[fic][dp] What Possesses
Title: What Possesses
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke)
Sliding Scale of Slash: Confirmed, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Rating: T/Mostly just angst and vague adult themes
Fandoms: Torchwood; Life On Mars; Final Fantasy VIII
Summary: Late night, coming down.
A/N: Skipping back up the chronology here. This follows after (The World As) A Loaded Gun, but I didn't get it written until now.
Sometimes, not sleeping was an advantage. Sometimes it was just more tiring than it was worth.
Tonight, it was... neither, so far as Jack could tell. No matter how much a career Sam had made of fighting his own body, he still needed to sleep, and that made night a long expanse of attempted neutrality. Nothing for Jack to fight for or argue against, work up the will to do or hold himself back from. Just quiet. Quiet enough for his thoughts to get loud.
Mostly, they were fixed on the theme of What the hell just happened?
In the absence of Sam and his reluctant compliance, or his flung accusations, the instinct he'd been following faded. He was a lot better at tactics than strategy, truth be told.
He pulled up a pelt, wrapped it around himself, and went out into the biting cold. The sky was clear and still enough that Jack thought he could see for miles - could practically make out the curve of the planet against the stars that crowded the sky.
The air stabbed at the corners of his eyes, the ground shoved its chill up through his soles, and Jack resisted the urge to shout invectives at the stars, the wind, and everything. It seemed that he'd dodged a bullet, not that he needed to dodge bullets. Maybe Sam had dodged one. Or maybe this was just that night on the hills after Lusuosa again, both of them astounded at Sam being alive, both of them lying to themselves, ready to lie again in the morning.
Or not. Maybe the bullet had hit. It was getting hard to tell.
Despite living through the tail end of the nineteenth century, most of the twentieth, and the first blush of the twenty-first, the common sense of Jack's childhood and the deep conditioning of his time in the Agency left the preconceptions and prejudices of Sam's era foreign and ridiculous. Jack could remember, when it was called to his attention, the politicization and weaponization of sex in what to him was ancient history, but unless he was paying close attention, it slipped his mind. It was like the incident where he almost got burned for blasphemy after a particular colorful curse - in the 1200s, with the Doctor, with Rose - writ large.
Aside from a wash of oxytocin and a couple other sex-specific hormones, this shouldn't have been different from a tussle or a pitched fight. Except it turned out as different as a neckrub and a savage beating, and Jack desperately needed someone to straighten out his head.
He checked his wrist device, and shut it again. It had a program, a simple scan-and-report, keyed to the signature of the TARDIS or anyone with two hearts, but it was quiet as ever - no matching signals found in spatial or temporal proximity.
Of course, Jack thought. I don't get answers that easily.
The prevailing narrative of Sam's time said this couldn't be fixed, that there was no moving on. But if Sam wasn't planning on sticking around to become a Thorlgard hunter-gatherer, Jack damn well had to find a way to move them both on from it. To his credit, he hoped, he was looking.
Of course he'd run into the Doctor looking for two years of memories. He'd run into Sam looking for the Doctor. If he took it as writ that he'd never find what he was looking for, where did that put him now?
...a long way from home.
Again, he flipped up the cover on his wrist device. The signal from Earth was still there, fluctuating with occasional washes of unidentified interference, but still existing as a beacon against the otherwise empty night. Temptingly close, and impossibly distant. He could have tried to make the jump himself if he hadn't had a sick man in tow. He could have done anything. Pulled off a con, maybe. Stuck it out a while longer, hunting through the universe with all the time in the world.
Instead Sam was sleeping. And he was going to wake up, sooner or later, and drag this whole mess back up with him.
And until then, Jack thought, it was just him, the wind, and the beacon blinking abjectly at the stars.
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke)
Sliding Scale of Slash: Confirmed, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Rating: T/Mostly just angst and vague adult themes
Fandoms: Torchwood; Life On Mars; Final Fantasy VIII
Summary: Late night, coming down.
A/N: Skipping back up the chronology here. This follows after (The World As) A Loaded Gun, but I didn't get it written until now.
Sometimes, not sleeping was an advantage. Sometimes it was just more tiring than it was worth.
Tonight, it was... neither, so far as Jack could tell. No matter how much a career Sam had made of fighting his own body, he still needed to sleep, and that made night a long expanse of attempted neutrality. Nothing for Jack to fight for or argue against, work up the will to do or hold himself back from. Just quiet. Quiet enough for his thoughts to get loud.
Mostly, they were fixed on the theme of What the hell just happened?
In the absence of Sam and his reluctant compliance, or his flung accusations, the instinct he'd been following faded. He was a lot better at tactics than strategy, truth be told.
He pulled up a pelt, wrapped it around himself, and went out into the biting cold. The sky was clear and still enough that Jack thought he could see for miles - could practically make out the curve of the planet against the stars that crowded the sky.
The air stabbed at the corners of his eyes, the ground shoved its chill up through his soles, and Jack resisted the urge to shout invectives at the stars, the wind, and everything. It seemed that he'd dodged a bullet, not that he needed to dodge bullets. Maybe Sam had dodged one. Or maybe this was just that night on the hills after Lusuosa again, both of them astounded at Sam being alive, both of them lying to themselves, ready to lie again in the morning.
Or not. Maybe the bullet had hit. It was getting hard to tell.
Despite living through the tail end of the nineteenth century, most of the twentieth, and the first blush of the twenty-first, the common sense of Jack's childhood and the deep conditioning of his time in the Agency left the preconceptions and prejudices of Sam's era foreign and ridiculous. Jack could remember, when it was called to his attention, the politicization and weaponization of sex in what to him was ancient history, but unless he was paying close attention, it slipped his mind. It was like the incident where he almost got burned for blasphemy after a particular colorful curse - in the 1200s, with the Doctor, with Rose - writ large.
Aside from a wash of oxytocin and a couple other sex-specific hormones, this shouldn't have been different from a tussle or a pitched fight. Except it turned out as different as a neckrub and a savage beating, and Jack desperately needed someone to straighten out his head.
He checked his wrist device, and shut it again. It had a program, a simple scan-and-report, keyed to the signature of the TARDIS or anyone with two hearts, but it was quiet as ever - no matching signals found in spatial or temporal proximity.
Of course, Jack thought. I don't get answers that easily.
The prevailing narrative of Sam's time said this couldn't be fixed, that there was no moving on. But if Sam wasn't planning on sticking around to become a Thorlgard hunter-gatherer, Jack damn well had to find a way to move them both on from it. To his credit, he hoped, he was looking.
Of course he'd run into the Doctor looking for two years of memories. He'd run into Sam looking for the Doctor. If he took it as writ that he'd never find what he was looking for, where did that put him now?
...a long way from home.
Again, he flipped up the cover on his wrist device. The signal from Earth was still there, fluctuating with occasional washes of unidentified interference, but still existing as a beacon against the otherwise empty night. Temptingly close, and impossibly distant. He could have tried to make the jump himself if he hadn't had a sick man in tow. He could have done anything. Pulled off a con, maybe. Stuck it out a while longer, hunting through the universe with all the time in the world.
Instead Sam was sleeping. And he was going to wake up, sooner or later, and drag this whole mess back up with him.
And until then, Jack thought, it was just him, the wind, and the beacon blinking abjectly at the stars.