Fic: Doppelganger - Chapter 12, "Don't Point a Gun if you Don't Intend to Shoot" [WIP 16/?]
Title: Doppelganger: Chapter 12, "Don't Point a Gun if You Don't Intend to Shoot"
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: John/Ianto, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Alonso, Mickey/Martha, other canon relationships
Rating: R, NC-17 overall
Genre: Timey-wimey Post-CoE eventual fix-it
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood", including characters, concepts, and events, belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russel T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones is searching for someone, and he's willing to risk and give anything if it brings him just one step closer. After materializing on an alternate Earth, the first person he happens upon is the smug and decidedly untrustworthy Captain John Hart, Time Agent. Hart seems to know what's going on in this world, and also knows more about Ianto himself than he's letting on, but most importantly he promises to take Ianto to Torchwood in London where he can continue his desperate search. However, when Hart's vortex manipulator takes them a crucial few months into the future, Ianto finds himself depending on him for much more than just directions . . . but at what cost?
A/N: Thank you _lullabelle_ beta-ing! OMG another missed week. I am getting bad at this aren't I? To be fair I did have my university convocation this week and thus have spent aboooout 28 hours in a car in the past seven days. I used to be so consistent, and now look at me! Pathetic! However! Lots of violence in this chapter. Also ♥Jack♥! Now you forgive me, right?
Chapter 12: Don’t Point a Gun if You Don’t Intend to Shoot
Jones jumps back in surprise at the sharp noise the slot in the door makes when it’s ripped open. A pair of dark eyes peer out at him, shifting back and forth in their sockets suspiciously.
“Who’s that, then?” the man behind the door asks through the slat.
Jones shoulders up close to it, trying to swallow down the awkwardness creeping all over him. Something about talking through a slat in a door.
“They call me ‘Cardiff’,” he tries. Well, why not?
“Do they, now?” the man behind the door says.
He digs for the psychic paper, flashes it at the slat quickly, hoping beyond hope it doesn’t show him anything embarrassing.
“Cardiff Jones,” the man behind the door says, the suspicion draining out of his tone. Does Jones detect a hint of disappointment? “Welcome to London.” He hears the locks on the other side of the door clicking open one by one.
When he steps through, the man behind the door steps back from it, hoisting a large double-handed weapon to his chest. He gives Jones a brisk nod.
“No wonder you go by ‘Cardiff’, mate. What kind of mongoloid fuckin’ woman names her son ‘Jack Jones’? Sounds like a fuckin’ lounge singer.”
Jones swallows a breath of relief.
“So do they call you ‘Liverpool’?” he asks, referring to his accent.
The other man barks out a laugh, looks a little bashful. “They call me ‘Ringo’, actually. So why you here then, Cardiff?”
“Here to see Cormac Scully,” Jones replies. He realizes he’s already taking a liking to Ringo, too. He wishes he’d have gotten the chav’s name.
“Scully’s busy, mate. You should know that.” His eyes scrunch up, bushy brows shadowing his hazel eyes. Hairy, but potentially handsome.
“He’ll make time for me,” Jones bluffs.
“Oh? And what makes you so sure about that?” Ringo steps in front of him, blocking his way down the narrow hallway that leads into the bowels of the building.
“Got information about the Time Agency he’ll want to hear,” Jones says, the lie spilling out of him before he even has a chance to concoct it.
“The Time Agency?” Ringo scoffs. “What’re you on about? They disbanded years ago.”
“Really? That’s strange, because I just ran into a man named Harper with a vortex manipulator who was saying some pretty interesting things.” Everything he’s heard and seen in the 51st century so far gets smashed together, comes out in a garbled story that he hopes makes just enough sense to sound possible, to make him seem native.
“James Harper?” Ringo replies, eyes huge. “The James Harper?”
“Got your interest now, do I?” Jones replies, trying to hide his own reaction to Harper’s apparent notoriety.
“But he . . . what the hell’s he got to do with us?” The cogs are spinning in Ringo’s rattrap brain, Jones can see it. He looks scared shitless.
“You need to bring me to Scully,” Jones warns.
“Right,” Ringo says, head bobbing. “Right.” He turns; starts to march down the long hallway.
Better liar than John gives him credit for, is Jones.
He’s lead through a network of hallways, apartments with doors pulled off their hinges. Inside, he sees men and women: grimy, dressed in a hodgepodge of military surplus clothing. They’re cleaning guns, discussing plans, making kitchen-sink bombs. Sometimes they look over their shoulders at him as he and Ringo pass, but most of the time they go about their business. So John was wrong, then. Hardly a “civil rights activist” or a “saint”. A revolutionary, more like it. A terrorist, if you wanted to be particularly unflattering. Jones knows firsthand how nebulous the line between a freedom fighter and terrorist can be: he remembers the propaganda against the Preachers, back in the days when Lumic was in control.
In another life, he could have been a member of this army. Just Ianto Jones, not ‘Jack’ or ‘Cardiff’. He could have gotten along with them, if Ringo and the chav are any indication. Could have made a respectable life here. But not now. Not this life. Now, he is here to bring all of this down. Ringo casts a look over one shoulder and Jones affords him a small smile. I’m so sorry, but I am here to take everything that matters to you, because it’s between everything that matters to you and everything that matters to me. Guilt coils in his gut.
They’ve reached a flight of stairs flanked by two guards, a woman and a man, both heavily armed, both sizing Jones up. They’ll come running as soon as they hear the shots. Three dead bodies at least, then. Four, if Ringo accompanies him up. God knows how many more if he has to fight his way out of here. He hopes John has some plan for retrieving him from this mess.
“He’s here to see Scully,” Ringo vouches. “I’ll take him up.”
The soldiers stand aside.
Four bodies.
When they reach the top of the stairs, they are faced with a single steel door; probably leading to what was once the block’s common room back when it served as a block of flats. Ringo knocks three times in perfect rhythm and a voice calls to him from inside, “Come in!”
There’s a buzz and the door swings open mechanically. So there are some technological advances here, Jones notes. Good to know for later.
The room is, as Jones suspected, a former common room: an expansive open space, now filled floor to wall with computers and wires and screens that show some futuristic version of radar, CCTV, and television broadcast monitoring. A war room. In the center of it all sits a person whom Jones assumes is Scully, slumped in a reclining leather chair with his back to the entrance, arms thrown out over the armrests.
“Sir, there’s a Cardiff-er, Jack Jones-to see you. Says he has information on James Harper.”
The chair Scully’s sitting in whirls around on its base, and Scully leaps to his feet in front of them, body language like a caged animal.
“Who the hell is Jack Jones?” he snarls. Well, that went as well as expected.
He’s malnourished and exhausted looking, but he has a charismatic face that didn’t come through in the picture on the hologram. Keen eyes. Jones doesn’t suppose the psychic paper will be of much use now.
“Sir, he had-” Ringo gulps, scrambling to defend himself. “He had an ID. Says he’s one of us.”
“I bet he did. If he’s on talking terms with Harper I bet he has a lot of useful IDs. Psychic paper, right?”
Dropped the wrong name, apparently. Jones pulls his gun, swings it onto Ringo, aiming it at his chest. His hands are slippery on top of each other, and hot. He feels his heart throbbing, feels his heartbeat thumping in his hands. He doesn’t want to shoot. He’s not going to shoot. He’s not going to kill Ringo, with his stupid nickname and his bushy eyebrows and his boyish jaw and his aw-shucks mannerisms. He’s not going to kill Ringo. He’s going to get him to drop his weapon, and then he’s going to tell him to back out of the room slowly. He’ll work out what to do from there.
“He’s working for the fucking Hive!” Scully says, his tone black.
And if they can get me, they can get the Hive. That happens? Even if Scully dies, I’ve failed. Hart’s words.
Jones fires the gun.
Ringo looks surprised. His hands clutch at his chest. Blood gushes between his fingers hot dark red. His mouth makes a little ‘o’ shape, like he’s disappointed in Jones, like he’s surprised and disappointed, like he wants to say ‘You’ve shot me and I expected better of you!’ His lower lip juts out like he’s going to pout, but then blood just burbles out over it. He topples forward.
Jones turns the gun on Scully, now.
“Those security doors have automatic locks, I take it?” he asks. His voice wavers. “Use them.”
“Or what?” Scully asks. He is pointedly not looking at Ringo’s body sprawled on the floor by the door, the blood spreading out to Jones’ feet, which Jones can see in his peripheral vision.
“Or I’ll kill you,” Jones replies, shaking the gun. His whole body is thrumming with adrenaline, with need, with arousal, with urgency, with addiction, with want. Something in him is saying kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him and his hand on the gun, his finger on the trigger, is shivering with delight, with anticipation, with possibility.
“Or you’ll kill me?” Scully asks. He’s not afraid at all. He just watches Jones with those keen eyes and a gentle smile, so fucking charismatic. “Aren’t you intending on doing that regardless?”
“You have no idea what I’m intending,” Jones grits out. Kill him kill him kill him kill him his own mind urges him, and he reaches out with the arm not holding the gun, clasping his own wrist as if to pull himself off the mark. But he can’t. He can’t do anything but what he’s told. Ringo is dead. “Please. Just lock the door. You have to help me. This isn’t what it looks like. I’m not . . . I’m not with the Hive.” Desperate, now. Last ditch effort. The word that opens all doors, the mantra. “I’m Torchwood. Torchwood, you hear me?”
The gun fires.
“Do you suppose we’ll call it ‘Hub 4’ or go back to calling it just ‘The Hub’ again?” asks Martha.
“Or ‘Hub Classic’?” Mickey ribs. “What d’you think, mate?” he asks Ianto Jones’ body, wheeling the trolley through the new cog door.
(“Manufactured in Poland” is stamped into its surface. Sign of the times, Mickey supposes).
When they get inside, things look about eighty percent complete. There’s still a lot of construction dust, no furniture yet and lots of yawning space where he assumes glass or drywalling will eventually be, but the complex is definitely taking shape.
“Which way?” he asks Martha.
She doesn’t reply.
“Oi!” he calls to her, where she’s stopped stock still a few steps ahead. “Which way?”
She turns her head back at him, her eyes huge, her lips firmed up into a hard line. He leaves the trolley to dash to her side.
There’s a man standing in the main area of the hub with his back to them. He has his hands on his hips, and his neck is craned to stare up the three storeys to the ceiling of the space. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that they’ve come in. The pair of them draw their pistols. Mickey signals her to hold her position.
“Put your hands behind your head,” he commands. “And turn around so we can see your face.”
The man starts, bouncing a little in place, but his hands do rise to his head, slow and steady.
“No funny business. One wrong move and I will shoot you in the spine, you understand?”
Martha cuts her eyes at him, then turns to the man standing in front of them with his hands folded over the nape of his neck.
“Listen,” she says, pleading, her voice sensible but firm. “We’re Torchwood. This is-well, that is-how did you get in here? Who are you?”
“You’re Torchwood?” the man asks. He still hasn’t turned. “But he said you were all dead.”
Mickey snorts. “Who said that? Because he’s an idiot. We’re harder to kill than all that.”
“Who’re you calling an idiot?”
It’s not the man ahead of them who says it. A second intruder, then: this one with an American accent. But it can’t be. But then it is. He wanders out of a corridor, looking no different from the last time Mickey saw him, wearing the same coat and insufferable smile.
“Mickey Mouse!” he greets. “And Martha Jones! You’re Torchwood?”
“Jack!” Martha gasps, although it comes out an inch away from a sob. She lowers her gun, obviously fighting the urge to run to him. Mickey keeps his gun on the intruder, whose hands are still on his neck.
“That’s ‘Martha Smith’ to you, Captain Cheesecake,” he says. He’s so angry, so betrayed, so sad, so excited, so giddy. He wants to run into Jack’s arms like a little boy, like he imagines boys do to their dads. He’s already lowering his gun.
“Martha Smith?” Jack gasps, scandalized. “You didn’t!”
“I did,” Mickey replies. “And yeah we’re Torchwood. Gwen recruited us. She couldn’t very well run it on her own after you ran out on her, could she?”
The man between them, with his hands on the back of his neck, clears his throat. “Can I, uh,-Jack, can I put my hands down now?”
“Oh, go on,” Martha says, exasperated.
He drops his arms, jogs to stand at Jack’s side. He’s young and scrawny, big-eared. He looks silly next to Jack.
“Who’s this, then, Jack?” Martha asks, nodding toward the young man. Her tone is good humoured. Her body wavers back and forth on her legs, as though she’s a magnet repelled. Mickey reaches out for her hand, and she takes it.
“Oh, I’ve been travelling with him,” Jack replies, dismissively.
“He’s not!” Mickey bursts. “But those ears, not again!”
It makes sense though, doesn’t it? A huge tragedy-who else would he go to, out in space, but the Doctor? To take him far away, help him to forget. Who knows how far they’ve gone or for how long. They’d had their suspicions about the Doctor the last time they saw him, that he was about to change. Mickey wasn’t expecting such an awkward form.
“Oh, oh, oh no. No. No.” Jack bursts, interrupting Mickey’s train of thought. “This is Alonso. Alonso Frame. Human. Well, near-human. Human-enough.”
Mickey feels Martha’s hand slipping from his own.
“Oh, Jack,” she says. She walks forward into his arms, falling against his chest. “How could you?” But it isn’t an accusation, just a sad, sorry question.
In the back of his mind, Mickey remembers Ianto Jones on his sad trolley, just round the corner where he left him. He wonders to himself just how mad at Jack Harkness he really is.
Go to Chapter 13: "Blood"
View the Masterlist for full chapter list and complete header info.
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: John/Ianto, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Alonso, Mickey/Martha, other canon relationships
Rating: R, NC-17 overall
Genre: Timey-wimey Post-CoE eventual fix-it
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood", including characters, concepts, and events, belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russel T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones is searching for someone, and he's willing to risk and give anything if it brings him just one step closer. After materializing on an alternate Earth, the first person he happens upon is the smug and decidedly untrustworthy Captain John Hart, Time Agent. Hart seems to know what's going on in this world, and also knows more about Ianto himself than he's letting on, but most importantly he promises to take Ianto to Torchwood in London where he can continue his desperate search. However, when Hart's vortex manipulator takes them a crucial few months into the future, Ianto finds himself depending on him for much more than just directions . . . but at what cost?
A/N: Thank you _lullabelle_ beta-ing! OMG another missed week. I am getting bad at this aren't I? To be fair I did have my university convocation this week and thus have spent aboooout 28 hours in a car in the past seven days. I used to be so consistent, and now look at me! Pathetic! However! Lots of violence in this chapter. Also ♥Jack♥! Now you forgive me, right?
Chapter 12: Don’t Point a Gun if You Don’t Intend to Shoot
Jones jumps back in surprise at the sharp noise the slot in the door makes when it’s ripped open. A pair of dark eyes peer out at him, shifting back and forth in their sockets suspiciously.
“Who’s that, then?” the man behind the door asks through the slat.
Jones shoulders up close to it, trying to swallow down the awkwardness creeping all over him. Something about talking through a slat in a door.
“They call me ‘Cardiff’,” he tries. Well, why not?
“Do they, now?” the man behind the door says.
He digs for the psychic paper, flashes it at the slat quickly, hoping beyond hope it doesn’t show him anything embarrassing.
“Cardiff Jones,” the man behind the door says, the suspicion draining out of his tone. Does Jones detect a hint of disappointment? “Welcome to London.” He hears the locks on the other side of the door clicking open one by one.
When he steps through, the man behind the door steps back from it, hoisting a large double-handed weapon to his chest. He gives Jones a brisk nod.
“No wonder you go by ‘Cardiff’, mate. What kind of mongoloid fuckin’ woman names her son ‘Jack Jones’? Sounds like a fuckin’ lounge singer.”
Jones swallows a breath of relief.
“So do they call you ‘Liverpool’?” he asks, referring to his accent.
The other man barks out a laugh, looks a little bashful. “They call me ‘Ringo’, actually. So why you here then, Cardiff?”
“Here to see Cormac Scully,” Jones replies. He realizes he’s already taking a liking to Ringo, too. He wishes he’d have gotten the chav’s name.
“Scully’s busy, mate. You should know that.” His eyes scrunch up, bushy brows shadowing his hazel eyes. Hairy, but potentially handsome.
“He’ll make time for me,” Jones bluffs.
“Oh? And what makes you so sure about that?” Ringo steps in front of him, blocking his way down the narrow hallway that leads into the bowels of the building.
“Got information about the Time Agency he’ll want to hear,” Jones says, the lie spilling out of him before he even has a chance to concoct it.
“The Time Agency?” Ringo scoffs. “What’re you on about? They disbanded years ago.”
“Really? That’s strange, because I just ran into a man named Harper with a vortex manipulator who was saying some pretty interesting things.” Everything he’s heard and seen in the 51st century so far gets smashed together, comes out in a garbled story that he hopes makes just enough sense to sound possible, to make him seem native.
“James Harper?” Ringo replies, eyes huge. “The James Harper?”
“Got your interest now, do I?” Jones replies, trying to hide his own reaction to Harper’s apparent notoriety.
“But he . . . what the hell’s he got to do with us?” The cogs are spinning in Ringo’s rattrap brain, Jones can see it. He looks scared shitless.
“You need to bring me to Scully,” Jones warns.
“Right,” Ringo says, head bobbing. “Right.” He turns; starts to march down the long hallway.
Better liar than John gives him credit for, is Jones.
He’s lead through a network of hallways, apartments with doors pulled off their hinges. Inside, he sees men and women: grimy, dressed in a hodgepodge of military surplus clothing. They’re cleaning guns, discussing plans, making kitchen-sink bombs. Sometimes they look over their shoulders at him as he and Ringo pass, but most of the time they go about their business. So John was wrong, then. Hardly a “civil rights activist” or a “saint”. A revolutionary, more like it. A terrorist, if you wanted to be particularly unflattering. Jones knows firsthand how nebulous the line between a freedom fighter and terrorist can be: he remembers the propaganda against the Preachers, back in the days when Lumic was in control.
In another life, he could have been a member of this army. Just Ianto Jones, not ‘Jack’ or ‘Cardiff’. He could have gotten along with them, if Ringo and the chav are any indication. Could have made a respectable life here. But not now. Not this life. Now, he is here to bring all of this down. Ringo casts a look over one shoulder and Jones affords him a small smile. I’m so sorry, but I am here to take everything that matters to you, because it’s between everything that matters to you and everything that matters to me. Guilt coils in his gut.
They’ve reached a flight of stairs flanked by two guards, a woman and a man, both heavily armed, both sizing Jones up. They’ll come running as soon as they hear the shots. Three dead bodies at least, then. Four, if Ringo accompanies him up. God knows how many more if he has to fight his way out of here. He hopes John has some plan for retrieving him from this mess.
“He’s here to see Scully,” Ringo vouches. “I’ll take him up.”
The soldiers stand aside.
Four bodies.
When they reach the top of the stairs, they are faced with a single steel door; probably leading to what was once the block’s common room back when it served as a block of flats. Ringo knocks three times in perfect rhythm and a voice calls to him from inside, “Come in!”
There’s a buzz and the door swings open mechanically. So there are some technological advances here, Jones notes. Good to know for later.
The room is, as Jones suspected, a former common room: an expansive open space, now filled floor to wall with computers and wires and screens that show some futuristic version of radar, CCTV, and television broadcast monitoring. A war room. In the center of it all sits a person whom Jones assumes is Scully, slumped in a reclining leather chair with his back to the entrance, arms thrown out over the armrests.
“Sir, there’s a Cardiff-er, Jack Jones-to see you. Says he has information on James Harper.”
The chair Scully’s sitting in whirls around on its base, and Scully leaps to his feet in front of them, body language like a caged animal.
“Who the hell is Jack Jones?” he snarls. Well, that went as well as expected.
He’s malnourished and exhausted looking, but he has a charismatic face that didn’t come through in the picture on the hologram. Keen eyes. Jones doesn’t suppose the psychic paper will be of much use now.
“Sir, he had-” Ringo gulps, scrambling to defend himself. “He had an ID. Says he’s one of us.”
“I bet he did. If he’s on talking terms with Harper I bet he has a lot of useful IDs. Psychic paper, right?”
Dropped the wrong name, apparently. Jones pulls his gun, swings it onto Ringo, aiming it at his chest. His hands are slippery on top of each other, and hot. He feels his heart throbbing, feels his heartbeat thumping in his hands. He doesn’t want to shoot. He’s not going to shoot. He’s not going to kill Ringo, with his stupid nickname and his bushy eyebrows and his boyish jaw and his aw-shucks mannerisms. He’s not going to kill Ringo. He’s going to get him to drop his weapon, and then he’s going to tell him to back out of the room slowly. He’ll work out what to do from there.
“He’s working for the fucking Hive!” Scully says, his tone black.
And if they can get me, they can get the Hive. That happens? Even if Scully dies, I’ve failed. Hart’s words.
Jones fires the gun.
Ringo looks surprised. His hands clutch at his chest. Blood gushes between his fingers hot dark red. His mouth makes a little ‘o’ shape, like he’s disappointed in Jones, like he’s surprised and disappointed, like he wants to say ‘You’ve shot me and I expected better of you!’ His lower lip juts out like he’s going to pout, but then blood just burbles out over it. He topples forward.
Jones turns the gun on Scully, now.
“Those security doors have automatic locks, I take it?” he asks. His voice wavers. “Use them.”
“Or what?” Scully asks. He is pointedly not looking at Ringo’s body sprawled on the floor by the door, the blood spreading out to Jones’ feet, which Jones can see in his peripheral vision.
“Or I’ll kill you,” Jones replies, shaking the gun. His whole body is thrumming with adrenaline, with need, with arousal, with urgency, with addiction, with want. Something in him is saying kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him and his hand on the gun, his finger on the trigger, is shivering with delight, with anticipation, with possibility.
“Or you’ll kill me?” Scully asks. He’s not afraid at all. He just watches Jones with those keen eyes and a gentle smile, so fucking charismatic. “Aren’t you intending on doing that regardless?”
“You have no idea what I’m intending,” Jones grits out. Kill him kill him kill him kill him his own mind urges him, and he reaches out with the arm not holding the gun, clasping his own wrist as if to pull himself off the mark. But he can’t. He can’t do anything but what he’s told. Ringo is dead. “Please. Just lock the door. You have to help me. This isn’t what it looks like. I’m not . . . I’m not with the Hive.” Desperate, now. Last ditch effort. The word that opens all doors, the mantra. “I’m Torchwood. Torchwood, you hear me?”
The gun fires.
“Do you suppose we’ll call it ‘Hub 4’ or go back to calling it just ‘The Hub’ again?” asks Martha.
“Or ‘Hub Classic’?” Mickey ribs. “What d’you think, mate?” he asks Ianto Jones’ body, wheeling the trolley through the new cog door.
(“Manufactured in Poland” is stamped into its surface. Sign of the times, Mickey supposes).
When they get inside, things look about eighty percent complete. There’s still a lot of construction dust, no furniture yet and lots of yawning space where he assumes glass or drywalling will eventually be, but the complex is definitely taking shape.
“Which way?” he asks Martha.
She doesn’t reply.
“Oi!” he calls to her, where she’s stopped stock still a few steps ahead. “Which way?”
She turns her head back at him, her eyes huge, her lips firmed up into a hard line. He leaves the trolley to dash to her side.
There’s a man standing in the main area of the hub with his back to them. He has his hands on his hips, and his neck is craned to stare up the three storeys to the ceiling of the space. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that they’ve come in. The pair of them draw their pistols. Mickey signals her to hold her position.
“Put your hands behind your head,” he commands. “And turn around so we can see your face.”
The man starts, bouncing a little in place, but his hands do rise to his head, slow and steady.
“No funny business. One wrong move and I will shoot you in the spine, you understand?”
Martha cuts her eyes at him, then turns to the man standing in front of them with his hands folded over the nape of his neck.
“Listen,” she says, pleading, her voice sensible but firm. “We’re Torchwood. This is-well, that is-how did you get in here? Who are you?”
“You’re Torchwood?” the man asks. He still hasn’t turned. “But he said you were all dead.”
Mickey snorts. “Who said that? Because he’s an idiot. We’re harder to kill than all that.”
“Who’re you calling an idiot?”
It’s not the man ahead of them who says it. A second intruder, then: this one with an American accent. But it can’t be. But then it is. He wanders out of a corridor, looking no different from the last time Mickey saw him, wearing the same coat and insufferable smile.
“Mickey Mouse!” he greets. “And Martha Jones! You’re Torchwood?”
“Jack!” Martha gasps, although it comes out an inch away from a sob. She lowers her gun, obviously fighting the urge to run to him. Mickey keeps his gun on the intruder, whose hands are still on his neck.
“That’s ‘Martha Smith’ to you, Captain Cheesecake,” he says. He’s so angry, so betrayed, so sad, so excited, so giddy. He wants to run into Jack’s arms like a little boy, like he imagines boys do to their dads. He’s already lowering his gun.
“Martha Smith?” Jack gasps, scandalized. “You didn’t!”
“I did,” Mickey replies. “And yeah we’re Torchwood. Gwen recruited us. She couldn’t very well run it on her own after you ran out on her, could she?”
The man between them, with his hands on the back of his neck, clears his throat. “Can I, uh,-Jack, can I put my hands down now?”
“Oh, go on,” Martha says, exasperated.
He drops his arms, jogs to stand at Jack’s side. He’s young and scrawny, big-eared. He looks silly next to Jack.
“Who’s this, then, Jack?” Martha asks, nodding toward the young man. Her tone is good humoured. Her body wavers back and forth on her legs, as though she’s a magnet repelled. Mickey reaches out for her hand, and she takes it.
“Oh, I’ve been travelling with him,” Jack replies, dismissively.
“He’s not!” Mickey bursts. “But those ears, not again!”
It makes sense though, doesn’t it? A huge tragedy-who else would he go to, out in space, but the Doctor? To take him far away, help him to forget. Who knows how far they’ve gone or for how long. They’d had their suspicions about the Doctor the last time they saw him, that he was about to change. Mickey wasn’t expecting such an awkward form.
“Oh, oh, oh no. No. No.” Jack bursts, interrupting Mickey’s train of thought. “This is Alonso. Alonso Frame. Human. Well, near-human. Human-enough.”
Mickey feels Martha’s hand slipping from his own.
“Oh, Jack,” she says. She walks forward into his arms, falling against his chest. “How could you?” But it isn’t an accusation, just a sad, sorry question.
In the back of his mind, Mickey remembers Ianto Jones on his sad trolley, just round the corner where he left him. He wonders to himself just how mad at Jack Harkness he really is.
Go to Chapter 13: "Blood"
View the Masterlist for full chapter list and complete header info.