i thought i was supposed to be accepting my emotions? well, my emotion is that i'm sorry.
I will talk about stuffs eventually, but not tonight, because it's almost 4am and I stayed up finishing this and and and I AM GOING TO DIE.
Title: To The End
Fandom: Torchwood/Regeneration
Summary: An AU, based around the events of To The Last Man.
Warnings: This is basically as tame as anything, but it is a crossover, so. I’ve tried to make it understandable for anyone who hasn’t read Regeneration, but may have failed entirely. WHATEVERS. Also there’s a bit of swearing? Occasionally?
A/N: For strangeumbrella 's birthday! ILU MADDIE. This is a bit late, but I haven’t finished anything since February and have been really struggling to write for quite a while. But here it is, thank god, and I hope you get something out of it at least.
Here is a funny joke Jack Harkness knows: a man walks into a bar. He knows Jack’s name, and Jack has no idea who he is.
Ha, ha, ha.
+
“A frozen soldier,” Gwen spits, half-laughing. “A frozen soldier from the first world war?”
“Yep,” Ianto replies, quite needlessly, but he’s got the beginnings of a silly grin on his face and, as she follows Jack out into the main room of the hub, Gwen also notices that Toshiko is wearing a dress. Owen, even, seems to have something of a spring in his step; and when he turns away from the medical equipment, the buttons of his smartly ironed shirt catch the light.
“Well,” Gwen mutters. “This is weird.”
They’re all following Jack to the far wall, now, that houses the ceiling-to-floor cryonic chambers which themselves store all the little bits and bats Torchwood just can’t seem to get rid of. The Secret Organisation equivalent of cardboard boxes in the loft, Ianto sometimes says, but the thought of being locked inside one for ninety years makes Gwen’s stomach go over - it’s a longer stretch of time than she can even really picture. Jack’s saying something like, “we wake him up once a year,” which knocks her out of her reverie.
“Once a year? Why?”
“Check he still works,” Ianto chips in, now inexplicably mounting the stairs with a camera in his hands, and then suddenly one of the drawers is no longer a space on the wall but a person, and Gwen can’t take her eyes off the man lying comatose in front of her, Owen’s ¬fingertips feeling for a pulse on his neck. The man in question is pale, thin, fair-haired; young-looking, but with a face she can’t help thinking of as somehow proud, even as expressionless and as unconscious as it is right now.
While Owen lifts a syringe full of blue liquid to the soldier’s neck, Jack says, “Gwen Cooper, meet Lieutenant William Prior,” and it is then that Prior sits up with a shout.
+
The first time Jack Harkness encountered Torchwood’s new, frozen pet turned out to be several years after it had actually arrived; between assignments, conscription and one especially nasty death, their meeting somehow did not occur until 1921. The first thing Prior ever heard Jack say was, “You.” Understandably, with his current situation taken into account - which is to say that he was hunched in, shivering and half-naked on a metal tray - it was quite difficult even for Prior to think of a witty retort.
After a few long moments spent getting his breath back, feeling that still-unfamiliar sensation of his heart readjusting to its rhythm, he settled for, “Were you expecting somebody else?”
“We weren’t,” murmured the dark-haired woman holding a stethoscope to Prior’s back. Cheefully, but with a hint of real sternness just beneath the surface, she added, “Don’t act up, Harkness.”
“You don’t recognise me?” Jack said, still staring intently, frowning a little with the odd, posterboy face of his that would soon become as familiar to Prior as the back of his own hand. But then, neither of them could have known that yet.
Prior blinked. “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” he said, then, as an afterthought, and almost unconsciously, “I would have remembered.”
Slowly, the tight line of Jack’s lips tipped into a grin.
Three hours after their odd ‘hello’, and each holding a scotch in spite of the time of day, Jack Harkness and Billy Prior were slumped on the lumpy couch outside the door to the storage bay.
“All I’m trying to say,” Prior continued, “is that it’s dangerous here. Over the last three days, I don’t think I’ve woken up once to see exactly the same group of people who last put me to sleep. And none of them were of retiring age, exactly.”
Jack shrugged evasively and said, “Yes, but I still say it’s fairly likely that I’ll be here next year, anyway. Tomorrow. You know what I mean.”
Prior didn’t ask how; he just lifted and dropped his skinny shoulders in a display of apparent disinterest, and then changed the subject. He’d seen denial like this at the front, God complexes, the odd Officer who’d gotten lucky enough times to have gained a reputation and was stupid enough to believe it. Every now and then, if you lived long enough yourself, you were bound to run into the odd man who thought of himself as somehow immortal - but it was a poor coping mechanism. He shook Jack’s hand, at the end of the day, and his grip was tight. He wasn’t expecting to see him again.
In 1922, the first thing Prior saw upon awaking was Jack Harkness’ face, and the first thing he said was, “Still alive, I see. Well done you.” But the brunette with the cold stethoscope and the gentle touch was gone.
+
There’s something intense about his gaze. Gwen can’t think of any better way to describe it, descending further with each attempt into the realms of the very worst Mills & Boon, but it’s true. There is. Just being looked at by him gives her this horrible sensation, like somehow he’s seeing all her most secret secrets and, worse than that, she’s beginning to feel distinctly underdressed beside her spruced up teammates. A man from the past, kept alive for ninety years by a gigantic freezer? Fine. Gwen can handle that perfectly well. But a non-shambolic, neatly ironed Torchwood - never.
+
In 1929, this is what Prior said to Jack: “Are you aware that, in all this time, you don’t appear to have aged a day?”
Jack visibly squirmed, but he didn’t say anything, so Prior continued, “I’m beginning to feel - not for the first time, in fact - as if this is all some great elaborate joke that I’m the victim of. Have years really been passing, or have I just been going to sleep every night and waking up to find things swapped about a bit, and people hiding in cupboards?”
Jack laughed, then noticed the wintry expression that was pinching Prior’s features and said, “No, this definitely isn’t some kind of trick. And you’re right, about me, but that’s my own problem…and I can’t tell you the truth because you wouldn’t believe me.” Prior scowled, but - anything being preferable to having the ‘I can’t die’ conversation with somebody who hadn’t seen even half as many bizarre things as normal Torchwood personnel - there didn’t seem an easy way to appease him. Half out of desperation, he said, “Prior, what can I do to prove to you that it’s 1931?”
“Take me outside,” Prior said, immediately.
“You know we can’t do that, not yet. If you ran into your mother, a friend, looking exactly the same now as you did thirteen years ago, what the hell would happen?”
Prior snorted. “Nobody I know would come to Cardiff,” he said, but picked up a book and didn’t ask again.
That evening, holding his knees to his chest and through one of the small, high windows at the night drawing in, Prior said quietly, to nobody in particular, “If I asked for a doctor, would you have to bring me one?”
Byrne - a short, stout man who’d been working in Torchwood Three for two years, now, after a transfer - put down his pen and studied Prior carefully. “We’ve a medic on site, lad,” he said after a moment. “And besides, there’s nothing physically wrong with you.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Prior’s lips, and Jack watched as he tapped his half-read book against the seat, visibly considering this. After a moment, he said, “I’m feeling quite mentally shaken. I still have human rights, surely? I mean, I can ask for a doctor if I’d like one, and I’d like one.”
Byrne shrugged, but looked uncertain. “I suppose.” He’s eyes flicked towards Jack in a gesture that clearly sought approval from anyone at hand, although their superior was away; Jack shrugged.
“Good,” said Prior, brusquely. “I’d like you to get hold of a Dr. W. Rivers for me - he was living in London the last time I spoke to him. Thank you.”
The sound of Byrne’s footsteps reverberated on the hard linoleum, as he crept from the room. Both times they’d met, Jack felt that Byrne had been unecessarily awkward around Prior, and assumed it stemmed from some guilt at having been just ever so slightly too young for the Great War. They weren’t far enough away from it yet for most members of Torchwood Three not to have found Prior intimidating or in some way upsetting, and Jack found it strange that, faced with all the alien terror and technology the rift could provide, it was their own human history that his colleagues found most frightening.
Rain was thrumming against the glass by the time he’d crossed the room to perch companionably beside Prior - who evidently needed cheering up - and Jack had to raise his voice slightly to be heard above it when he said, “A doctor? Really?”
Prior rubbed his jaw evasively and murmured, “He’s a very special kind of doctor.”
Jack smiled, because he couldn’t help it. “I know that feeling,” he said, with a grin that, he hoped, came across as rakish moreso than awkward or desperate to please. “I once had a very good Doctor. They’re worth holding onto. Is this the guy who treated you for shellshock?”
“Yes,” said Prior. He was clearly still a little annoyed, or else the subject really mattered to him, but either way it was obvious that he didn’t want to discuss it.
Jack let it drop and at some point soon after that, he supposes, he must have fallen asleep; it felt like the blink of an eye, the time between that moment and the other, later, worse. Waking up to find the Hub in semi-darkness, a figure hunched over nearby, his shaking visible even in the low light.
“Prior?” said Jack, uncertain.
And Prior replied, “He’s been dead since 1922,” voice harsh and high in a way that seemed quite unnatural for him.
It took Jack a moment to realise where he was, why Prior was with him and what the hell was going on, but once it had all fallen into place there wasn’t time to answer before Prior continued, “Seven years. A week. I was a fucking week late, and it’s stupid, but all I’ve been able to think since I got here is how he’d… How he’s the only person who might actually…And I shouldn’t be surprised, he was old, I suppose, older than half my generation were when they went, but it still- It still feels fucking painful.”
Jack had a fairly good idea that what he was about to do would almost certainly seem unnatural to a twentieth century male, but couldn’t think of anything better, so he was stuck with it: slowly, like dealing with a feral animal, he threaded an arm around Prior’s shoulders and pulled him closer. Prior tensed, and Jack expected him to bolt, but for some reason he didn’t. He moved suddenly, grabbing a handful of Jack’s shirt and sinking back into him, breath hissing through his teeth. He was still shaking. “Come on,” he said, more to himself than to Jack. “Come on, come on, come on.”
+
Pushing her plate away after breakfast, Gwen finally feels steeled up enough to just turn to Prior and say, “So, how did you get here? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”
Those shrewd, steely eyes fix on her, and she blinks several times, but doesn’t look away. “I don’t mind,” says Prior. Something about the look on his face during that brief pause tells her that, no, he really doesn’t mind, but he is thinking carefully about which parts to edit out.
+
When Prior came to - pinned down and with an aching wrist - his thoughts went immediately to shells, machine guns, mud, imminent death, and he struggled bolt upright almost immediately through sheer force of personality. However, it was only after having done so, and with quite a loud cry, that he realised the guilty ‘pinning’ item had simply been a bedsheet, tucked in so tightly it had restricted his movement. A nurse came scurrying over.
“Where am I?” Prior said, quite matter-of-factly.
“You’re safe,” said the nurse, uselessly, before compounding matters by redundantly adding, “You’re in a hospital.”
“I know,” said Prior. “Hospital where?”
It was not the first time a fugue state had lead him somewhere strange, but, he reflected, Cardiff was pushing it - even by his standards. His initial relief was compounded by a slight panic as he began asking the nurse how long he’d been there.
“Only a few hours,” she said, and how hadn’t he noticed her Welsh accent before? “You was in a dead faint when you got brought in, we thought you were one of the shellshocks making a break for it, but your papers didn’t check out and then -”
A horribly familiar screaming struck up on the other side of the ward, which Prior supposed was coming from a neurasthenic patient (it was a recognisable sound, somehow), and as the nurse bustled away mid-sentence, Prior took his chance to scarper. He was halfway out of the blankets when a smartly dressed man and woman arrived, carrying boxes.
“Are you Prior?” said the man.
“Yes,” said Prior, after a moment, because he couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“You’d better come with us,” he said, and Prior immediately demanded to know who they were. The two of them seemed pleased to be asked; she smiled, he puffed out his chest, and after a moment he said, “We’re Torchwood.”
If it was supposed to mean something to him, it didn’t.
+
The first time they fucked, Jack and Prior, was sometime during the early 1930’s and, honestly, Jack was surprised it had taken them so long. It happened quite suddenly, after years of aggressive, heavy-duty flirting; Prior was just bored, it seemed, caged and trapped and if he couldn’t get out of the Hub then he’d make his own fun inside it, wouldn’t he. Jack, for his part, was quite willing, if mildly surprised to discover that Prior didn’t kiss.
It happened again after that, and again, but not every year. There were years where, smiling sweetly at Jack over his shoulder, Prior would delicately charm another, Torchwood members having always been (and Jack’s always assumed it’s something to do with the danger) notoriously easy to seduce. Jack didn’t mind. And even when it was his team, even when it was a blushing Toshiko, Jack was surprised to realise that he still didn’t mind, not really.
With Owen, of course, he’d had no idea what their time together had involved - it was entirely possible that the two of them had just sat up all night, discussing their myriad parental issues - but he’d come to know Prior quite well over the past eighty-plus years, and, well. What could Jack say? The man was good.
+
Gwen investigates the hospital. The past comes calling. The box opens.
It’s time.
“We can’t just send him back, Jack, and you know it,” Gwen half-shouts, slamming her hand into the table. Ianto’s stood in the corner, looking uncomfortable (Jack remembers his encounter with Prior quite clearly; it was the only time, at least that Jack could remember, where the CCTV system had really been worth it), and Owen’s fiddling with an object that appears to resemble a big brass set of cogs. Toshiko, outisde monitoring rift activity, appears to be the only person not involved in The Great Prior Debate - apart from Prior himself, of course.
“That’s what he’s here for!” Jack cries. “If we don’t do this…”
“Using him like this, it isn’t ethical. He’s a human being, not some useful gadget - and that war, I mean, he could die out there. Like all those others. Is that really what you want?”
“Of course it isn’t, you know that. But I’m deadly serious when I say -”
Prior chooses that moment to clear his throat gently. Everyone freezes, caught in the act, and turns to look at him.
“You know,” Prior says, leaning in the doorway, “The first year I was here, I asked them to send me back. I said I had responsibilities, might even make it back to the front-line eventually, and they said, ‘sorry, lad, the war’s over.’ I should have been pleased, I suppose, but do you know what I did? I screamed at them. I couldn’t stop. I felt like a deserter - being a year in the future was no excuse, because I knew where I belonged, and it wasn’t here. That was only a few weeks ago; I still feel exactly the same.”
They were all looking at him with the same troubled expression, but Jack’s seemed the most pained and uncomfortable of all, so Prior addressed this last to him. “If I’ve a chance to go home, Jack, you must let me take it.”
+
Before stepping into the hospital (alone, at his own insistence), Prior had been forced to dampen Jack’s concern with a few well-placed, scathing remarks, just to make sure Jack knew who he was talking to. But he hugged him goodbye just the same. It was strange to think that Jack had known him for nigh on ninety years - a longer stretch of time than he could even really picture.
After the first flash of light, Prior sees the familiar faces of the man and the woman, the first but by no means last Torchwood operatives he ever met. He thinks: I know for a fact that, a few years from now, you’ll be dead, and contemplates telling them to consider looking for a different job. Instead, he says, “Take me. I’m on the ward next door: I’m not a real patient, so I’m not being watched properly. My name’s Prior - did you hear that? Prior. It won’t be easy, but you must make me come with you, and freeze me so that I can be here now, in the future, to tell you this. Quickly.”
His head’s hurting by the time the light flashes again, and all he can picture in his mind’s eye is that old drawing, the snake eating its own tail. During his last few moments in 2008, Prior says goodbye to the world outside the hospital - a world which contains no Sarah, no Rivers, no one left who can remember what happened to them and everyone their age. What they did and saw and felt. It’s not the kind of world he wants to live in.
And Prior steps back through time alone, with a rift manipulator clutched in one hand, Jack’s final instructions ringing in his ears and his ninety-year-old uniform resting on his shoulders. He feels no fear.
+
Here is a funny joke Billy Prior knows: he walks into a bar and, just like Jack told him, that last night they spent together, there he is. He won’t stay long, but this will be worth it.
“Captain Harkness!” he cries, “Good to see you. Get this man another of whatever he’s having, will you?”
Jack blinks, looking confused, clearly drowning his sorrows over something. “Do I know you?”
“Not yet,” says Prior, as he throws a few coins on the bar to pay for Jack’s drink. They scatter, roll, and he thinks: that’s for that night in the late 1920’s, when it was raining. “I’m going back to France in a few days. I just feel like you should know - whatever happens - that it’s what I want.”
He gives Jack a hard, friendly slap on the back. “Good luck with the secret organisation, Harkness,” he says, cheerfully. “It’ll all be yours one day!”
Then he leaves, as quickly as possible, before Jack can catch him.
.
Title: To The End
Fandom: Torchwood/Regeneration
Summary: An AU, based around the events of To The Last Man.
Warnings: This is basically as tame as anything, but it is a crossover, so. I’ve tried to make it understandable for anyone who hasn’t read Regeneration, but may have failed entirely. WHATEVERS. Also there’s a bit of swearing? Occasionally?
A/N: For strangeumbrella 's birthday! ILU MADDIE. This is a bit late, but I haven’t finished anything since February and have been really struggling to write for quite a while. But here it is, thank god, and I hope you get something out of it at least.
Here is a funny joke Jack Harkness knows: a man walks into a bar. He knows Jack’s name, and Jack has no idea who he is.
Ha, ha, ha.
+
“A frozen soldier,” Gwen spits, half-laughing. “A frozen soldier from the first world war?”
“Yep,” Ianto replies, quite needlessly, but he’s got the beginnings of a silly grin on his face and, as she follows Jack out into the main room of the hub, Gwen also notices that Toshiko is wearing a dress. Owen, even, seems to have something of a spring in his step; and when he turns away from the medical equipment, the buttons of his smartly ironed shirt catch the light.
“Well,” Gwen mutters. “This is weird.”
They’re all following Jack to the far wall, now, that houses the ceiling-to-floor cryonic chambers which themselves store all the little bits and bats Torchwood just can’t seem to get rid of. The Secret Organisation equivalent of cardboard boxes in the loft, Ianto sometimes says, but the thought of being locked inside one for ninety years makes Gwen’s stomach go over - it’s a longer stretch of time than she can even really picture. Jack’s saying something like, “we wake him up once a year,” which knocks her out of her reverie.
“Once a year? Why?”
“Check he still works,” Ianto chips in, now inexplicably mounting the stairs with a camera in his hands, and then suddenly one of the drawers is no longer a space on the wall but a person, and Gwen can’t take her eyes off the man lying comatose in front of her, Owen’s ¬fingertips feeling for a pulse on his neck. The man in question is pale, thin, fair-haired; young-looking, but with a face she can’t help thinking of as somehow proud, even as expressionless and as unconscious as it is right now.
While Owen lifts a syringe full of blue liquid to the soldier’s neck, Jack says, “Gwen Cooper, meet Lieutenant William Prior,” and it is then that Prior sits up with a shout.
+
The first time Jack Harkness encountered Torchwood’s new, frozen pet turned out to be several years after it had actually arrived; between assignments, conscription and one especially nasty death, their meeting somehow did not occur until 1921. The first thing Prior ever heard Jack say was, “You.” Understandably, with his current situation taken into account - which is to say that he was hunched in, shivering and half-naked on a metal tray - it was quite difficult even for Prior to think of a witty retort.
After a few long moments spent getting his breath back, feeling that still-unfamiliar sensation of his heart readjusting to its rhythm, he settled for, “Were you expecting somebody else?”
“We weren’t,” murmured the dark-haired woman holding a stethoscope to Prior’s back. Cheefully, but with a hint of real sternness just beneath the surface, she added, “Don’t act up, Harkness.”
“You don’t recognise me?” Jack said, still staring intently, frowning a little with the odd, posterboy face of his that would soon become as familiar to Prior as the back of his own hand. But then, neither of them could have known that yet.
Prior blinked. “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” he said, then, as an afterthought, and almost unconsciously, “I would have remembered.”
Slowly, the tight line of Jack’s lips tipped into a grin.
Three hours after their odd ‘hello’, and each holding a scotch in spite of the time of day, Jack Harkness and Billy Prior were slumped on the lumpy couch outside the door to the storage bay.
“All I’m trying to say,” Prior continued, “is that it’s dangerous here. Over the last three days, I don’t think I’ve woken up once to see exactly the same group of people who last put me to sleep. And none of them were of retiring age, exactly.”
Jack shrugged evasively and said, “Yes, but I still say it’s fairly likely that I’ll be here next year, anyway. Tomorrow. You know what I mean.”
Prior didn’t ask how; he just lifted and dropped his skinny shoulders in a display of apparent disinterest, and then changed the subject. He’d seen denial like this at the front, God complexes, the odd Officer who’d gotten lucky enough times to have gained a reputation and was stupid enough to believe it. Every now and then, if you lived long enough yourself, you were bound to run into the odd man who thought of himself as somehow immortal - but it was a poor coping mechanism. He shook Jack’s hand, at the end of the day, and his grip was tight. He wasn’t expecting to see him again.
In 1922, the first thing Prior saw upon awaking was Jack Harkness’ face, and the first thing he said was, “Still alive, I see. Well done you.” But the brunette with the cold stethoscope and the gentle touch was gone.
+
There’s something intense about his gaze. Gwen can’t think of any better way to describe it, descending further with each attempt into the realms of the very worst Mills & Boon, but it’s true. There is. Just being looked at by him gives her this horrible sensation, like somehow he’s seeing all her most secret secrets and, worse than that, she’s beginning to feel distinctly underdressed beside her spruced up teammates. A man from the past, kept alive for ninety years by a gigantic freezer? Fine. Gwen can handle that perfectly well. But a non-shambolic, neatly ironed Torchwood - never.
+
In 1929, this is what Prior said to Jack: “Are you aware that, in all this time, you don’t appear to have aged a day?”
Jack visibly squirmed, but he didn’t say anything, so Prior continued, “I’m beginning to feel - not for the first time, in fact - as if this is all some great elaborate joke that I’m the victim of. Have years really been passing, or have I just been going to sleep every night and waking up to find things swapped about a bit, and people hiding in cupboards?”
Jack laughed, then noticed the wintry expression that was pinching Prior’s features and said, “No, this definitely isn’t some kind of trick. And you’re right, about me, but that’s my own problem…and I can’t tell you the truth because you wouldn’t believe me.” Prior scowled, but - anything being preferable to having the ‘I can’t die’ conversation with somebody who hadn’t seen even half as many bizarre things as normal Torchwood personnel - there didn’t seem an easy way to appease him. Half out of desperation, he said, “Prior, what can I do to prove to you that it’s 1931?”
“Take me outside,” Prior said, immediately.
“You know we can’t do that, not yet. If you ran into your mother, a friend, looking exactly the same now as you did thirteen years ago, what the hell would happen?”
Prior snorted. “Nobody I know would come to Cardiff,” he said, but picked up a book and didn’t ask again.
That evening, holding his knees to his chest and through one of the small, high windows at the night drawing in, Prior said quietly, to nobody in particular, “If I asked for a doctor, would you have to bring me one?”
Byrne - a short, stout man who’d been working in Torchwood Three for two years, now, after a transfer - put down his pen and studied Prior carefully. “We’ve a medic on site, lad,” he said after a moment. “And besides, there’s nothing physically wrong with you.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Prior’s lips, and Jack watched as he tapped his half-read book against the seat, visibly considering this. After a moment, he said, “I’m feeling quite mentally shaken. I still have human rights, surely? I mean, I can ask for a doctor if I’d like one, and I’d like one.”
Byrne shrugged, but looked uncertain. “I suppose.” He’s eyes flicked towards Jack in a gesture that clearly sought approval from anyone at hand, although their superior was away; Jack shrugged.
“Good,” said Prior, brusquely. “I’d like you to get hold of a Dr. W. Rivers for me - he was living in London the last time I spoke to him. Thank you.”
The sound of Byrne’s footsteps reverberated on the hard linoleum, as he crept from the room. Both times they’d met, Jack felt that Byrne had been unecessarily awkward around Prior, and assumed it stemmed from some guilt at having been just ever so slightly too young for the Great War. They weren’t far enough away from it yet for most members of Torchwood Three not to have found Prior intimidating or in some way upsetting, and Jack found it strange that, faced with all the alien terror and technology the rift could provide, it was their own human history that his colleagues found most frightening.
Rain was thrumming against the glass by the time he’d crossed the room to perch companionably beside Prior - who evidently needed cheering up - and Jack had to raise his voice slightly to be heard above it when he said, “A doctor? Really?”
Prior rubbed his jaw evasively and murmured, “He’s a very special kind of doctor.”
Jack smiled, because he couldn’t help it. “I know that feeling,” he said, with a grin that, he hoped, came across as rakish moreso than awkward or desperate to please. “I once had a very good Doctor. They’re worth holding onto. Is this the guy who treated you for shellshock?”
“Yes,” said Prior. He was clearly still a little annoyed, or else the subject really mattered to him, but either way it was obvious that he didn’t want to discuss it.
Jack let it drop and at some point soon after that, he supposes, he must have fallen asleep; it felt like the blink of an eye, the time between that moment and the other, later, worse. Waking up to find the Hub in semi-darkness, a figure hunched over nearby, his shaking visible even in the low light.
“Prior?” said Jack, uncertain.
And Prior replied, “He’s been dead since 1922,” voice harsh and high in a way that seemed quite unnatural for him.
It took Jack a moment to realise where he was, why Prior was with him and what the hell was going on, but once it had all fallen into place there wasn’t time to answer before Prior continued, “Seven years. A week. I was a fucking week late, and it’s stupid, but all I’ve been able to think since I got here is how he’d… How he’s the only person who might actually…And I shouldn’t be surprised, he was old, I suppose, older than half my generation were when they went, but it still- It still feels fucking painful.”
Jack had a fairly good idea that what he was about to do would almost certainly seem unnatural to a twentieth century male, but couldn’t think of anything better, so he was stuck with it: slowly, like dealing with a feral animal, he threaded an arm around Prior’s shoulders and pulled him closer. Prior tensed, and Jack expected him to bolt, but for some reason he didn’t. He moved suddenly, grabbing a handful of Jack’s shirt and sinking back into him, breath hissing through his teeth. He was still shaking. “Come on,” he said, more to himself than to Jack. “Come on, come on, come on.”
+
Pushing her plate away after breakfast, Gwen finally feels steeled up enough to just turn to Prior and say, “So, how did you get here? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”
Those shrewd, steely eyes fix on her, and she blinks several times, but doesn’t look away. “I don’t mind,” says Prior. Something about the look on his face during that brief pause tells her that, no, he really doesn’t mind, but he is thinking carefully about which parts to edit out.
+
When Prior came to - pinned down and with an aching wrist - his thoughts went immediately to shells, machine guns, mud, imminent death, and he struggled bolt upright almost immediately through sheer force of personality. However, it was only after having done so, and with quite a loud cry, that he realised the guilty ‘pinning’ item had simply been a bedsheet, tucked in so tightly it had restricted his movement. A nurse came scurrying over.
“Where am I?” Prior said, quite matter-of-factly.
“You’re safe,” said the nurse, uselessly, before compounding matters by redundantly adding, “You’re in a hospital.”
“I know,” said Prior. “Hospital where?”
It was not the first time a fugue state had lead him somewhere strange, but, he reflected, Cardiff was pushing it - even by his standards. His initial relief was compounded by a slight panic as he began asking the nurse how long he’d been there.
“Only a few hours,” she said, and how hadn’t he noticed her Welsh accent before? “You was in a dead faint when you got brought in, we thought you were one of the shellshocks making a break for it, but your papers didn’t check out and then -”
A horribly familiar screaming struck up on the other side of the ward, which Prior supposed was coming from a neurasthenic patient (it was a recognisable sound, somehow), and as the nurse bustled away mid-sentence, Prior took his chance to scarper. He was halfway out of the blankets when a smartly dressed man and woman arrived, carrying boxes.
“Are you Prior?” said the man.
“Yes,” said Prior, after a moment, because he couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“You’d better come with us,” he said, and Prior immediately demanded to know who they were. The two of them seemed pleased to be asked; she smiled, he puffed out his chest, and after a moment he said, “We’re Torchwood.”
If it was supposed to mean something to him, it didn’t.
+
The first time they fucked, Jack and Prior, was sometime during the early 1930’s and, honestly, Jack was surprised it had taken them so long. It happened quite suddenly, after years of aggressive, heavy-duty flirting; Prior was just bored, it seemed, caged and trapped and if he couldn’t get out of the Hub then he’d make his own fun inside it, wouldn’t he. Jack, for his part, was quite willing, if mildly surprised to discover that Prior didn’t kiss.
It happened again after that, and again, but not every year. There were years where, smiling sweetly at Jack over his shoulder, Prior would delicately charm another, Torchwood members having always been (and Jack’s always assumed it’s something to do with the danger) notoriously easy to seduce. Jack didn’t mind. And even when it was his team, even when it was a blushing Toshiko, Jack was surprised to realise that he still didn’t mind, not really.
With Owen, of course, he’d had no idea what their time together had involved - it was entirely possible that the two of them had just sat up all night, discussing their myriad parental issues - but he’d come to know Prior quite well over the past eighty-plus years, and, well. What could Jack say? The man was good.
+
Gwen investigates the hospital. The past comes calling. The box opens.
It’s time.
“We can’t just send him back, Jack, and you know it,” Gwen half-shouts, slamming her hand into the table. Ianto’s stood in the corner, looking uncomfortable (Jack remembers his encounter with Prior quite clearly; it was the only time, at least that Jack could remember, where the CCTV system had really been worth it), and Owen’s fiddling with an object that appears to resemble a big brass set of cogs. Toshiko, outisde monitoring rift activity, appears to be the only person not involved in The Great Prior Debate - apart from Prior himself, of course.
“That’s what he’s here for!” Jack cries. “If we don’t do this…”
“Using him like this, it isn’t ethical. He’s a human being, not some useful gadget - and that war, I mean, he could die out there. Like all those others. Is that really what you want?”
“Of course it isn’t, you know that. But I’m deadly serious when I say -”
Prior chooses that moment to clear his throat gently. Everyone freezes, caught in the act, and turns to look at him.
“You know,” Prior says, leaning in the doorway, “The first year I was here, I asked them to send me back. I said I had responsibilities, might even make it back to the front-line eventually, and they said, ‘sorry, lad, the war’s over.’ I should have been pleased, I suppose, but do you know what I did? I screamed at them. I couldn’t stop. I felt like a deserter - being a year in the future was no excuse, because I knew where I belonged, and it wasn’t here. That was only a few weeks ago; I still feel exactly the same.”
They were all looking at him with the same troubled expression, but Jack’s seemed the most pained and uncomfortable of all, so Prior addressed this last to him. “If I’ve a chance to go home, Jack, you must let me take it.”
+
Before stepping into the hospital (alone, at his own insistence), Prior had been forced to dampen Jack’s concern with a few well-placed, scathing remarks, just to make sure Jack knew who he was talking to. But he hugged him goodbye just the same. It was strange to think that Jack had known him for nigh on ninety years - a longer stretch of time than he could even really picture.
After the first flash of light, Prior sees the familiar faces of the man and the woman, the first but by no means last Torchwood operatives he ever met. He thinks: I know for a fact that, a few years from now, you’ll be dead, and contemplates telling them to consider looking for a different job. Instead, he says, “Take me. I’m on the ward next door: I’m not a real patient, so I’m not being watched properly. My name’s Prior - did you hear that? Prior. It won’t be easy, but you must make me come with you, and freeze me so that I can be here now, in the future, to tell you this. Quickly.”
His head’s hurting by the time the light flashes again, and all he can picture in his mind’s eye is that old drawing, the snake eating its own tail. During his last few moments in 2008, Prior says goodbye to the world outside the hospital - a world which contains no Sarah, no Rivers, no one left who can remember what happened to them and everyone their age. What they did and saw and felt. It’s not the kind of world he wants to live in.
And Prior steps back through time alone, with a rift manipulator clutched in one hand, Jack’s final instructions ringing in his ears and his ninety-year-old uniform resting on his shoulders. He feels no fear.
+
Here is a funny joke Billy Prior knows: he walks into a bar and, just like Jack told him, that last night they spent together, there he is. He won’t stay long, but this will be worth it.
“Captain Harkness!” he cries, “Good to see you. Get this man another of whatever he’s having, will you?”
Jack blinks, looking confused, clearly drowning his sorrows over something. “Do I know you?”
“Not yet,” says Prior, as he throws a few coins on the bar to pay for Jack’s drink. They scatter, roll, and he thinks: that’s for that night in the late 1920’s, when it was raining. “I’m going back to France in a few days. I just feel like you should know - whatever happens - that it’s what I want.”
He gives Jack a hard, friendly slap on the back. “Good luck with the secret organisation, Harkness,” he says, cheerfully. “It’ll all be yours one day!”
Then he leaves, as quickly as possible, before Jack can catch him.
.