DW/Torchwood Crossover Fic: Better Men
Title: Better Men
Author: Evilawyer
Rating: PG
Fandoms: Torchwood, Doctor Who (Classic)
Characters: Captain Jack Harkness, Commander Lytton
Time Frame: Torchwood - Post-Children of Time (pre-New Who EoT bar scene, possibly immediately before it --- this could even be a “missing scene” just before that one). Doctor Who - after Resurrection of the Daleks and not long before Attack of the Cybermen. (Precisely how this can be, I cannot explain --- vortex manipulators, maybe?)
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Two ex-Time Agents have a conversation over drinks.
Disclaimer: The characters in this work of fan fiction are the property of the BBC and/or persons affiliated therewith. The writer of this work of fan fiction intends no infringement of any copyrights or trademarks held pursuant to and protected by US or international law, not does she realize or intend to realize any financial profit from this work.
Author's Note: I like the character Stien very much because, among other, more lofty reasons, his “Hello, boys....” line to the Daleks is, to my mind, one of the five best lines ever uttered by any Classic or New Who character other than the Fourth Doctor (who got the most excellent lines). Also, his earring is a nice touch. He doesn't appear here, but he was kind of the motivating force behind this story. Lastly, there is no canonical support for my identification of Lytton as a former Time Agent --- I just made him so.
Lytton stood in the doorway and looked across the room to the bar. Familiar faces in unfamiliar times and places. That, he remembered from his brief stint as a Time Agent, had been the unofficial motto of the Time Agency. He thought it was a revolting little ditty even back then. He pushed it from his mind, walked across the room and sat down next to the man he'd recognize anywhere, even though that man looked somehow broken as he sat nursing his drink.
“Captain Harkness.”
Jack looked up from his drink. “Commander Lytton. What brings you here?” He took a sip of his whiskey.
“On my way to a job.” Lytton signaled the bartender over to order a drink.
Jack waited until the bartender was standing in front of him and Lytton before asking, “So, you're off to kill people for money?”
“Whiskey,” Lytton told the stunned and frightened-looking bartender.
The bartender moved to get Lytton's drink. He quickly put it down on the bar in front of Lytton. “It's on the house,” he said before scurrying away.
Lytton waited until the man was out of earshot before looking at Jack. “You say that as though it's a bad thing.”
“Isn't it?”
“Money is the purest motivator of them all.” Lytton picked up his glass and studied the amber liquid. “When your motivation for doing something is money, there is no right, no wrong, and no need to choose between the two.”
“Same old Lytton,” Jack snorted. “You always were able to keep a clear business head. No wonder the Time Agency liked you so much. Why didn't you stay?”
Lytton sipped at his whiskey. “Our masters at the Agency neither appreciated my skills nor paid me sufficiently for them.”
Jack let out a single laugh. “Used them enough, though, didn't they?”
“Too much,” Lytton muttered.
“You? Thinking that any amount of killing could ever be too much?” Jack grimaced. “What would they think of you back on Rifton V?”
“I neither know nor care,” Lytton responded impassively before taking another sip of his drink.
“Still always in it for yourself, huh, Lytton?” Jack waited for Lytton's confirmation. It never came. “So,” Jack continued when Lytton remained silent, “how've you been keeping yourself busy since the Time Agency went bust?”
Lytton set his glass down on the bar. “Freelance work.”
“Who for?”
“Different groups.”
“Anyone interesting?”
“They're all interesting.”
“They all legit?”
“What is 'legit' according to your definition?”
“Well,” Jack said, then finished his drink. He put the glass down on the bar with a thunk. “Not trying to take over the universe, for starters.” A grim look came over him as he signaled for another whiskey.
Lytton waited for the bartender to deliver Jack's drink and hurry away before responding. “I would think that the ones doing precisely that are the ones most likely to need my services.” Lytton recognized the grimness on Jack's face as a sign of disgust. “You needn't look so disapproving. I'm a business man with a skill to sell, and I sell it to the highest bidder. It's not as though you haven't done the same. As for whether the people I work for are 'legit,' as you put it, I wouldn't know. I don't concern myself with their motives.”
The grimness did not fade from Jack's expression. “Don't you want to know why they hire you? What they're trying to do?”
“I don't care why they hire me. I don't care what their goals are. I care about how much they'll pay me.”
“How you do that? How can you work for pay when you know that you might be helping to do something terrible. Hell, you might be doing terrible things even when you're fighting the good fight. Sometimes you have to do awful things to keep everything from becoming even worse than the things you have to do.” Lytton thought the look Jack gave him was almost pleading. “Don't you ever want to know how the fact that you're killing someone fits into everything?”
“If the awful things I do have to be done regardless, there's not much point to me knowing how it fits into the cosmic scheme.”
Jack grunted, but make no comment. The two sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their drinks, before Jack asked, “Remember Stien?”
“Oh, yes,” Lytton said, voice deep and drawn. A shadow crossed his face. Jack was well-acquainted with that shadow. He saw it every time he looked in the mirror. Not that he looked in the mirror all that much these days.
“Have you seen him lately?”
“A while back. He worked for me on an assignment.”
“So you two kept on working together after the Time Agency fell apart.”
“I always said he was my best right-hand man.” The fact that Jack sat silently staring into his drink instead of spewing out some crude innuendo told Lytton his first impression had been right. Jack Harkness was a broken man.
After a moment, Jack asked, “How is he?”
“Dead.”
Jack nodded slightly. He did not, Lytton noticed, seem surprised. “That does happen,” Jack said then settled himself further back on the seat of his bar stool. “God, I can still see him, the way he'd say 'Hello, boys. Just in time for the fun,' when we'd find ourselves facing down six or seven goons spoiling for a fight.” Jack broke into a laugh. Lytton went so far as to smile.
Jack's laughter trailed off. He took a sip of his drink. “How did he go?”
"Fighting.”
“For you?”
Lytton huffed. “Mercenaries fight for lucre, not each other,” he derided.
“For your customers, then?”
Lytton slowly shook his head. “For himself, I think.”
Jack looked at Lytton with a mixture of doubt and curiosity. “Strange thing for a mercenary to be fighting for, don'cha think?”
“Undoubtedly,” agreed Lytton. He took another sip of his whiskey. “But I think that he couldn't stand the thought of losing himself, whatever that was. He didn't want to live out his life as an unthinking minion of my 'customers.'”
"And that was?”
“The Daleks.”
Jack let out a bark of laughter. “I should have known. Don't tell me, it all ended in a complete bloodbath. Too bad the Doctor wasn't there to give you a hand.”
“The Doctor?” Lytton swiftly turned his head and met Jack's eyes. “He was there. He was, in fact, the reason it ended in, as you say, 'a complete bloodbath.'”
“Yeah? Well,” Jack paused to take a swallow of whiskey, “he usually does turn up whenever there's big bad alien trouble.”
“Well, that's good to know,” Lytton said sarcastically. “I met him then, briefly. He seemed an arrogant, self-righteous sort. Like all Time Lords.”
Jack nodded his head. “He seems like that, yeah. Once I'd have said that he really wasn't, but I don't know anymore. I don't know about a whole lot of things anymore.”
“You surprise me,” Lytton said. “I wouldn't have thought he'd be the type of person you would know even as a passing acquaintance, yet you talk as if you're intimately familiar with him.”
Jack closed his eyes. “Not intimately.”
“Not for lack of your trying, I presume.”
Jack opened his eyes and drank half of the whiskey in his glass. “I wasn't his type.”
If Lytton had possessed a sense of humor, he would have laughed. “When has that ever stopped you? From what I saw, he certainly seemed to be your type.”
Jack looked at Lytton askance. “How's that?”
“He was quite youthful. Blond and vibrant. Exceedingly brave in a dull, pedestrian way, but he was very attractive.”
“He always is, inside and out.”
“And yet you and he never...?”
“No,” Jack said with an unmistakeable air of finality. “The Doctor, when I first met him....He didn't approve of me. He let me travel with him, let me help him, but he never saw past the con man.”
"That sounds like a man who's had bad experiences with people before. One bitten, twice shy.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it was just that, in his mind, he believed that he could change, but nobody else could. Not really change.”
“Sounds like a hard sell.”
“Not completely, because even though he was always thinking of my past, he actually did come to rely on me. Back then, before he regenerated, when he was still the Doctor I first met, I think he wanted to be able to be proud of me, even though I was a con man. So he relied on me. Maybe it was just as Dalek gun stalk fodder, but he relied on me.”
The note Lytton heard in Jack's voice spoke of sorrow, disappointment and betrayal. “And how did you respond to all this reliance?”
“I spent a long time trying to become a better man, someone he'd be proud of. I went through every kind of hell trying to become that.”
“That's important? That the Doctor should be proud of you?” Lytton looked at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “He must be quite the man if his being proud of you is that important to the two of you.”
“It was important,” Jack answered after a long moment. “To me.”
There was a bleak despair in Jack's voice. Lytton had heard that despair before. He had brought that sound out in so many people so many times before. He had heard it in their voices as they begged for mercy, begged to not be killed, to be killed quickly and spared pain, to be killed out of the presence of their spouses and children. He had made so many people beg for so many things during his career, and they all had that same note of bleak despair in their voices as they begged. None of those people's voices had sounded as full of despair as Jack's did. It didn't suit Jack, but he didn't know what to say to break it. He wasn't even sure that, right at that moment, he wanted to. Misery loves company, isn't that how the saying went? Instead of spouting some comforting saying that would have sounded insincere to both of them, he asked, “So, the Doctor makes us better men?”
Jack huffed. “I would have said yes once. A long time ago.” He took a sip of his drink, then held the glass to his forehead. He inhaled, long and deep, then set the glass back down on the bar. “The Doctor is...what he is.” A smile crossed Jack's face. It was almost the blinding smile Lytton had seen Jack use so many times in the past. Almost, but not quite; it didn't touch Jack's eyes. “He comes in,” Jack continued, “makes a big commotion and, when he does that, he makes us want to do and be so many things, all of them good.” He shifted backward on his bar stool and looked at the ceiling. Lytton saw how Jack's throat and jaw muscles worked as though he was trying to hold back tears. Or screams. Lytton didn't mention it; he simply sat and waited until Jack was ready to talk again.
“He's there for moment then...,” Jack made a “poof” gesture as he blew on his fingertips, “he's gone.” He finished his drink, then signaled the bartender for a another. When it came, he looked into its depths as he said, “There are things that the Doctor can't do, things that we can only do for ourselves, that we have to pay a price for. He can't make us better men. We make ourselves better men.”
Lytton said nothing. It was time to go. The Kryons were waiting for him on Telos, hiding from the Cybermen in the ice caves of their own planet. He lifted his glass, drained it, then put it lightly back down on the bar. “See you in Hell, Jack.”
Jack was still. Lytton assumed he'd been too lost in private thoughts to hear. He made to get up and leave but, before he stood up, Jack turned his head to look directly at him. Lytton had never seen a pair of older or sadder eyes. “Yeah,” Jack said with a small laugh that only partially covered the sob that had been fighting to escape from his throat all evening. He lifted his own fresh drink and saluted Lytton with it. “See you in Hell, Lytton.”