Fic: Five people Jack could have fallen in love with but didn't.
TITLE: Five people Jack could have fallen in love with but didn't.
AUTHOR: Mexx
RATING: 15+
FANDOM: Primarily Doctor Who, but touching upon Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and X-Men.
DISCLAIMER: Have invaded a lot of sandboxes -- no copyright infringement intended anywhere, I'm just playing.
SUMMARY: Two years he's forgotten, fucks in alleys and run-down motels, sledging on frozen waves, and six months spent in London in 2006.
PRIMARY PAIRINGS: Jack/Simon, Jack/Faith, Jack/Logan, Jack/Rose, Jack/Mickey (and secretly Jack/Nine).
AN#1: Thank you to my rather fab beta readers taraljc and fan_elune.
AN#2: Don't let the fact that it's a cross-over scare you off, you don't need to be familiar with the shows/comics I've crossed-over with, and there's explanations and pictures and links at the bottom to characters you may not be familiar with.
i. simon.
Jack's twenty-four now, and has been on active duty for pushing three years. He's seen more - travelling through time and space - than he could ever contemplate at the academy, and after two years of group missions and joint-commands, he's finally got his own mission and he wants to impress. 2516, the lost Earth years, on a densely populated, wealthy Terran colony.
The Time Agency is involved in something different. This time it's a little more shady than the assignments Jack is usually sent on, and this one doesn't sit well with him. They're working in conjunction with a different group - not a temporal one, but a static one in the twenty-fifth century. The Blue Sun Corporation have links everywhere, and Jack doesn't want to cross them.
There's a girl. Dark hair and crazy eyes, startled laughs and lilting screams. Jack hears her trying to bend the universe, locking tendrils of herself around the world and time, clawing at him because she knows he doesn't belong. She reminds him of the myth of the Time Lords, but her screams are all too human.
He tries to joke with his colleagues, make conversation, make eye contact, anything. But they are stoic and silent; watch closely as he makes adjustments to the capsule she's in; tamper with the chip that's going to go in her; fall apart inside because he knows that this is wrong, but consoling himself with the knowledge that if it wasn't him it'd be somebody else.
He doesn't know what he's doing. There's a teenage girl trying to bend time around herself, sugarcoat the pain she's being put through and all he does is stop her. Lock too much inside her head. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just a job, he consoles himself. He's not the one putting her through the agony. But it's hardly right, either.
Out of hours, he falls into even shadier crowds. Finds himself in the dirty clubs of Earth's lost years, and drunkenly marvels how his ancestors managed to lose and re-discover an entire planet in a single millenia.
He fucks sly boys and pretty girls, all different shades of vanilla, and once almost talks his way into the bed of a Companion. She has dark hair and ebony eyes, pouted lips and properly proportioned hips. He can tell she recognises he's a player, and almost lets herself be swept away by him anyway. She's craving something dark and dirty, he can see it in her glossy eyes, and when the girl's screams echo round his brain, Jack thinks he's as dark and dirty as you can get.
Three weeks later he fucks the girl's brother and embraces a whole new low.
His name is Simon and he's a doctor. He has nice hands and soft lips, he smells of old money, and two hours before they fuck he is crying for his missing sister. Jack pays little attention. Sucks him off and then fucks him into the soft mattress. It is only when they are laying sweaty and tangled, panting and spent, that Jack joins the dots and curses in Chinese. He's helping to imprision the missing sister. He's one of the corrupt fucks who see her as an experiment, not a girl. He's the one, he decides, that is going to help get her out of there.
He offers Simon all that he knows, but when it comes down to it, his knowledge is worth next to nothing. He's been kept in the dark more than he knew, but eventually poking around the facility, dodging co-workers wearing blue rubber-gloves, pays off; he offers the men Simon has hired what they need to know, and three days later he helps to rescue her.
"Bad Wolf's gonna getcha," she tells him serenely as he helps walk her from one capsule to another. She's dosed up on meds - it's easier to transport unconscious fugitives, and Simon tells him he hopes it'll dull her senses - and he doesn't expect much sense from her. "You can't escape it. You want it. Want them. Bad Wolf and Grandma. Who does that make you, then, Little Red Riding Hood?"
Simon looks at him and offers a wry smile. "My sister might be crazy."
Three days later Jack is recalled to the nearest base. Two years missing in his head, and stationed on a planet in the Nebularth system, Jack remembers nothing of Simon or River or two years of his life spent on Osiris.
--
ii. faith.
He has contacts in all the right places; the guilds, the agencies, the councils. Always two paces ahead of the Time Agency, one step behind the next adventure.
He's found a relic, well, a burnt out piece of crockery that might pass for a relic from a distance. He knows of a little council in the twenty-first century desperately trying to rebuild their fractured front. They'd welcome anything he could throw in their direction, he is sure. His previous contact with this group was a high-pitched, gangly geek. He'd barely had to try and con him, and he'd almost felt bad for the kid. Almost.
This time, a leather clad brunette female emerges from the darkened recess of a doorway in the dirty bar they'd arranged to meet in. Her eyes narrow when she spots him, and she strides over to him. "Harkness?" she barks.
"Yeah, that's me. Captain Jack Harkness, at your service." He gives her his most charming smile, contemplating mixing a little business with pleasure with this one. He's never classed himself as particularly picky, but he does have a fondness for brunette women.
"You got the goods?" She talks all business; but there's a playful twinkle in her eye.
"They're in good hands," he tells her, smirking a little.
"Yeah?" She cocks an eyebrow, settles her arms across her chest. "Well, I'll feel better when they're in my hands."
Jack smirks at her. Says, "I bet a lot of things feel good in your hands."
She laughs throatily at this, his blatant flirting. Her laugh is tinged with something, a darkness. She has a guilt; a pocket of self-loathing. Hard to spot, but not impossible. Jack recognises it because he sees it in the mirror every day when he wonders what he did that must have been so terrible to be erased from his memory.
They engage in (mostly) harmless banter, forgetting temporarily about the relic, and Jack offers her a drink.
He likes her. He normally steers clear of anyone - man, woman or alien - before the twenty-third century, but this woman has an edge about her that he craves; an otherness that rivals his own. She cusses like a Centaurian, assures him she could arm wrestle him under the table, and matches him shot for shot. He vaguely wishes he could take her to the Gynian Outpost in the forty-second century, introduce her to hyper vodka, see if she could stand - or do that thing to his calf that she's doing with her foot - after a couple of shots of that.
They fuck in an alley outside the bar, then twice more in a motel three miles out of town. It's a pay-by-the-hour type of establishment, but Jack charges a full night to his fake credit card. This woman seems a little easy and cheap, but she gives head that rivals a Hoovialith of Sector Seven, circa thirty-eighth century, and he wouldn't mind another round with her come daybreak.
The next morning he thinks he has a cracked rib, and aches in places he never knew he had. She sleeps against him naked, unabashed and sprawled languidly. She chews on her hair and has dark smudges of eyeliner all around her eyes, yet still he finds her intoxicatingly beautiful. Just enough raw energy to keep him on his toes, and just enough darkness to abate his own unknown horrors.
She wakes as his tongue is getting pleasantly acquainted with a tattooed wolf against a full moon on her hip. She flinches and flexes and moans beneath him, and Jack wants to make her scream. She's dark and a little crazy. She reminds him of a girl he doesn't remember ever knowing, and he lets her go because this unnerves him.
--
iii. logan.
After Faith, Jack develops a fondness for the twenty-first century. People are cynical and apathetic; they don't ask many questions. He travels the century and continents, but inexplicably he always finds himself at the beginning, in North America. Here, in another dirty little bar sporting stuffed animal heads on the walls, he meets Logan.
When they meet, Logan is drunk off his ass and tries to pick a fight with Jack. Jack calms him, offers him a drink. The place is crowded, but quiet. They talk and they drink, and their knees brush once too many times under the table to be accidental.
Later, Jack cups his fingers around clenched fists and tells him he thinks he's really hot. The frown lessens, and the man's curiousity is piqued. Jack dips his head and raises the stranger's slowly unclenching fist to his lips, runs his tongue across weathered knuckles. Logan shudders. Jack grins; it's never difficult when it's been awhile.
Logan's eyes darken. "You know what I am?" he growls.
Jack runs his tongue across his lips. He lowers his head a little and looks at Logan benneath lowered lashes. He chuckles.
"I'm pretty indiscriminate."
It's freezing outside, but Logan's hands are hot and rough on his stomach and thighs. The parking lot is empty and when Jack cries out in pleasure it echoes through the cold night air. Jack is embarassingly uncouth when he comes, and runs his hands
desperately against Logan as he jerks him off, moaning incoherently and tangling his fingers in the chain of dog-tags Logan has looped around his neck. When they kiss their teeth clack together, and their hands caress with no semblance of a gentleness that Jack only remembers in the blinkering shadows of a passion-hazed mind.
Afterwards, under the ugly, blinking neon lights, Jack continues to finger the dog-tags, tracing the etched letters and digits.
"Wolverine," he reads, then asks teasingly, "Where'd you get a name like that?"
Logan's heaving breaths abate, and he falls quiet. Blue eyes darken and widen, looking carefully at Jack. Finally he replies,
"It's the only name I'm sure about."
Something in the quiet admission speaks to Jack, an empty hollowness he recognises, an absence of something that should be there but isn't.
--
iv. rose.
When he meets her she's a flirtation, a means to an end. Blonde, pretty, but nothing special. Then she saves his life - in more ways than one - and he gets woven into her beautiful trap of laughter and friendship. He's always been about the chase, the adrenaline rush that comes with new-lust and sex, but she becomes his friend first, and he finds it means something more.
They travel across the universe with the Doctor. Spend months discovering Earth of his past and future, his own time and Rose's, planets with names that Rose struggles in pronouncing but enjoys nonetheless. They discover aliens Jack has never met in all his years of travelling, and often end up consuming spirits that knock even him for six.
Twice they get drunk and Rose kisses him, and twice Jack realises the Doctor would quite possibly kill him if he took advantage. Both times they laugh over it the next day, and agree that telling the Doctor would not be the best idea ever, though Jack sometimes wonders if the Doctor knows anyway.
When Rose almost manages to get herself married off to a lecherous ape on a back-water planet in the middle of nowhere, it is Jack - not the Doctor - that poses as her husband in order to get her out of it. It is Jack who fake-kisses her and pretends to love her enough to challenge the suitor to a duel. It is Jack that finds it difficult (for once) to flirt with Rose for a week after they return to the TARDIS, while the Doctor jokes and plays and laughs with her.
Losing her on a slave colony proves disasterous. She's a crabby, tired mess when they finally find her and barter for her release. She flinches away from their touch, and insists on limping back to the TARDIS barefoot, rather than having one of them carry her. She hasn't been harmed physically, but Jack can't help but worry. He finds himself too concerned about her to wonder when vague affection had morphed into some so deep.
Then the Doctor decides that if Rose is so good at getting into trouble around the natives, perhaps they should go somewhere a little more deserted. He takes them to a planet with an iced-over ocean, lit with a purple hue by constantly shimmering moons and a low, distant sun. A perfect spot for seduction. Instead, Jack spends two days skidding and slipping and skating down the frozen waves with Rose, laughing and joking, and catching her when she falls. The Doctor watches, laughing at the two of them, and Jack is finally comfortable. It's an adventure like all of the others, but something changes.
She gives up on the idea of skiing having fallen over far too many times, and decides to use a sledge. Her laughter echoes across the landscape, bouncing off the icy waves, and Jack discovers that he wants her all over again. It's a different kind of want now, hotter and closer, and when he helps her up, touches her hips and a gasp of laughter escapes her lips, he doesn't want to let her go. "My hero," she whispers, laughing. She gazes adoringly at him, like when they first met, and Jack has to remind himself not to let his hands drift any lower.
He looks past Rose, down the slope of the wave on which they are stood, and finds the Doctor looking up at them, a dark frown on his face; eyes unfathomable orbs, and mouth set in a tight line. Jack shudders, blinks, and looks back towards Rose. The Doctor makes him tense and spiral inside like no one else, and even if things are complicated with Rose, sometimes, when he looks at the Doctor, he knows this need for Rose could be stronger.
With Rose, it's not just about sex, and Jack thinks that might be worse than anything else.
--
v. mickey.
After they leave him, Jack hitch-hikes back to 2005. Finds himself knocking at Mickey Smith's door because he doesn't know where else to go, and the stories he's heard from the Doctor about Rose's mother terrify even him. He's at a loss without Rose and the Doctor - survived far too long before them and now doesn't know what to do with himself without them. He knows they'll turn up here at some point, it's just a case of waiting for them.
Mickey tells him what Rose attempted to do, and he figures out the rest for himself. She would have been powerful, she would have revived him. Mickey tells him they returned to tell himself and Jackie that Rose had survived and the Doctor had changed, but they were safe. Mickey tells him they thought he was dead, and Jack's fears of abandonment abate somewhat, but not completely.
Mickey is reluctantly hospitable. He makes Jack sleep on the couch, but he gives him blankets and pillows to make himself more comfortable. He doesn't so much as put a pizza in the oven for Jack, but he shows him where the Pot Noodles are kept and how to use the microwave. Jack flirts with Tricia, who is bigger and wears more make-up than Rose and her hair - half blonde and half brunette - reminds Jack of a skunk, but she isn't entirely unlikeable. Mickey doesn't speak to him for four days straight for flirting with her, but he doesn't throw him out either.
Jack tells Mickey stories of his adventures, before the Blitz and after, and forgets that even touching on the complicated relationship between himself, the Doctor and Rose is not something that Mickey will want to hear about. Mickey listens anyway, and sometimes Jack wonders if the rapt attention is for him or his stories.
Mickey introduces Jack to all of his friends. Rose's friends too, Jack supposes. Janice. Ian. Danny. Tiffany. Si. Suki. Rob. Scott. Shireen. People who knew Rose. More ties and reminders to her and the Doctor. Enough to keep him hoping. Shireen fawns over him, calls him 'Mickey's handsome American friend', and makes her intentions towards him very clear. She smells like Rose - fruity perfume and expensive make-up and peroxide in a soft, sugary wafts - and that's enough for Jack to flirt back and allow himself to be led back to her flat three drunken weekends in a row. He tries to forget that normally he wouldn't need an excuse to jump into bed with a pretty blonde.
He gets bored with Shireen. She's pretty but she's vapid, and he can never stand to stick around those sort for too long. He begins to spend evenings down the Lamb and Flag with Mickey, learns to enjoy watching football and develops an appreciation and a talent for a game called pool. Waits with Mickey for Rose and the Doctor because he doesn't know what else to do.
One Saturday, after a long afternoon and an even longer evening in the pub, Jack follows Mickey into his bedroom and kisses him. Mickey is small and stunned and tastes of Rose and the TARDIS. He doesn't kiss Jack back, but he doesn't push him away either. The smaller, slight, frame against him reminds him of a kiss he doesn't actually remember, and it jars him. Jack apologises and retreats back to the living room.
The next day, Rose and the Doctor come and find him. Mickey jokes that Jack has shagged half his and Rose's friends. Rose and the Doctor laugh. Mickey won't meet his eyes, like he blames Jack for something he didn't even do, and a feeling of regret glosses his soul like he's done this before, left when he could have stayed.
-- finis.
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Accusations of my insanity? All welcome.
And in case you want a bit more info (with pictures and Wikipedia links) on our guest stars...
Simon Tam, of Joss Whedon's Firefly. A medical researcher and physician of the first caliber, on the lam after breaking his sister River out of a government research facility.
River Tam, of Joss Whedon's Firefly. River was a genius and child prodigy, but suffered from unspecified experimentation at the hands of Alliance doctors. As a result, she is psychotic and almost impossible to communicate with, but still undeniably brilliant.
Faith Lehane, of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A good slayer, then an evil slayer, then a good slayer again. She is pretty so she be forgiven for killing people.
Logan, aka Wolverine, aka James Howlett, of Marvel Comics' X-Men. Has sooper-dooper healing powers, retractable claws that pop out of his knuckles and his skeleton is coated in adamantium. Here be a picture of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in the films, because the idea of yellow lycra is too scary even for Jack.
And one of Jack for the road...
AUTHOR: Mexx
RATING: 15+
FANDOM: Primarily Doctor Who, but touching upon Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and X-Men.
DISCLAIMER: Have invaded a lot of sandboxes -- no copyright infringement intended anywhere, I'm just playing.
SUMMARY: Two years he's forgotten, fucks in alleys and run-down motels, sledging on frozen waves, and six months spent in London in 2006.
PRIMARY PAIRINGS: Jack/Simon, Jack/Faith, Jack/Logan, Jack/Rose, Jack/Mickey (and secretly Jack/Nine).
AN#1: Thank you to my rather fab beta readers taraljc and fan_elune.
AN#2: Don't let the fact that it's a cross-over scare you off, you don't need to be familiar with the shows/comics I've crossed-over with, and there's explanations and pictures and links at the bottom to characters you may not be familiar with.
i. simon.
Jack's twenty-four now, and has been on active duty for pushing three years. He's seen more - travelling through time and space - than he could ever contemplate at the academy, and after two years of group missions and joint-commands, he's finally got his own mission and he wants to impress. 2516, the lost Earth years, on a densely populated, wealthy Terran colony.
The Time Agency is involved in something different. This time it's a little more shady than the assignments Jack is usually sent on, and this one doesn't sit well with him. They're working in conjunction with a different group - not a temporal one, but a static one in the twenty-fifth century. The Blue Sun Corporation have links everywhere, and Jack doesn't want to cross them.
There's a girl. Dark hair and crazy eyes, startled laughs and lilting screams. Jack hears her trying to bend the universe, locking tendrils of herself around the world and time, clawing at him because she knows he doesn't belong. She reminds him of the myth of the Time Lords, but her screams are all too human.
He tries to joke with his colleagues, make conversation, make eye contact, anything. But they are stoic and silent; watch closely as he makes adjustments to the capsule she's in; tamper with the chip that's going to go in her; fall apart inside because he knows that this is wrong, but consoling himself with the knowledge that if it wasn't him it'd be somebody else.
He doesn't know what he's doing. There's a teenage girl trying to bend time around herself, sugarcoat the pain she's being put through and all he does is stop her. Lock too much inside her head. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just a job, he consoles himself. He's not the one putting her through the agony. But it's hardly right, either.
Out of hours, he falls into even shadier crowds. Finds himself in the dirty clubs of Earth's lost years, and drunkenly marvels how his ancestors managed to lose and re-discover an entire planet in a single millenia.
He fucks sly boys and pretty girls, all different shades of vanilla, and once almost talks his way into the bed of a Companion. She has dark hair and ebony eyes, pouted lips and properly proportioned hips. He can tell she recognises he's a player, and almost lets herself be swept away by him anyway. She's craving something dark and dirty, he can see it in her glossy eyes, and when the girl's screams echo round his brain, Jack thinks he's as dark and dirty as you can get.
Three weeks later he fucks the girl's brother and embraces a whole new low.
His name is Simon and he's a doctor. He has nice hands and soft lips, he smells of old money, and two hours before they fuck he is crying for his missing sister. Jack pays little attention. Sucks him off and then fucks him into the soft mattress. It is only when they are laying sweaty and tangled, panting and spent, that Jack joins the dots and curses in Chinese. He's helping to imprision the missing sister. He's one of the corrupt fucks who see her as an experiment, not a girl. He's the one, he decides, that is going to help get her out of there.
He offers Simon all that he knows, but when it comes down to it, his knowledge is worth next to nothing. He's been kept in the dark more than he knew, but eventually poking around the facility, dodging co-workers wearing blue rubber-gloves, pays off; he offers the men Simon has hired what they need to know, and three days later he helps to rescue her.
"Bad Wolf's gonna getcha," she tells him serenely as he helps walk her from one capsule to another. She's dosed up on meds - it's easier to transport unconscious fugitives, and Simon tells him he hopes it'll dull her senses - and he doesn't expect much sense from her. "You can't escape it. You want it. Want them. Bad Wolf and Grandma. Who does that make you, then, Little Red Riding Hood?"
Simon looks at him and offers a wry smile. "My sister might be crazy."
Three days later Jack is recalled to the nearest base. Two years missing in his head, and stationed on a planet in the Nebularth system, Jack remembers nothing of Simon or River or two years of his life spent on Osiris.
--
ii. faith.
He has contacts in all the right places; the guilds, the agencies, the councils. Always two paces ahead of the Time Agency, one step behind the next adventure.
He's found a relic, well, a burnt out piece of crockery that might pass for a relic from a distance. He knows of a little council in the twenty-first century desperately trying to rebuild their fractured front. They'd welcome anything he could throw in their direction, he is sure. His previous contact with this group was a high-pitched, gangly geek. He'd barely had to try and con him, and he'd almost felt bad for the kid. Almost.
This time, a leather clad brunette female emerges from the darkened recess of a doorway in the dirty bar they'd arranged to meet in. Her eyes narrow when she spots him, and she strides over to him. "Harkness?" she barks.
"Yeah, that's me. Captain Jack Harkness, at your service." He gives her his most charming smile, contemplating mixing a little business with pleasure with this one. He's never classed himself as particularly picky, but he does have a fondness for brunette women.
"You got the goods?" She talks all business; but there's a playful twinkle in her eye.
"They're in good hands," he tells her, smirking a little.
"Yeah?" She cocks an eyebrow, settles her arms across her chest. "Well, I'll feel better when they're in my hands."
Jack smirks at her. Says, "I bet a lot of things feel good in your hands."
She laughs throatily at this, his blatant flirting. Her laugh is tinged with something, a darkness. She has a guilt; a pocket of self-loathing. Hard to spot, but not impossible. Jack recognises it because he sees it in the mirror every day when he wonders what he did that must have been so terrible to be erased from his memory.
They engage in (mostly) harmless banter, forgetting temporarily about the relic, and Jack offers her a drink.
He likes her. He normally steers clear of anyone - man, woman or alien - before the twenty-third century, but this woman has an edge about her that he craves; an otherness that rivals his own. She cusses like a Centaurian, assures him she could arm wrestle him under the table, and matches him shot for shot. He vaguely wishes he could take her to the Gynian Outpost in the forty-second century, introduce her to hyper vodka, see if she could stand - or do that thing to his calf that she's doing with her foot - after a couple of shots of that.
They fuck in an alley outside the bar, then twice more in a motel three miles out of town. It's a pay-by-the-hour type of establishment, but Jack charges a full night to his fake credit card. This woman seems a little easy and cheap, but she gives head that rivals a Hoovialith of Sector Seven, circa thirty-eighth century, and he wouldn't mind another round with her come daybreak.
The next morning he thinks he has a cracked rib, and aches in places he never knew he had. She sleeps against him naked, unabashed and sprawled languidly. She chews on her hair and has dark smudges of eyeliner all around her eyes, yet still he finds her intoxicatingly beautiful. Just enough raw energy to keep him on his toes, and just enough darkness to abate his own unknown horrors.
She wakes as his tongue is getting pleasantly acquainted with a tattooed wolf against a full moon on her hip. She flinches and flexes and moans beneath him, and Jack wants to make her scream. She's dark and a little crazy. She reminds him of a girl he doesn't remember ever knowing, and he lets her go because this unnerves him.
--
iii. logan.
After Faith, Jack develops a fondness for the twenty-first century. People are cynical and apathetic; they don't ask many questions. He travels the century and continents, but inexplicably he always finds himself at the beginning, in North America. Here, in another dirty little bar sporting stuffed animal heads on the walls, he meets Logan.
When they meet, Logan is drunk off his ass and tries to pick a fight with Jack. Jack calms him, offers him a drink. The place is crowded, but quiet. They talk and they drink, and their knees brush once too many times under the table to be accidental.
Later, Jack cups his fingers around clenched fists and tells him he thinks he's really hot. The frown lessens, and the man's curiousity is piqued. Jack dips his head and raises the stranger's slowly unclenching fist to his lips, runs his tongue across weathered knuckles. Logan shudders. Jack grins; it's never difficult when it's been awhile.
Logan's eyes darken. "You know what I am?" he growls.
Jack runs his tongue across his lips. He lowers his head a little and looks at Logan benneath lowered lashes. He chuckles.
"I'm pretty indiscriminate."
It's freezing outside, but Logan's hands are hot and rough on his stomach and thighs. The parking lot is empty and when Jack cries out in pleasure it echoes through the cold night air. Jack is embarassingly uncouth when he comes, and runs his hands
desperately against Logan as he jerks him off, moaning incoherently and tangling his fingers in the chain of dog-tags Logan has looped around his neck. When they kiss their teeth clack together, and their hands caress with no semblance of a gentleness that Jack only remembers in the blinkering shadows of a passion-hazed mind.
Afterwards, under the ugly, blinking neon lights, Jack continues to finger the dog-tags, tracing the etched letters and digits.
"Wolverine," he reads, then asks teasingly, "Where'd you get a name like that?"
Logan's heaving breaths abate, and he falls quiet. Blue eyes darken and widen, looking carefully at Jack. Finally he replies,
"It's the only name I'm sure about."
Something in the quiet admission speaks to Jack, an empty hollowness he recognises, an absence of something that should be there but isn't.
--
iv. rose.
When he meets her she's a flirtation, a means to an end. Blonde, pretty, but nothing special. Then she saves his life - in more ways than one - and he gets woven into her beautiful trap of laughter and friendship. He's always been about the chase, the adrenaline rush that comes with new-lust and sex, but she becomes his friend first, and he finds it means something more.
They travel across the universe with the Doctor. Spend months discovering Earth of his past and future, his own time and Rose's, planets with names that Rose struggles in pronouncing but enjoys nonetheless. They discover aliens Jack has never met in all his years of travelling, and often end up consuming spirits that knock even him for six.
Twice they get drunk and Rose kisses him, and twice Jack realises the Doctor would quite possibly kill him if he took advantage. Both times they laugh over it the next day, and agree that telling the Doctor would not be the best idea ever, though Jack sometimes wonders if the Doctor knows anyway.
When Rose almost manages to get herself married off to a lecherous ape on a back-water planet in the middle of nowhere, it is Jack - not the Doctor - that poses as her husband in order to get her out of it. It is Jack who fake-kisses her and pretends to love her enough to challenge the suitor to a duel. It is Jack that finds it difficult (for once) to flirt with Rose for a week after they return to the TARDIS, while the Doctor jokes and plays and laughs with her.
Losing her on a slave colony proves disasterous. She's a crabby, tired mess when they finally find her and barter for her release. She flinches away from their touch, and insists on limping back to the TARDIS barefoot, rather than having one of them carry her. She hasn't been harmed physically, but Jack can't help but worry. He finds himself too concerned about her to wonder when vague affection had morphed into some so deep.
Then the Doctor decides that if Rose is so good at getting into trouble around the natives, perhaps they should go somewhere a little more deserted. He takes them to a planet with an iced-over ocean, lit with a purple hue by constantly shimmering moons and a low, distant sun. A perfect spot for seduction. Instead, Jack spends two days skidding and slipping and skating down the frozen waves with Rose, laughing and joking, and catching her when she falls. The Doctor watches, laughing at the two of them, and Jack is finally comfortable. It's an adventure like all of the others, but something changes.
She gives up on the idea of skiing having fallen over far too many times, and decides to use a sledge. Her laughter echoes across the landscape, bouncing off the icy waves, and Jack discovers that he wants her all over again. It's a different kind of want now, hotter and closer, and when he helps her up, touches her hips and a gasp of laughter escapes her lips, he doesn't want to let her go. "My hero," she whispers, laughing. She gazes adoringly at him, like when they first met, and Jack has to remind himself not to let his hands drift any lower.
He looks past Rose, down the slope of the wave on which they are stood, and finds the Doctor looking up at them, a dark frown on his face; eyes unfathomable orbs, and mouth set in a tight line. Jack shudders, blinks, and looks back towards Rose. The Doctor makes him tense and spiral inside like no one else, and even if things are complicated with Rose, sometimes, when he looks at the Doctor, he knows this need for Rose could be stronger.
With Rose, it's not just about sex, and Jack thinks that might be worse than anything else.
--
v. mickey.
After they leave him, Jack hitch-hikes back to 2005. Finds himself knocking at Mickey Smith's door because he doesn't know where else to go, and the stories he's heard from the Doctor about Rose's mother terrify even him. He's at a loss without Rose and the Doctor - survived far too long before them and now doesn't know what to do with himself without them. He knows they'll turn up here at some point, it's just a case of waiting for them.
Mickey tells him what Rose attempted to do, and he figures out the rest for himself. She would have been powerful, she would have revived him. Mickey tells him they returned to tell himself and Jackie that Rose had survived and the Doctor had changed, but they were safe. Mickey tells him they thought he was dead, and Jack's fears of abandonment abate somewhat, but not completely.
Mickey is reluctantly hospitable. He makes Jack sleep on the couch, but he gives him blankets and pillows to make himself more comfortable. He doesn't so much as put a pizza in the oven for Jack, but he shows him where the Pot Noodles are kept and how to use the microwave. Jack flirts with Tricia, who is bigger and wears more make-up than Rose and her hair - half blonde and half brunette - reminds Jack of a skunk, but she isn't entirely unlikeable. Mickey doesn't speak to him for four days straight for flirting with her, but he doesn't throw him out either.
Jack tells Mickey stories of his adventures, before the Blitz and after, and forgets that even touching on the complicated relationship between himself, the Doctor and Rose is not something that Mickey will want to hear about. Mickey listens anyway, and sometimes Jack wonders if the rapt attention is for him or his stories.
Mickey introduces Jack to all of his friends. Rose's friends too, Jack supposes. Janice. Ian. Danny. Tiffany. Si. Suki. Rob. Scott. Shireen. People who knew Rose. More ties and reminders to her and the Doctor. Enough to keep him hoping. Shireen fawns over him, calls him 'Mickey's handsome American friend', and makes her intentions towards him very clear. She smells like Rose - fruity perfume and expensive make-up and peroxide in a soft, sugary wafts - and that's enough for Jack to flirt back and allow himself to be led back to her flat three drunken weekends in a row. He tries to forget that normally he wouldn't need an excuse to jump into bed with a pretty blonde.
He gets bored with Shireen. She's pretty but she's vapid, and he can never stand to stick around those sort for too long. He begins to spend evenings down the Lamb and Flag with Mickey, learns to enjoy watching football and develops an appreciation and a talent for a game called pool. Waits with Mickey for Rose and the Doctor because he doesn't know what else to do.
One Saturday, after a long afternoon and an even longer evening in the pub, Jack follows Mickey into his bedroom and kisses him. Mickey is small and stunned and tastes of Rose and the TARDIS. He doesn't kiss Jack back, but he doesn't push him away either. The smaller, slight, frame against him reminds him of a kiss he doesn't actually remember, and it jars him. Jack apologises and retreats back to the living room.
The next day, Rose and the Doctor come and find him. Mickey jokes that Jack has shagged half his and Rose's friends. Rose and the Doctor laugh. Mickey won't meet his eyes, like he blames Jack for something he didn't even do, and a feeling of regret glosses his soul like he's done this before, left when he could have stayed.
-- finis.
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Accusations of my insanity? All welcome.
And in case you want a bit more info (with pictures and Wikipedia links) on our guest stars...
Simon Tam, of Joss Whedon's Firefly. A medical researcher and physician of the first caliber, on the lam after breaking his sister River out of a government research facility.
River Tam, of Joss Whedon's Firefly. River was a genius and child prodigy, but suffered from unspecified experimentation at the hands of Alliance doctors. As a result, she is psychotic and almost impossible to communicate with, but still undeniably brilliant.
Faith Lehane, of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A good slayer, then an evil slayer, then a good slayer again. She is pretty so she be forgiven for killing people.
Logan, aka Wolverine, aka James Howlett, of Marvel Comics' X-Men. Has sooper-dooper healing powers, retractable claws that pop out of his knuckles and his skeleton is coated in adamantium. Here be a picture of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in the films, because the idea of yellow lycra is too scary even for Jack.
And one of Jack for the road...