape to, something to fall back on. The sort of defence that might hold up in court, or under the scrutiny of public opinion. It was something he'd learned not to give up.
He looked up again, fighting to stay steady against the pressure of Jack's eyes, against the force of everything he'd shoved to the back of his mind so he didn't have to react. Trauma, if he'd admit that this was trauma, wasn't something to be dealt with huddled on the floor, naked except for a fur blanket, trying not to shake in a room full of disorder. It was something for the clinical terms of a psychotherapist, the sterile instruments of a hospital, not this place with its sweat and dust and-
"I can't," he said again, pushed back against his breaking voice. Across from him Jack watched the closing of his eyes, the tension in his jaw, and didn't pull back his hand.
Break this, of course, and cracks would develop everywhere. The world Sam had set up around himself was rigid and brittle, and he was holding on with both hands. It was easy to see why he couldn't spare one to reach.
And what could Jack say? He couldn't press, couldn't force anything without destroying everything. Could say I've been where you are now, except for him it came over the husk of a Chula ambulance with hundreds of gasmasks watching. Except for him it wasn't the same at all. He had to keep track of the placement of his limbs, because he was watching Sam's world crumble around him and as much as he needed to step forward and do something, he had been the cause. All he could do was offer Sam a hand up out of the rubble and wait for him to take it.
Sam didn't move. He opened his eyes and watched Jack's hand again, like he couldn't decide whether it was a rope to a man overboard or a noose to the condemned.
Jack watched him, checking over his posture again, the rise and fall of his shoulders, the fine muscles of the face and around the eyes. Everything read shock and anger and bitter fear, buried under too much silence. Always that silence. You "couldn't".
"I promise you," Jack said. "You can survive this."
Sam caught his breath. Nothing made sense; that was the problem. "It's not-" he began, and couldn't say the rest of it. It's not about survival. If it wasn't about survival, what was it?
And if Jack, despite everything, hadn't been the one keeping him alive so far-
"You're confident," he said. Of course. You're always confident, unless the world is ending. Bile crept up the back of his throat. Taking Jack's hand seemed a Faustian deal - but then, Faust only had to sell his soul. Who knew what Jack was buying?
Jack nodded. His voice was damnably even. "I know it."
You trust me, don't you? Jack had asked, and like Sam had answered Honesty, Sam had answered Yes. And this had been - what? Because of that trust? In spite of it?
Jack had said Trust me, and he'd opened the door of the lodge and showed him exactly where they were, and it was nowhere. Jack said We should be past this and Seems like we've had plenty of opportunities to not screw up and Sam had said It's not exactly that easy and out of that, all of this.
Jack said You can survive this.
Sam closed his eyes and reached out.
He caught Jack's hand or Jack caught his, and that contact again - skin on skin - made him want to pull away first and then made him clench down, feeling the bones and fingers shift under his grip. Jack's hand was warmer than air, softer than floor, smoother than fur, and nothing happened.
Nothing.
The walls didn't fall in and he didn't fall apart, and when he opened his eyes all he saw were two hands, his own white-knuckled and holding onto Jack's, Jack's arm disappearing back under the hide that hung over his shoulders. Almost absurd, inherently meaningless, and there they were.
He exhaled, turned his wrist a little, and Jack's arm turned with it. Sam's hand didn't quite feel like a part of him, even when he could see it connected to his arm like that, when he could feel the pressure of the clench. An odd thought tickled the back of his mind, like it was absurd to have hesitated so long when nothing had happened anyway. He looked at Jack.
"Why?" Sam asked.
Jack hesitated. He looked small, somehow - whether that was an effect of the fur or of both of them crouched here, arms hanging out into the space between them like a slack rope with a single knot, Sam didn't know. "Why what?"
"Why did you-" Sam said, and looked away. This wasn't the right reaction, sitting here, holding hands, but the realization made his grip tighten instead of release. It was hard to make himself look back up, look at Jack's eyes, hold his gaze even when those eyes could have been leering or mocking or arrogant or anything.
They weren't. Jack's expression was carefully neutral, verging on pained, and that made it harder.
"You owe me an explanation," Sam said. Anger boiled up at the base of his lungs again, and that made it easier. Hate, he thought, hate was the natural response to something like this, and anger was similar enough to mean maybe he was reacting somehow as a normal person might.
Jack watched the shift of emotion in Sam's eyes, and realized he had nothing to say.
This was the problem - him a creature of instinct and action, Sam a creature of reason and rationale. I had to begged more explanation than it gave. To explain this, he'd need to explain his entire existence as a person; nothing else would be sufficient.
"I was never interested in medicine," he said.
Sam stared as though he'd asked for directions and received a passage from Milton. Jack tried not to look away.
"Where I grew up," he went on, fumbling for the end of the thread, the logical place to start from. "It was a pretty small colony. I can't promise this will make sense."
"Medicine," Sam said.
"I had high aptitude in anatomy and kinesiology," he said. "Sensation. Nociception. Body reaction." He looked down across their linked hands, across the dirt on which they sat. Sam drew his feet back, and Jack continued. "But I wasn't interested in medicine. The colony was too small to support physical therapy, physical counseling, and medicine was too clinical." His mouth supported half a smile; his eyes didn't support any. "Things didn't work out at home. Sooner or later this organization started recruiting..."
"The Time Agency," Sam supplied.
Jack nodded. "It was the fifty-first century, by the way. I told you. When we met. But-"
Sam glared. Jack glanced quickly away, then back up.
"The Agency had better prospects than a dredging world in the middle of nowhere. I joined up, and..." He trailed off. After a moment, he shook his head. "Well. Bit of a perceptionfuck. New protocols. New ways of thinking." The half-a-smile shifted from one side of his lips to the other, then settled into a wry, unhappy curve. "They didn't exactly have physical counseling either."
A pressure began behind Sam's upper jaw which was mirrored below his diaphragm. He was trained to fill in gaps, to arrive at conclusions when nothing told a complete story. He wasn't sure he wanted to close this logic. "Then what did you go into?"
Jack's eyes traced the ceiling. "A specialized discipline," he said. "Physical communication." He said a word Sam didn't know, strange consonants, long liquids - he couldn't place the language, and suspected it wasn't one he'd ever heard before. "The art of finding a middle ground where words are insufficient."
Jack's tone was somewhere in the middle distance. His eyes didn't quite track the world around them and, as per usual, what he wasn't saying outweighed what he was.
Sam snatched his hand back.
He stood up, turning to the furnace and stepping around Jack, walking to the line of clothes scattered across the dirt. That same dirt was stone-hard under his heels, that same dirt dusted his feet and caked between his toes. He heard Jack stand up behind him as he crouched to pick up articles of clothing - pants, trousers, to hell with being cleaned up; for the moment he'd settle for being dressed.
"Sam-"
Sam didn't listen. But he did turn before taking his shirt - pulling that on would require dropping the fur, and he wasn't prepared for that yet. Jack took a step and a half towards him, then hesitated without closing the rest of the distance.
"There's something wrong with-" Jack said, but there was something wrong with everything he wanted to say.
Your century. Your conditioning. Parading yourself to someone else's propriety. There's something wrong-
"-with us," he finished. "With this."
"There's nothing wrong with me," Sam snapped.
Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. "Do you believe that?" he asked. "Really? You think we'd be here if there wasn't?"
Sam lowered his head, the very picture of a cornered animal. "You're still suggesting that this is my fault."
"No," Jack said. "I'm suggesting that this is a fault of yours. There's a difference. And I... know I've got plenty of my own."
Sam snorted. There's an understatement.
Jack didn't say anything. Sam picked up his shirt and stood holding it.
"What do you want from me?"
And that was the question, wasn't it? Jack glanced away. Agency training said always have an endgame in mind. He never was good at that.
"Honesty," he said.
It was as good as any answer. It had the benefit of being reciprocal. And if there was anything either of them needed...
Sam was buttoning his shirt when Jack looked back. All the buttons and seams were in place, and he was as composed as he could be. He still looked back at Jack with the same anger, though, and his eyes still slipped and darted away when watching was too much. "I've been honest."
No, you haven't. "Your definition of honesty is skewed," he said, and while he tried to keep his voice quiet, a cold edge crept in. "I mean, sure, as long as dishonesty is kept to spoken lies, but this-"
The muscles of Sam's back clenched tight, bringing his head down, building the pressure at the back of his jaw. This, as though Jack knew or was qualified to speak on the net of social policing any living person on Earth had to endure. Jack, who danced across planets and times as though he owned them. "Who the hell are you to make that distinction?"
"Someone who knows better," Jack answered, and much as he tried to control it, anger welled up at the bottom of his lungs. Anger at Sam - Substituting the victim, his mind filled in - anger around Sam, at the world which had made him and gone on its merry way. "Someone who's seen better! Your entire culture, Sam-"
"I know."
"It doesn't occur to you that that's a bit screwed up?"
"Of course it's screwed up." Sam rounded on him, and there was the anger, long-burning for all the time it had spent banked. "What, shall I fix it?"
He raised a hand, hunting for a gesture of appropriate violence, and finally just clicked his fingers. The sound was exactly as futile in the Thorlgard hall as it was in the larger universe.
Jack watched the tips of his fingers, weighing the defiance in the gesture against the defeat. "You can do something."
Sam looked toward the door, voice dropping toward disgust. "You wouldn't know."
"I've lived-"
Jack aborted the first three endings to that sentence. Some revealed too much, some not nearly enough. Sam thought he was some sort of temporal armchair sociologist, and maybe that was a fair assessment from someone stuck so deep in one time as Sam was. But fair or not, it wasn't exactly true.
"Nineteen hundreds, two thousands, trust me, Sam, I've lived them. Lived in them. And not for a month or two - stretches of years. I've seen-"
Too many to count, walking through Torchwood, and there hadn't been a one of them who hadn't been broken by the world somehow. All one had to do was look.
"You got me a bit wrong," he admitted, running his fingers down the edge of the fur where the coarse bristles met the tough leather grain. Getting each other wrong was becoming a habit between them. "When you said I - well, I guess I said it."
Sam scowled.
"It's not that I'm trying not to try," Jack said. "It's just that when I do try, it comes out... something like this." He chuckled thinly. "You should have seen the mess I made of 1902."
Sam raised a hand to the side of his head. "1902."
"Kinda unwrote it. Long story. Kinda beside the point." He pulled at the fur, testing the give. "I'm trying. Maybe I'm screwing everything up, but I'm trying." Then he looked up, meeting Sam's eyes again, but this time without contrition. "Unlike you, who've given up on trying at all."
Sam crossed the space between them and punched Jack in the face.
Jack went down - back and down like a parody of himself, staged-fight melodrama and Sam turned away with a hiss so as not to see the mess being made of Jack's fur. Jack hit the floor and rolled onto his knees, choking in appreciation or surprise at the sudden violence. "Well. That was something."
"Something-!" Sam turned back, hand a fist again, untrimmed nails hard against the flesh of his palm - "Do you think I've enjoyed this? Living my entire life around-!"
A foreign set of rules. The constant threat of judgement. Jack pushed himself to his feet, pulling each leg under him.
"Around what?" He glanced to the wall, the door, the furnace burning in the centre of the room. As though socialization were as easily swapped out as society, and the change in locale should have made all the difference. "Where is it?"
As though conditioning were that easily displaced. Sam shouted without meaning to. "This isn't the fifty-first century!"
"Yeah?" Jack drew the back of his hand across his mouth. "It's not the twenty-first, either."
...but I do know it's a long way home.
Sam turned away, digging his fisted knuckles against his lips. They were going home - that had been the promise of this entire escapade. And they'd been going home for how many months and through how many worlds, and at the end of the line was waiting... what?
He took a breath. 1974, he'd have vanished in the middle of absolute madness, time dogs and paradoxes and who knew who'd got out alive. 2006, and Jack had said they couldn't make it there, a few years down the line, maybe, when he'd vanished for God knew whatever reason, as though his body'd just disappeared following collision with a car he'd barely glimpsed coming; missing, presumed dead by now. And in the mean time they were here, a dead zone, safe period, where nothing mattered and the universe didn't so much make an exception for him as ignore that he was there. Fitting, really. He'd made such a career of not calling undue attention.
Behind him, Jack was circling in. Not closing the distance, but testing out how close to come. "There's one thing you can't," he was saying, each sound careful. "You can't just - you can't do this. Stay quiet and hope things work out on their own."
Sam turned his head away. How even to begin to respond?
Jack stopped at the edge of his peripheral vision. "Are we good to talk?"
How even to understand the question?
Sam closed his eyes as tight as his fist. "Put - put your bloody trousers on."
A pause, then a dry chuckle at that. Jack turned away. At least you're getting some sort of priorities in order.
By the time Jack was decent - by Sam's standards more than his own - Sam had made his way to a wall and pressed his back into it, crossed his arms, set his jaw and begun staring at the ceiling with such specific focus that he could have been counting the stitches across the seams. Jack moved to stand in front of him, keeping a healthy distance between them, and spread his hands.
He could see Sam's jaw work, watch the fine muscles by the eyes flicker underneath the skin. Sam was trying to decide, most likely, whether to look down or not, whether to acknowledge, whether to risk eye contact and the possibility that words would start up again.
Might as well pre-empt that.
Jack dropped his hands. "I am sorry." But probably not for the things you want me to be.
The flicker of muscles tugged at Sam's upper lip, hinting a sneer or a grimace beneath the façade which tried to hint control. "Really."
He still watched the ceiling. For a moment, Jack watched him.
"You like having your back to a wall," Jack said.
Sam's gaze dropped like a stone, hitting Jack as though he'd just remembered the furnace, the warm brick beneath his shirt. Jack glanced away - harmless, really; - and looked back at him from a tilted head.
"You do, though. Practically, keeping your back to a wall is just a good way to get cornered. Keeps things from sneaking up on you. Also writes out any possibility of escape."
Sam swallowed. "Stop talking."
"You can hit me again, if you want," Jack said. Even if he was aware, and Sam should have been aware, that it was a deflection away from the actual issue - if it served to break the tension, he'd allow it. "Now that I'm dressed."
Sam looked sharply away.
"Or we can pretend that nothing happened." Jack brought a hand up, kneading his thumb into his opposite palm. "It worked after Lusuosa. I guess. Given time-"
"Stop it!"
Jack was just watching him. Sam fought down the urge to cross the room, hit him again - it'd derail the conversation again, even if just for a moment-
"What do you want me to stop?"
Talking. Being. Existing. Anything. Sam tried not to shake his head. He wanted to stop confronting this, being dragged through by the bit. He wanted to stop being made to know how fucked-up all of this was.
...and that was what had put him here, hadn't it? Not here, this world and this situation, though he supposed that was the parallel Jack was trying to draw. Here on this path in the first place, him arguing with Maya, pressing her with Look around you. What use are feelings in this room? And she'd run off on her own and he'd followed and been hit by a car, and then he was in 1973 with Gene demanding he trust his instincts, and then he was here with Jack -
With Jack pushing him to this.
He pushed one hand against his mouth.
What do you all know that I don't?
"I don't want-" he started. He could feel his heart beating in the space below his diaphragm - odd, wasn't that? Annie always brought that out in him, Annie and night terrors, the girl on the test card who was never quite so frightening when he woke up with the sun coming in through his window, and he crouched down to stop the room from spinning before it could start to spin, he ground his fingertips into the dirt floor. This was real, at least by the same standards by which he'd judged 1973 to be real, or any stop on this off-Earth adventure prior to this. Is there grit on your hands? Maybe he was mad. Maybe he was still in a coma, but after this long and this many changes in the rules, he was beginning to doubt there really was a way out.
You can survive this, Jack had said.
He'd failed to mention how.
"I don't want this," he said, and wrenched his head up to look Jack in the eyes. "I don't want to be like this, I don't want this constant-" He tried to laugh. He couldn't. "-self-policing. What do I do, then? Can't shut it off. Not like there's a switch. Am I just supposed to-"
He swallowed. What, give myself over to you?
And would there be anything left of him afterwards?
This was never so much of an issue, in 2006, in 1973. Rather, it was, but no one ever ground his face in it like Jack was doing now. In 1973, in 2006, he could get away, walk out the door, bury himself in work and social camouflage and respectability, and none of that - no way out - existed here.
It was difficult to breathe. "You wouldn't just let me live quietly, would you?"
Jack closed in, just a few steps. He was keeping his breathing soft, his motions subliminal. Nothing to distract, nothing to take away from the words Sam was wrenching out of himself. "You shouldn't have to."
"You're talking about a revolution," Sam said.
"Maybe." Jack eased closer, watching for any sign that Sam would spook. "Maybe the world isn't quite as mean as you grew up thinking it was. Maybe I know a safe space."
"Like this is a safe space," Sam scoffed, edging away. Jack caught the motion and stopped, freezing his approach. "Because nothing here matters?"
Jack held himself still, held his expression neutral. "Would you like it to?"
Would I what?
Sam stood and stepped back, pressing into the wall again. Meaning was inimical; so was meaninglessness. Meaning threatened censure and worse than that, obliteration. Meaningless threatened imprisonment here, at the mercy of Jack's arbitrary attempts to do the right thing, forever. Jack didn't come forward; he stood steady as though his steadiness could push arbitrary reality away.
"I want to go home."
Jack glanced down, flipping the cover on his wrist device. It whittered, and he flipped it closed. "We should be able to, soon. What'll you do once you're there?"
Sam shook his head. "I can't think about this."
"You can." He wouldn't stop. "You do." And for all that, Sam was hanging onto the words in a way that turned his stomach. "A lot more often than you've ever talked to me about it." He was right, was the problem - not in his actions; Sam wasn't prepared to consider that and didn't think he ever would be, but calmly, implacably, Jack wasn't lying. "You were fighting to go home too hard not to know what you were going back to."
He said it, but his voice softened, lost surety. He let the question hang in the air, unsaid.
Weren't you?
After a moment, Jack turned and walked away.
Sam's head snapped up, eyes following him. He hadn't expected that break in equilibrium - he'd expected Jack to stay, prod harder, keep pulling him down the path he was paving, to not let him go until he'd broken (again), and Jack was walking back to the furnace, he was rearranging the jars of tallow, he was leaving his back turned and saying nothing, nothing any more, and Sam took two steps forward despite himself.
He'd known exactly where he was going.
"Jack." The name came out of his throat without touching his teeth, and he forced words out after it. "-it wasn't safe."
Jack half-glanced over his shoulder, as though Sam had commented on the weather or the stitch pattern of the walls. "Hm?" Sam took another cautious two steps forward, slipping the button on one cuff back and forth through its buttonhole.
"It wasn't safe. Living as though-"
One more step, though not quite toward him; toward another part of the furnace, a different pile of clay containers. This conversation wouldn't have been safe; it revealed too much with too little cover, and most of his mind still cried danger.
"-as though anything mattered."
Jack turned to look at him, straight at the eyes, and nodded.
Sam faltered. What do you want from me? Jack was almost inscrutable at the best of times, and this was far from those.
He looked away. Back to the swept dirt again; it remained apathetic when external passions ran too high.
"It wasn't safe to feel. Certainly not to demonstrate feeling anything." He settled into a crouch, knuckles tracing the ground. "You said you'd lived in - various times. You have to have been aware of social, of political and even legal repercussions of... deviation." He glanced away. "Of any sort. There's a certain standard by which people are judged, and any deviation from that standard, be it sex, race, or... could become grounds for censure. Or exclusion. Or reprisal."
They were comforting, those academic terms. They laid out the issue flat and dry, and sounded like bylaws instead of threats. There was nothing inherently pitiable about living one's life by rules, unlike living one's life under threat.
"You weren't in the wrong," Jack said.
Sam snorted. "In what? Doing nothing, or wanting to?"
"Wanting to do nothing or wanting to do something?" Jack put the tallow aside, lacing his fingers together. Sam watched his hands, the net of skin, and had no answer before Jack continued. "Either way, I suppose."
Sam snorted. "It was just wrong."
Jack smiled, sidelong and not terribly amused. "Yeah."
Sam almost started laughing.
He looked up after a bit, searching Jack's face with an expression akin to pain. "What's right?" he asked. "Not this. Not the... exhibition of the people trying to make a statement back home. Not levying everything on social activism, not creating privileged classes for whom this isn't an issue, not pretending the issue doesn't exist. What do you do?" He swallowed. "By your century, what changed?"
Jack glanced to his clasped hands before looking up again. "...I don't know," he admitted. "Social politics of the early-21st century? If I knew too much I'd skirt a paradox."
He tilted his head.
"I imagine there's something to be said for trying, though."
Sam shifted, moving his weight closer as if in spire of himself. "And this is trying?"
"Trying. Making mistakes. Making progress. ...I hope."
"And we'll... what?" Sam took a step closer, crouching down and unconsciously mimicking Jack's pose, fingers laced together. "Conduct a responsible analysis of how we went wrong, tabulate the results..."
"All of which are fancy ways of saying 'put off trying again.'"
"No." This was familiar, suddenly - this was 1973, in a police station shouting down an entire department, arguing through to someone whose bullheadedness put Jack's to shame. This was everything he'd left behind him, and simultaneously everything he'd brought with him to keep himself sane. "It's a way of understanding the issue."
Jack shook his head. "It's not mine."
"It is mine." It was the way he prized, above all else. Jack raised his eyebrows.
"The only way?"
Sam opened his mouth to respond.
Then he closed it. Looked away.
You used to believe in gut feeling, Maya had said. It was true. He'd changed.
"Is yours?"
Maybe he didn't believe that change was pernicious.
...maybe it didn't have to be all-or-nothing.
"After a while it gets difficult to trust what your gut says," he said. After so long reigning it in, police procedure on one side and public opinion on the other, if he could have excised instinct altogether, it might have made things easier. Evidence. Hard to bring to a moral court.
"Yeah, it does." Jack shrugged. "All right. We can tabulate all you want, but in the mean time..." He showed one palm. "Want to make friends with your gut again?"
Sam blinked. It felt as though the ground had shifted, again - as though gravity wasn't quite where he thought it was, but it hadn't pulled him down just yet.
Maybe here, with the dirt hard underfoot and the cold air kept at bay outside the hide walls, it was possible to move forward.
"Yeah," Sam said. "Maybe I do."
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke )
Sliding Scale of Slash: Confirmed, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Rating: T-M/Mostly just angst and vague adult themes
Beta Warning: Semibeta'd. You clicks your LJ-cuts and you takes your chances.
Fandoms: Life on Mars; Torchwood; Final Fantasy VIII
Summary: Questions of wrong, right, and picking up the pieces.
There was something to be said for thresholds.
Even if Sam couldn't process the metaphor, standing with his hand on the door to the lodge and staring out over the hoarfrost, the world was kind enough to narrow down his options to a binary. Step back into the room, with the heat of its furnace and the mess of its beds, with Jack standing right there too close and just out of reach, or-
Or walk into the tundra.
That made the decision simple when it wasn't easy. Nothing about the lodge made sense, but the tundra did. It offered one cold certainty: walk out and freeze between the impassive sky and ice. The choice was simple because it wasn't a choice. Not unless one expanded the options to suicide.
Standing there, shaking like his bones would escape his skin, the next step would have been to close the door and step away. One logical avenue had been closed, so it was time to focus on the others.
He didn't.
This not moving was a liminal point - untenable, maybe, but deceptively safe. And so long as he could hold on to that...
Jack's footsteps moved away from him. Sam closed his eyes and listened to every footfall, soft and solid, warm in the wide space. Jack was solid, human-warm, had had his arms around him-
He slammed the door and turned back to the room, averting his eyes from the light of the furnace, the mess of the bed, the bare skin of his feet, until his eyes found a patch of bare floor which neither threatened nor recalled anything. Jack approached again, one hand edging into Sam's field of vision, offering a familiar clay mug.
"Water," Jack said.
Sam swallowed, nodded and reached for it. In taking it his fingertip brushed Jack's knuckle, skin on skin, and for a moment that contact was too much - his hand jerked back with the mug, and the water splashed up and over the edge.
Jack watched. This was a skill he'd trained in lifetimes ago: reading the body, watching for signs. The drops of water on Sam's hands amplified the pattern of his shaking; the rigid lines of his neck, his shoulders and arms, even softened by the fur, told Jack where and how he was holding his tension.
Sam was watching, too, but he was seeing something different. His attention was anywhere but the body, anywhere but two human men standing in the middle of a wide and empty lodge - he saw the room, the floor, the human debris. He noticed the way their clothes were scattered, the way the furs were mussed. In an instant it struck him as horrible and familiar, and then the sense was gone - it seemed something he should have experience with, except if he was standing looking at it that usually meant that it had ended in murder or at least a missing person. He didn't fit here in any other way.
Jack shifted his weight and Sam flinched back, pulling in the mug, the hide, all his limbs even as his chin snapped up. "Don't," he said, and the word sounded absurd in the warm air - as though he or the room had forgotten language, and it was nothing but a dumb sound. "Ever again. Don't."
Jack nodded. The first thing to do was cut out any element of threat, anything that might be perceived as threat or coercion. "Never," he repeated, like a subordinate confirming an order. Maybe if he gave up all the power he could between them, what circumstance wouldn't let him drop would be enough to see them through.
He pulled himself back into a smaller posture, keeping head and voice low. Now that they were talking, maybe something could be done.
"Why didn't you stop me?"
Sam's gut knotted, pulling his entire chest tense. The tension pressed up against his jaw, gritting his teeth to keep anything from escaping his throat. If Jack asked that, if he considered answering it, then this reduced to him in some way - some action or inaction on his part, and that was enough to start heat burning at the base of his lungs. He looked up, straight at Jack's eyes finally, still unable to process the input but at least able to throw something back. "Why should I have had to?"
Anger. The cues for that one were easy enough to read, and Jack caught himself before he moved to soothe it. If Sam was confronting him, at least he was confronting something. As it was the anger was struggling up through the shock, and if they could just burn away shock without burning the problems beneath...
"Not the same question," Jack said, keeping his hands hidden beneath the hide, voice even, volume low, not stepping up against the challenge and not backing down. Each nuance had to be felt out to coax Sam up, and he'd always been better at bodies than people. "Right or wrong-" and I know to you it's wrong, "-why didn't you?"
Sam flinched away. Everything about Jack, his steadiness, his refusal to yield or react, the texture of his voice, was pressing into his awareness like fingers or lips; he turned away, eyes snapping back towards the door and away from it again. He was still trapped in the warm air. Jack was going to drag him back to that moment when he could have said no, if he could have, and fighting it rang in his ears and tightened his breathing. "Don't," he said again; easier to say, now that - what?
Now that it makes no difference.
Jack closed his eyes. Set his jaw. Sam wasn't watching; Sam was fighting through the same reaction, and for Jack, that was a blessing. He needed the moment to put his own controls back in place, to sweep away the idea that this was the moment when everything slipped through his fingers. That moment had been stretched out and laid over the entire night. Sam verged on hyperventilating, and the sound of his breath grated the air. Jack kept himself still.
By the time Sam had at least nominal control over himself, Jack did too. Sam glanced back out of the corner of his eye, looking in Jack's direction but not exactly seeing him. "What do you want me to say."
The way the words fell could hardly be considered a question. Jack took a breath, telling himself to keep steady with the stretch of his diaphragm, bracing his words against the contraction of his lungs. "I want to know what's wrong."
He couldn't say I want to help.
"What's wrong," Sam echoed, but his voice hollowed and hardened so he hardly recognized it as his own. "You don't find that obvious?"
Jack opened his mouth to respond. A moment later it occurred to him that response wasn't necessary - anything he could say would be meaningless or incendiary. Sam seemed to grasp that, too.
"Where are you from?" he asked. "You said the future, which from 1973 could be - the whole bloody universe," he finished in a mutter. "What - ten years? A hundred? A thousand? Do you really not-"
He bit the line off, looking rigid-jawed toward the door again. Far from being an escape, now it was a reminder: it was the same door they'd stood at when he'd said we're nowhere, when Jack had said a safe period, when he should have known that the current broken state of things was no guarantee against them breaking further.
Sam should have known a lot of things. It wasn't as though he'd never seen these patterns before.
"No matter what morality you claim, your actions have to stand," he shot, without knowing quite what he needed to say or how he could ever hope to say it. "And I - do you think I haven't seen madmen telling me that God told them to kill, or - you take it further, don't you? All this, safe periods and predestination and - you think that knowing the rules grants leave to circumvent them? I was in the middle of an investigation when you-!" He cut that off. "On Lusuosa you said your moral quality was 'exactly as advertised'. Is that how you justify yourself? Expect nothing, and anything good is laudable. You-"
The mug was good. It gave Sam something to hang onto until his fingers hurt and his knuckles bleached to bone, whereas Jack had only the ragged edge of the hide for himself. He watched while Sam fought back against the bear of his words clawing up his throat, and he held himself still.
"You never claimed to be a good person," Sam spat, voice twisting into a parody, forcing out the r. "So long as you make no claim you can't be held responsible. The worst part is, you think you can make it charming; you parade it, dress it up as honesty-"
And I asked for that.
Sam stepped away, tossing his head, but couldn't toss out the words or the image or the sense of where he was and where he'd been. Some little stopover planet whose name he couldn't remember or never learned, Jack had asked What do you want from me? and he'd, with the sun casting shadows through the windows onto his hands, with no idea how any of this worked, he'd said Honesty as if that was a guarantee of anything.
The mug was hard as stone against his fingers and he wanted to throw it - at Jack, at the furnace, at the door, at the wall, at anything. He wanted to break it, watch the pieces fall over each other to the ground and be something, mean something, some markable event standing between him and what had happened. It wasn't rational. It wasn't dignified or controlled and for a moment he didn't care, and the instant he realized that he wrapped his other hand around it to keep himself from throwing. The fur came loose over his shoulders, flapping open enough to let cool air edge along his stomach, his ribs, and he let go of the mug to snatch at the edges. The mug hit the floor and the water splashed up onto the leather, in between his toes, and he stepped back against the wall and sunk to the ground after it.
He bit down, held himself still. God, he thought, he was losing it, like he'd lived in 1973 half-expecting them to find a reason to haul him off to a madhouse on any given day and still wearing madness as a cover for his twenty-first century sensibilities when he wasn't wearing them as a cover for it. Jack was just watching him, quiet after having both barrels emptied at him, and Sam had the sudden urge to apologise.
As if he was the one who should be apologising. As if he thought Jack cared what he thought, as if he thought he should care what Jack felt. He held onto the fur with both hands, dropped his head, then turned his head away when resting his chin on his chest filled his nostrils with the smell of his own sweat. He needed to be stable again; needed to get out of this incriminating position, to destroy the evidence - get cleaned up, get dressed, get on his feet. He couldn't focus. Thinking about walking to the furnace, washing up, pulling on articles of clothing one by one made him want to turn his head again, get away from the thought like he'd get away from the smell like he'd get away from the air working its way between his fingers. His toes curled against the dirt, the mud that had formed between them. He couldn't get away from anything.
"Help me," he said. The words were tenuous to his own ears. Jack was the person who'd dragged him out here, who'd broken him down, who he'd just said had a moral core only nominally better than a sociopath's and that only from a certain point of view - and he was the only one to ask, here, when Sam could barely breathe.
Jack crouched down. When he'd come close was a question Sam couldn't answer, but they seemed to keep the same distance, and he had to ask when that had started and if it was ever going to end. Jack moved away, he moved away, Jack came closer - too much closer - but they'd been at the same equilibrium since they met each other, hadn't they?
Jack offered a hand.
Sam closed his eyes.
He was expecting Jack's fingers to close around his wrist, take his pulse, pull him up, hold him there, anything, but Jack didn't move. When he opened his eyes again Jack was still crouched, one hand hidden under the fur wrapped around him, one hand open and offered.
Sam looked away.
He had it in him to be calm and rational. If he could just push everything else away, if he could just find that-
"I can't help you unless you let me," Jack said.
Sam looked at the ground. The ground was dirt - swept dirt; not quite clean, but not dirty enough to bear footsteps. Nothing but its barrenness implying that humans had been here. "Maybe I don't want your help."
Jack let his hand drop, forearm resting on his knee, but he didn't pull back. "Then why do you keep asking for it?"
Why. It always turned back to why, and Sam bit back the pressure pushing up his throat. Why say the things he said when he was pushed past thinking, why not resist when he couldn't consider resisting, why stay in this room in this place with this man when the door was right there and seemed such an obvious answer-
"I can't get out," Sam heard himself saying, and Jack heard the way his voice dropped back and went unstable. Sam looked back toward the intersection of wall and floor, the hides that kept the furnace's warmth in and the deadly cold out, and pulled his own fur tighter around his shoulders. He'd said that before, hadn't he?-I can't, and he couldn't make it make sense in context, couldn't bridge the gap between the words he knew and what he needed to express.
Jack turned his hand over again, turning his palm again into an open offer. Sam stared at it, at the distance between them. Close enough to touch, if touching was that easy. For Jack it was. To Jack everything must have seemed so straightforward. He was on the outside; he watched and could mock the culture Sam was still buried in. I know you early-twenty-first-century types tend to worry.
Jack followed his gaze. He turned his wrist, letting his fingers close into his palm and open again. His lips pulled toward something neither a smile nor a grimace.
"It's just a hand," he said. "It's not a threat or a contract or-" He stopped. To Sam, he thought, it was probably the first step down a slippery slope. Make one advance and everything fell apart; there was no turning back.
As if there ever had been. As if all that holding himself back was helping him now.
Jack wanted to push his hand forward, but he didn't. "It's just a hand," he said again. No expectations, no promises. "That's it."
And if this means nothing, all that means anything is whether you want to take it.
Sam stopped a noise at the pit of his throat. It was just a hand in the way that 1970 had been just another decade or whatever had happened had been just sex; it was a euphemism at best, a Trojan horse at worst, and he-
Jack wasn't exactly subtle. Never had been. Sam could remember meeting him, watching Gene throw him into a wall for too careless a word or phrase, watching him stuck in a holding cell trying to charm his way out; he could remember the bar they'd hit early on, Jack offering him that same hand out onto the dance floor; Lusuosa and the cave after Lusuosa, both of them drunk past thinking, waking up pinned under a sprawl of limbs with his head turned in and resting against Jack's shoulder and choosing to do nothing. Nothing was easy. He'd decided, he'd convinced himself, that with that incident brushed out of sight and mind nothing could happen, and here he hadn't stopped it - hadn't tried, whether or not he'd had a choice.
What would reaching out do? What could it do, here? Admit that he was powerless in a place where he had no power anyway, invite what he couldn't ignore. But as long as he didn't move, all of this was done to him; he had something to escape to, something to fall back on. The sort of defence that might hold up in court, or under the scrutiny of public opinion. It was something he'd learned not to give up.
He looked up again, fighting to stay steady against the pressure of Jack's eyes, against the force of everything he'd shoved to the back of his mind so he didn't have to react. Trauma, if he'd admit that this was trauma, wasn't something to be dealt with huddled on the floor, naked except for a fur blanket, trying not to shake in a room full of disorder. It was something for the clinical terms of a psychotherapist, the sterile instruments of a hospital, not this place with its sweat and dust and-
"I can't," he said again, pushed back against his breaking voice. Across from him Jack watched the closing of his eyes, the tension in his jaw, and didn't pull back his hand.
Break this, of course, and cracks would develop everywhere. The world Sam had set up around himself was rigid and brittle, and he was holding on with both hands. It was easy to see why he couldn't spare one to reach.
And what could Jack say? He couldn't press, couldn't force anything without destroying everything. Could say I've been where you are now, except for him it came over the husk of a Chula ambulance with hundreds of gasmasks watching. Except for him it wasn't the same at all. He had to keep track of the placement of his limbs, because he was watching Sam's world crumble around him and as much as he needed to step forward and do something, he had been the cause. All he could do was offer Sam a hand up out of the rubble and wait for him to take it.
Sam didn't move. He opened his eyes and watched Jack's hand again, like he couldn't decide whether it was a rope to a man overboard or a noose to the condemned.
Jack watched him, checking over his posture again, the rise and fall of his shoulders, the fine muscles of the face and around the eyes. Everything read shock and anger and bitter fear, buried under too much silence. Always that silence. You "couldn't".
"I promise you," Jack said. "You can survive this."
Sam caught his breath. Nothing made sense; that was the problem. "It's not-" he began, and couldn't say the rest of it. It's not about survival. If it wasn't about survival, what was it?
And if Jack, despite everything, hadn't been the one keeping him alive so far-
"You're confident," he said. Of course. You're always confident, unless the world is ending. Bile crept up the back of his throat. Taking Jack's hand seemed a Faustian deal - but then, Faust only had to sell his soul. Who knew what Jack was buying?
Jack nodded. His voice was damnably even. "I know it."
You trust me, don't you? Jack had asked, and like Sam had answered Honesty, Sam had answered Yes. And this had been - what? Because of that trust? In spite of it?
Jack had said Trust me, and he'd opened the door of the lodge and showed him exactly where they were, and it was nowhere. Jack said We should be past this and Seems like we've had plenty of opportunities to not screw up and Sam had said It's not exactly that easy and out of that, all of this.
Jack said You can survive this.
Sam closed his eyes and reached out.
He caught Jack's hand or Jack caught his, and that contact again - skin on skin - made him want to pull away first and then made him clench down, feeling the bones and fingers shift under his grip. Jack's hand was warmer than air, softer than floor, smoother than fur, and nothing happened.
Nothing.
The walls didn't fall in and he didn't fall apart, and when he opened his eyes all he saw were two hands, his own white-knuckled and holding onto Jack's, Jack's arm disappearing back under the hide that hung over his shoulders. Almost absurd, inherently meaningless, and there they were.
He exhaled, turned his wrist a little, and Jack's arm turned with it. Sam's hand didn't quite feel like a part of him, even when he could see it connected to his arm like that, when he could feel the pressure of the clench. An odd thought tickled the back of his mind, like it was absurd to have hesitated so long when nothing had happened anyway. He looked at Jack.
"Why?" Sam asked.
Jack hesitated. He looked small, somehow - whether that was an effect of the fur or of both of them crouched here, arms hanging out into the space between them like a slack rope with a single knot, Sam didn't know. "Why what?"
"Why did you-" Sam said, and looked away. This wasn't the right reaction, sitting here, holding hands, but the realization made his grip tighten instead of release. It was hard to make himself look back up, look at Jack's eyes, hold his gaze even when those eyes could have been leering or mocking or arrogant or anything.
They weren't. Jack's expression was carefully neutral, verging on pained, and that made it harder.
"You owe me an explanation," Sam said. Anger boiled up at the base of his lungs again, and that made it easier. Hate, he thought, hate was the natural response to something like this, and anger was similar enough to mean maybe he was reacting somehow as a normal person might.
Jack watched the shift of emotion in Sam's eyes, and realized he had nothing to say.
This was the problem - him a creature of instinct and action, Sam a creature of reason and rationale. I had to begged more explanation than it gave. To explain this, he'd need to explain his entire existence as a person; nothing else would be sufficient.
"I was never interested in medicine," he said.
Sam stared as though he'd asked for directions and received a passage from Milton. Jack tried not to look away.
"Where I grew up," he went on, fumbling for the end of the thread, the logical place to start from. "It was a pretty small colony. I can't promise this will make sense."
"Medicine," Sam said.
"I had high aptitude in anatomy and kinesiology," he said. "Sensation. Nociception. Body reaction." He looked down across their linked hands, across the dirt on which they sat. Sam drew his feet back, and Jack continued. "But I wasn't interested in medicine. The colony was too small to support physical therapy, physical counseling, and medicine was too clinical." His mouth supported half a smile; his eyes didn't support any. "Things didn't work out at home. Sooner or later this organization started recruiting..."
"The Time Agency," Sam supplied.
Jack nodded. "It was the fifty-first century, by the way. I told you. When we met. But-"
Sam glared. Jack glanced quickly away, then back up.
"The Agency had better prospects than a dredging world in the middle of nowhere. I joined up, and..." He trailed off. After a moment, he shook his head. "Well. Bit of a perceptionfuck. New protocols. New ways of thinking." The half-a-smile shifted from one side of his lips to the other, then settled into a wry, unhappy curve. "They didn't exactly have physical counseling either."
A pressure began behind Sam's upper jaw which was mirrored below his diaphragm. He was trained to fill in gaps, to arrive at conclusions when nothing told a complete story. He wasn't sure he wanted to close this logic. "Then what did you go into?"
Jack's eyes traced the ceiling. "A specialized discipline," he said. "Physical communication." He said a word Sam didn't know, strange consonants, long liquids - he couldn't place the language, and suspected it wasn't one he'd ever heard before. "The art of finding a middle ground where words are insufficient."
Jack's tone was somewhere in the middle distance. His eyes didn't quite track the world around them and, as per usual, what he wasn't saying outweighed what he was.
Sam snatched his hand back.
He stood up, turning to the furnace and stepping around Jack, walking to the line of clothes scattered across the dirt. That same dirt was stone-hard under his heels, that same dirt dusted his feet and caked between his toes. He heard Jack stand up behind him as he crouched to pick up articles of clothing - pants, trousers, to hell with being cleaned up; for the moment he'd settle for being dressed.
"Sam-"
Sam didn't listen. But he did turn before taking his shirt - pulling that on would require dropping the fur, and he wasn't prepared for that yet. Jack took a step and a half towards him, then hesitated without closing the rest of the distance.
"There's something wrong with-" Jack said, but there was something wrong with everything he wanted to say.
Your century. Your conditioning. Parading yourself to someone else's propriety. There's something wrong-
"-with us," he finished. "With this."
"There's nothing wrong with me," Sam snapped.
Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. "Do you believe that?" he asked. "Really? You think we'd be here if there wasn't?"
Sam lowered his head, the very picture of a cornered animal. "You're still suggesting that this is my fault."
"No," Jack said. "I'm suggesting that this is a fault of yours. There's a difference. And I... know I've got plenty of my own."
Sam snorted. There's an understatement.
Jack didn't say anything. Sam picked up his shirt and stood holding it.
"What do you want from me?"
And that was the question, wasn't it? Jack glanced away. Agency training said always have an endgame in mind. He never was good at that.
"Honesty," he said.
It was as good as any answer. It had the benefit of being reciprocal. And if there was anything either of them needed...
Sam was buttoning his shirt when Jack looked back. All the buttons and seams were in place, and he was as composed as he could be. He still looked back at Jack with the same anger, though, and his eyes still slipped and darted away when watching was too much. "I've been honest."
No, you haven't. "Your definition of honesty is skewed," he said, and while he tried to keep his voice quiet, a cold edge crept in. "I mean, sure, as long as dishonesty is kept to spoken lies, but this-"
The muscles of Sam's back clenched tight, bringing his head down, building the pressure at the back of his jaw. This, as though Jack knew or was qualified to speak on the net of social policing any living person on Earth had to endure. Jack, who danced across planets and times as though he owned them. "Who the hell are you to make that distinction?"
"Someone who knows better," Jack answered, and much as he tried to control it, anger welled up at the bottom of his lungs. Anger at Sam - Substituting the victim, his mind filled in - anger around Sam, at the world which had made him and gone on its merry way. "Someone who's seen better! Your entire culture, Sam-"
"I know."
"It doesn't occur to you that that's a bit screwed up?"
"Of course it's screwed up." Sam rounded on him, and there was the anger, long-burning for all the time it had spent banked. "What, shall I fix it?"
He raised a hand, hunting for a gesture of appropriate violence, and finally just clicked his fingers. The sound was exactly as futile in the Thorlgard hall as it was in the larger universe.
Jack watched the tips of his fingers, weighing the defiance in the gesture against the defeat. "You can do something."
Sam looked toward the door, voice dropping toward disgust. "You wouldn't know."
"I've lived-"
Jack aborted the first three endings to that sentence. Some revealed too much, some not nearly enough. Sam thought he was some sort of temporal armchair sociologist, and maybe that was a fair assessment from someone stuck so deep in one time as Sam was. But fair or not, it wasn't exactly true.
"Nineteen hundreds, two thousands, trust me, Sam, I've lived them. Lived in them. And not for a month or two - stretches of years. I've seen-"
Too many to count, walking through Torchwood, and there hadn't been a one of them who hadn't been broken by the world somehow. All one had to do was look.
"You got me a bit wrong," he admitted, running his fingers down the edge of the fur where the coarse bristles met the tough leather grain. Getting each other wrong was becoming a habit between them. "When you said I - well, I guess I said it."
Sam scowled.
"It's not that I'm trying not to try," Jack said. "It's just that when I do try, it comes out... something like this." He chuckled thinly. "You should have seen the mess I made of 1902."
Sam raised a hand to the side of his head. "1902."
"Kinda unwrote it. Long story. Kinda beside the point." He pulled at the fur, testing the give. "I'm trying. Maybe I'm screwing everything up, but I'm trying." Then he looked up, meeting Sam's eyes again, but this time without contrition. "Unlike you, who've given up on trying at all."
Sam crossed the space between them and punched Jack in the face.
Jack went down - back and down like a parody of himself, staged-fight melodrama and Sam turned away with a hiss so as not to see the mess being made of Jack's fur. Jack hit the floor and rolled onto his knees, choking in appreciation or surprise at the sudden violence. "Well. That was something."
"Something-!" Sam turned back, hand a fist again, untrimmed nails hard against the flesh of his palm - "Do you think I've enjoyed this? Living my entire life around-!"
A foreign set of rules. The constant threat of judgement. Jack pushed himself to his feet, pulling each leg under him.
"Around what?" He glanced to the wall, the door, the furnace burning in the centre of the room. As though socialization were as easily swapped out as society, and the change in locale should have made all the difference. "Where is it?"
As though conditioning were that easily displaced. Sam shouted without meaning to. "This isn't the fifty-first century!"
"Yeah?" Jack drew the back of his hand across his mouth. "It's not the twenty-first, either."
...but I do know it's a long way home.
Sam turned away, digging his fisted knuckles against his lips. They were going home - that had been the promise of this entire escapade. And they'd been going home for how many months and through how many worlds, and at the end of the line was waiting... what?
He took a breath. 1974, he'd have vanished in the middle of absolute madness, time dogs and paradoxes and who knew who'd got out alive. 2006, and Jack had said they couldn't make it there, a few years down the line, maybe, when he'd vanished for God knew whatever reason, as though his body'd just disappeared following collision with a car he'd barely glimpsed coming; missing, presumed dead by now. And in the mean time they were here, a dead zone, safe period, where nothing mattered and the universe didn't so much make an exception for him as ignore that he was there. Fitting, really. He'd made such a career of not calling undue attention.
Behind him, Jack was circling in. Not closing the distance, but testing out how close to come. "There's one thing you can't," he was saying, each sound careful. "You can't just - you can't do this. Stay quiet and hope things work out on their own."
Sam turned his head away. How even to begin to respond?
Jack stopped at the edge of his peripheral vision. "Are we good to talk?"
How even to understand the question?
Sam closed his eyes as tight as his fist. "Put - put your bloody trousers on."
A pause, then a dry chuckle at that. Jack turned away. At least you're getting some sort of priorities in order.
By the time Jack was decent - by Sam's standards more than his own - Sam had made his way to a wall and pressed his back into it, crossed his arms, set his jaw and begun staring at the ceiling with such specific focus that he could have been counting the stitches across the seams. Jack moved to stand in front of him, keeping a healthy distance between them, and spread his hands.
He could see Sam's jaw work, watch the fine muscles by the eyes flicker underneath the skin. Sam was trying to decide, most likely, whether to look down or not, whether to acknowledge, whether to risk eye contact and the possibility that words would start up again.
Might as well pre-empt that.
Jack dropped his hands. "I am sorry." But probably not for the things you want me to be.
The flicker of muscles tugged at Sam's upper lip, hinting a sneer or a grimace beneath the façade which tried to hint control. "Really."
He still watched the ceiling. For a moment, Jack watched him.
"You like having your back to a wall," Jack said.
Sam's gaze dropped like a stone, hitting Jack as though he'd just remembered the furnace, the warm brick beneath his shirt. Jack glanced away - harmless, really; - and looked back at him from a tilted head.
"You do, though. Practically, keeping your back to a wall is just a good way to get cornered. Keeps things from sneaking up on you. Also writes out any possibility of escape."
Sam swallowed. "Stop talking."
"You can hit me again, if you want," Jack said. Even if he was aware, and Sam should have been aware, that it was a deflection away from the actual issue - if it served to break the tension, he'd allow it. "Now that I'm dressed."
Sam looked sharply away.
"Or we can pretend that nothing happened." Jack brought a hand up, kneading his thumb into his opposite palm. "It worked after Lusuosa. I guess. Given time-"
"Stop it!"
Jack was just watching him. Sam fought down the urge to cross the room, hit him again - it'd derail the conversation again, even if just for a moment-
"What do you want me to stop?"
Talking. Being. Existing. Anything. Sam tried not to shake his head. He wanted to stop confronting this, being dragged through by the bit. He wanted to stop being made to know how fucked-up all of this was.
...and that was what had put him here, hadn't it? Not here, this world and this situation, though he supposed that was the parallel Jack was trying to draw. Here on this path in the first place, him arguing with Maya, pressing her with Look around you. What use are feelings in this room? And she'd run off on her own and he'd followed and been hit by a car, and then he was in 1973 with Gene demanding he trust his instincts, and then he was here with Jack -
With Jack pushing him to this.
He pushed one hand against his mouth.
What do you all know that I don't?
"I don't want-" he started. He could feel his heart beating in the space below his diaphragm - odd, wasn't that? Annie always brought that out in him, Annie and night terrors, the girl on the test card who was never quite so frightening when he woke up with the sun coming in through his window, and he crouched down to stop the room from spinning before it could start to spin, he ground his fingertips into the dirt floor. This was real, at least by the same standards by which he'd judged 1973 to be real, or any stop on this off-Earth adventure prior to this. Is there grit on your hands? Maybe he was mad. Maybe he was still in a coma, but after this long and this many changes in the rules, he was beginning to doubt there really was a way out.
You can survive this, Jack had said.
He'd failed to mention how.
"I don't want this," he said, and wrenched his head up to look Jack in the eyes. "I don't want to be like this, I don't want this constant-" He tried to laugh. He couldn't. "-self-policing. What do I do, then? Can't shut it off. Not like there's a switch. Am I just supposed to-"
He swallowed. What, give myself over to you?
And would there be anything left of him afterwards?
This was never so much of an issue, in 2006, in 1973. Rather, it was, but no one ever ground his face in it like Jack was doing now. In 1973, in 2006, he could get away, walk out the door, bury himself in work and social camouflage and respectability, and none of that - no way out - existed here.
It was difficult to breathe. "You wouldn't just let me live quietly, would you?"
Jack closed in, just a few steps. He was keeping his breathing soft, his motions subliminal. Nothing to distract, nothing to take away from the words Sam was wrenching out of himself. "You shouldn't have to."
"You're talking about a revolution," Sam said.
"Maybe." Jack eased closer, watching for any sign that Sam would spook. "Maybe the world isn't quite as mean as you grew up thinking it was. Maybe I know a safe space."
"Like this is a safe space," Sam scoffed, edging away. Jack caught the motion and stopped, freezing his approach. "Because nothing here matters?"
Jack held himself still, held his expression neutral. "Would you like it to?"
Would I what?
Sam stood and stepped back, pressing into the wall again. Meaning was inimical; so was meaninglessness. Meaning threatened censure and worse than that, obliteration. Meaningless threatened imprisonment here, at the mercy of Jack's arbitrary attempts to do the right thing, forever. Jack didn't come forward; he stood steady as though his steadiness could push arbitrary reality away.
"I want to go home."
Jack glanced down, flipping the cover on his wrist device. It whittered, and he flipped it closed. "We should be able to, soon. What'll you do once you're there?"
Sam shook his head. "I can't think about this."
"You can." He wouldn't stop. "You do." And for all that, Sam was hanging onto the words in a way that turned his stomach. "A lot more often than you've ever talked to me about it." He was right, was the problem - not in his actions; Sam wasn't prepared to consider that and didn't think he ever would be, but calmly, implacably, Jack wasn't lying. "You were fighting to go home too hard not to know what you were going back to."
He said it, but his voice softened, lost surety. He let the question hang in the air, unsaid.
Weren't you?
After a moment, Jack turned and walked away.
Sam's head snapped up, eyes following him. He hadn't expected that break in equilibrium - he'd expected Jack to stay, prod harder, keep pulling him down the path he was paving, to not let him go until he'd broken (again), and Jack was walking back to the furnace, he was rearranging the jars of tallow, he was leaving his back turned and saying nothing, nothing any more, and Sam took two steps forward despite himself.
He'd known exactly where he was going.
"Jack." The name came out of his throat without touching his teeth, and he forced words out after it. "-it wasn't safe."
Jack half-glanced over his shoulder, as though Sam had commented on the weather or the stitch pattern of the walls. "Hm?" Sam took another cautious two steps forward, slipping the button on one cuff back and forth through its buttonhole.
"It wasn't safe. Living as though-"
One more step, though not quite toward him; toward another part of the furnace, a different pile of clay containers. This conversation wouldn't have been safe; it revealed too much with too little cover, and most of his mind still cried danger.
"-as though anything mattered."
Jack turned to look at him, straight at the eyes, and nodded.
Sam faltered. What do you want from me? Jack was almost inscrutable at the best of times, and this was far from those.
He looked away. Back to the swept dirt again; it remained apathetic when external passions ran too high.
"It wasn't safe to feel. Certainly not to demonstrate feeling anything." He settled into a crouch, knuckles tracing the ground. "You said you'd lived in - various times. You have to have been aware of social, of political and even legal repercussions of... deviation." He glanced away. "Of any sort. There's a certain standard by which people are judged, and any deviation from that standard, be it sex, race, or... could become grounds for censure. Or exclusion. Or reprisal."
They were comforting, those academic terms. They laid out the issue flat and dry, and sounded like bylaws instead of threats. There was nothing inherently pitiable about living one's life by rules, unlike living one's life under threat.
"You weren't in the wrong," Jack said.
Sam snorted. "In what? Doing nothing, or wanting to?"
"Wanting to do nothing or wanting to do something?" Jack put the tallow aside, lacing his fingers together. Sam watched his hands, the net of skin, and had no answer before Jack continued. "Either way, I suppose."
Sam snorted. "It was just wrong."
Jack smiled, sidelong and not terribly amused. "Yeah."
Sam almost started laughing.
He looked up after a bit, searching Jack's face with an expression akin to pain. "What's right?" he asked. "Not this. Not the... exhibition of the people trying to make a statement back home. Not levying everything on social activism, not creating privileged classes for whom this isn't an issue, not pretending the issue doesn't exist. What do you do?" He swallowed. "By your century, what changed?"
Jack glanced to his clasped hands before looking up again. "...I don't know," he admitted. "Social politics of the early-21st century? If I knew too much I'd skirt a paradox."
He tilted his head.
"I imagine there's something to be said for trying, though."
Sam shifted, moving his weight closer as if in spire of himself. "And this is trying?"
"Trying. Making mistakes. Making progress. ...I hope."
"And we'll... what?" Sam took a step closer, crouching down and unconsciously mimicking Jack's pose, fingers laced together. "Conduct a responsible analysis of how we went wrong, tabulate the results..."
"All of which are fancy ways of saying 'put off trying again.'"
"No." This was familiar, suddenly - this was 1973, in a police station shouting down an entire department, arguing through to someone whose bullheadedness put Jack's to shame. This was everything he'd left behind him, and simultaneously everything he'd brought with him to keep himself sane. "It's a way of understanding the issue."
Jack shook his head. "It's not mine."
"It is mine." It was the way he prized, above all else. Jack raised his eyebrows.
"The only way?"
Sam opened his mouth to respond.
Then he closed it. Looked away.
You used to believe in gut feeling, Maya had said. It was true. He'd changed.
"Is yours?"
Maybe he didn't believe that change was pernicious.
...maybe it didn't have to be all-or-nothing.
"After a while it gets difficult to trust what your gut says," he said. After so long reigning it in, police procedure on one side and public opinion on the other, if he could have excised instinct altogether, it might have made things easier. Evidence. Hard to bring to a moral court.
"Yeah, it does." Jack shrugged. "All right. We can tabulate all you want, but in the mean time..." He showed one palm. "Want to make friends with your gut again?"
Sam blinked. It felt as though the ground had shifted, again - as though gravity wasn't quite where he thought it was, but it hadn't pulled him down just yet.
Maybe here, with the dirt hard underfoot and the cold air kept at bay outside the hide walls, it was possible to move forward.
"Yeah," Sam said. "Maybe I do."