Fic: Miracle and Wonder (Doctor Who/Torchwood/Wonder Woman, PG-13)
Title: Miracle and Wonder.
Author: Prochytes.
Fandom: Torchwood/Doctor Who (2005)/Wonder Woman (Jenkins films).
Rating: PG-13.
Characters/Pairing: Diana, Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler/the Ninth Doctor.
Disclaimer: Neither of these intermittently angsting quasi-immortals belongs to me.
Summary: An (unavoidably) immortal goddess and an (accidentally) immortal former Time Agent wait out the Twentieth Century, sometimes in each other's company.
Word Count: 2532.
A/N: Big spoilers for the 2017 Wonder Woman film, Wonder Woman 1984, the whole run of Torchwood, and Doctor Who to "Last of the Time Lords".
Jack first met her in London, during that second, less fun, stab at the Blitz.
The all-clear had sounded some time before. Dawn was announcing itself, delicately, at the edges of the London skyline; those who had homes to go to were wending thither. Jack had been putting in some quality time the previous night at the Café de Paris, while that was still an option. As a result, he was less sure-footed than usual, and almost tripped over the woman sitting on the curb as he staggered out of Piccadilly Circus.
At first, he took in only the mass of long and unkempt hair, bent over what was easily, even after seven decades of data-sampling, the best pair of legs that he had seen on Planet Earth. Then, she squinted up to stare at him, and Jack found himself looking down at the face of a woman who looked like a goddess. (There was an easy explanation for that. But the Thirties had set Jack’s generic expectations firmly to thrift-store realism, and he didn’t think of it.)
Once, such a face alone would have been enough to arrest Jack’s onward movement. But the Jack Harkness of 1940 bis was not the man he had been the first time around - before the TARDIS; before the Game Station; before Rose and death and glory and The Doctor. Now, it was almost as important that this woman didn’t seem to have a friend, beside the half-empty bottle of expensive brandy in her hand.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said. “I’m Captain Jack Harkness. Room down there for a passenger?”
“I am Diana,” she said. “And I am drunk. Always Diana; very seldom drunk.” She patted the pavement. “You may sit down.”
***
Jack settled on the curb next to Very Seldom Drunk Diana. The cold stone was insistent through the seat of his pants. He considered trying to cadge a swig of the brandy, but the intentness with which Diana was applying herself to it suggested that her necessity was yet greater than his.
“Looks like you’ve been enjoying quite the session there,” he said.
“Mm,” said Diana, absently. Her gaze was fixed upon the sky over the East End. Smoke hovered above unquenched fires.
“When did you get started?”
Diana’s brow furrowed. “Tuesday,” she said, at last. “Or maybe the Tuesday before that. It's hard for me to get drunk. I need a run-up.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what brought this on?”
“You’re doing it again.”
Historically, people had tended to say variations on that to Jack when he had just accomplished something amazing, appalling, or, for preference, both. Business had been slow on that front since the last coronation but three; Jack had forgotten how much he’d felt the lack. Diana’s next words, however, revealed his misapprehension.
“You’re all doing it again,” she said. “I thought I’d made my peace with the fact that it didn’t need my brother. I hadn’t.” She took a pull of brandy long enough to make Jack wince before continuing. “I knew the darkness was in you, but I thought… I hoped… you’d learned. And then, in twenty years - twenty tiny years - you do it again. Except harder, and with even more genocide.”
Jack considered, as Diana stared at the sky, and hunched her solid shoulders. All those second persons were instructive; “twenty tiny years”, doubly so. Diana shouldn’t even have been a teenager by the Armistice.
Jack wondered, briefly, whether he had another ageless prophet on his hands. The century will turn twice before you find each other again. Diana could just about be The Tarot Girl’s taller, buffer, not-so-creepy sister, who had forsaken portentousness and card games for the gym. (Not that pumping iron would be a big thing for a while yet; Jack hadn’t realized how much he’d miss lycra.) But there were so many other possibilities.
“You’re not human, are you?” he said, at last. Not subtle, by any mean, but subtle could fuck itself. It was five a. m.; his ass was cold; and Earth was already playing footsie on its second date with Hell.
“No.” Diana peered as though seeing him properly for the first time. “And neither are you. Not completely. Not any more. My apologies,” she added hastily, as Jack flinched, “I am drunk; I did not mean to cause offence.”
“None taken. Well, maybe just a little.” Diana proffered the almost-empty bottle; Jack accepted it. “Something happened to me. Now, I can’t die.”
“Even gods die. I have established this, empirically.”
“Is that what you are?” Jack wiped his mouth, and returned the bottle. “A god?”
“Yes. I am the last god left that walks on Gaea.” Diana waved an arm. Its sweep took in the whole of London: the parts on fire; the parts that had been on fire; and the parts that would be on fire before too long. “As you can see, I’m doing a great job.”
***
Shortly thereafter, Diana heard the tell-tale crack of masonry in a neighbouring street. Jack spent much of that morning ferrying people to safety, and telling passers-by that Diana was simply leaning against the wall (”Sorry, gentlemen: my gal came over funny…”) which she was actually holding up. Diana sustained the full weight of the collapsing building for a little under an hour, until Jack had helped all the denizens to safety. Then, she was noisily sick over his shoes.
This episode fostered three beliefs in Jack: first, that Diana sometimes wanted to be a cynical and disaffected loner, but sucked at it; second, that, in all likelihood, she really was a god; and third, that he now had blackmail material on one of the very few people with whom he was pretty much guaranteed to be waiting out the Twentieth Century.
All three of these beliefs were quite correct.
***
Diana worked in the museum sector. She changed jobs, every now and again, but not as often as an immortality rookie might have expected. Jack had learnt at the Time Agency, long before he had contracted his own case of glacial ageing, that people tended not to pursue lines of investigation that would potentially make their own lives more difficult. Institutions were prepared not to ask a helluva lot of questions about an employee who worked that hard; looked that good; and, for some reason, never needed to borrow workmen or forklift trucks when she was moving big exhibits. This would all become more of a challenge once they started networking computers and databases at century’s end, but cross that bridge once someone got around to building it.
After the War, Jack ran into her most often at fancy parties.
“Do you ever wonder,” she said, at the opening bash for the London Transport Museum in 1980, “whether we are right to live in such seclusion?”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jack, as he received a top-up of Champagne. Diana smiled warmly at the wait staff, but held a hand over her glass. “In case you haven’t noticed, Diana, there’s a measure of difference between Captain Jack Harkness and a hermit.”
“I know. And I know, too, that you have loved, in your time upon this world.”
“I have,” said Jack, thinking of Angelo, and Lucia, and Estelle. He drained the glass.
“But your eyes always stay trained upon that promised reunion - the one that will come once the century has turned over twice. I have my solitude; you have your wait.” Diana set down her flute. “I’m no longer as sure as I was that either is wise.”
“Well,” Jack plucked a canapé from a passing tray, “at least we have each other.”
“Yes. I have an idea about that. I think that the likes of us collect, if we let ourselves, particular...” Diana hesitated for a moment “… genres of people as their friends. Not necessarily as lovers…”
“More’s the pity,” said Jack, with feeling. He looked at the double-deckers, and tried not to engage in happy speculations about thighs that could dead-lift them wrapped around him. Diana’s momentarily narrowed eyes suggested that she knew exactly where his thoughts had headed, but she pressed on:
“… not necessarily as lovers, and other friends are just as dear. But there are some… types to which we return.”
“I’m not buying it,” said Jack. “You think that because the love of your life and I have a little in common, that you’re always going to be collecting men with great jaw-lines and funky outfits, who like to zip around in the sky and save the day? If that were true, I’d be constantly finding intense brunette women with amazing legs who spend half their time starry-eyed about the wonders of the world, and half smacking the bits of the world that don’t get with the programme.” He bit down on the salmon. “Q. E. D..”
Diana opened her mouth to reply. At this point, however, a problem arose with the insufficiently curated Underground exhibit, and it became hard to hear conversation over the screaming. Jack and Diana spent the rest of the evening respectively shooting and punching Yeti.
***
“I never thought I’d see you again,” said Rose. Her voice was muffled against Jack’s chest.
“I never gave up,” said Jack, into her hair. “I’ve waited so, so long.”
“But not long enough,” said The Doctor. His eyes flickered between Jack’s face and the TV screen; of course, he’d already worked it out. Jack had missed exactly this: Rose’s compassion; the candour and the genius of The Doctor. They had made him the man that he was now. And the man he was now couldn’t not do what needed to be done.
Jack kissed the top of Rose’s head, and gently slipped out of her arms. He threw The Doctor a salute, and drew a breath.
“I renounce my wish,” he said.
***
“Did you wish for him?” Jack asked.
“Yes. I did.”
“But you gave him up.”
“Yes.” Diana rested her elbows on the ledge of the balcony, and looked down at the Thames. “I did. I was selfish; it took me far too long. You were stronger than I was.”
“It was easier for me. I knew that all I had to do was go on waiting. And now,” Jack gestured back at the bulk of Tate Modern, “now the century has turned over twice. It won’t be long.”
“Jack… this reunion won’t be what you expect. Things will be different. Better, I hope. But different.”
“You can’t know that, Diana.”
Diana glanced at Jack’s face, and changed the subject. “The Curator of the National Gallery is a very strange man indeed.”
“Alien?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll look into it,” said Jack.
He didn’t.
***
Not much later, Jack got his reunion. It was not what he had expected, even leaving aside the part where the serving UK Prime Minister repeatedly tortured him to death. (Jack never found out what happened to Diana during that period, though he did recall hearing Saxon mutter darkly once that something would have to be done about Spice Girl Island.)
Diana’s analysis was entirely vindicated. Jack decided that a mature and proportionate response to this would be to avoid her for more than a decade so that she couldn’t say “I told you so”, which he duly did. Jack now had other people to say “I told you so” at him, anyway.
Other people. A gift the fullness of which, after all these years, he could finally acknowledge. Jack sighed; steeled himself; and (within barely another twelvemonth or two) picked up the ’phone.
It was time that Diana and he met each other’s friends.
***
“Gwen,” said Jack, “meet Diana of Themyscira. Diana, meet Gwen Cooper.”
Diana looked at Gwen’s hair. Diana looked at Gwen’s legs. Diana opened her mouth.
“Not one single word,” said Jack.
***
“Diana’s amazing,” said Gwen. “How did you two meet?”
“She was drunk and depressed; I barged in thinking about something else; and a building collapsed,” said Jack.
“Usually, those things happen in the opposite order.”
“Very funny.” Jack drank up his tea. “It horrifies me how well you two get on.”
“Were you expecting us to fight over you?”
“It’d be hot,” said Jack hopefully.
“It’d be short,” said Gwen. “On my best day, I’d land one punch she barely noticed before Diana KOed me with her thumb. But one of the things about being a normal person, which, you may recall, was why you hired me, long ago…”
“Yeah - kinda started rethinking that after the first time that you decked me.”
“… one of the things about being a normal person, is putting up with the knowledge that there’s always someone in your extended friendship circle who’s smarter than you, nicer than you, prettier than you, cooler than you, and could most likely kick your arse. I can live with that, Jack: Anwen’s godmother is Martha Jones.” Gwen put down her own tea. “It’s good that there’s someone who’s that for you.”
Jack harrumphed. “Diana is not cooler than me.”
“Diana is in every way cooler than you, Jack.”
“I have an invisible ’plane.”
“You had an invisible ’plane. It exploded. Diana can make any ’plane invisible by concentrating.”
“I have an underground base.”
“You had an underground base. It exploded. Diana told me that her stone-rich mate in that new crew of hers lets her use his. I have a strong suspicion that it’s bigger than yours was.”
Jack snorted.
“She talked a lot, while you were playing with Anwen, about that new crew you’re both off to meet. They sound less preoccupied with sex than Torchwood was. Mind you: so is Anwen’s rabbit. I think they’re good for her, like I hope… I hope we were for you. ”
“Mmm,” said Jack. His eyes were far away.
“Rhys and I named our son after him, you know,” Gwen said quietly, after a long silence. “It’s a good Welsh name. He’s not forgotten.”
“Thank you.” Jack rose and pulled Gwen into a hug. “I’m sorry Rhys was picking up at the school. Tell him I said ‘hi’.”
“Understood. Don’t be a stranger.”
Jack looked out into the garden over Gwen’s shoulder. Diana was teaching Anwen a dance move, or possibly a spin-kick. After more than a century out in the world, he still wasn’t sure she understood the difference.
***
“Gwen’s great,” said Diana, as she accompanied Jack back out on to the country lane. “Outside Themyscira, I’ve seldom seen a faster jab.”
Jack stopped. “Are you telling me that you two sparred while I was playing with Anwen?”
“Gwen felt that having you there might make you over-excited.”
Jack scowled, and walked on quickly. The scheduled rendezvous with a Wayne Enterprises jet at the nearest private airport was only half an hour away.
Diana - naturally - had no trouble keeping up. “Why did your friend try to borrow my lasso?” she asked.
“It’s probably better if I don’t answer that.” Jack unlocked his car. “Gwen and Rhys can be… innovative.”
“Humanity,” said Diana, settling into the passenger seat, “has an astounding appetite for perverting wonders.”
“Yeah. It’s why we love them.”
“Yes.” Diana clicked her seat-belt, and smiled. “I suppose it is.”
FINIS
Author: Prochytes.
Fandom: Torchwood/Doctor Who (2005)/Wonder Woman (Jenkins films).
Rating: PG-13.
Characters/Pairing: Diana, Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler/the Ninth Doctor.
Disclaimer: Neither of these intermittently angsting quasi-immortals belongs to me.
Summary: An (unavoidably) immortal goddess and an (accidentally) immortal former Time Agent wait out the Twentieth Century, sometimes in each other's company.
Word Count: 2532.
A/N: Big spoilers for the 2017 Wonder Woman film, Wonder Woman 1984, the whole run of Torchwood, and Doctor Who to "Last of the Time Lords".
Jack first met her in London, during that second, less fun, stab at the Blitz.
The all-clear had sounded some time before. Dawn was announcing itself, delicately, at the edges of the London skyline; those who had homes to go to were wending thither. Jack had been putting in some quality time the previous night at the Café de Paris, while that was still an option. As a result, he was less sure-footed than usual, and almost tripped over the woman sitting on the curb as he staggered out of Piccadilly Circus.
At first, he took in only the mass of long and unkempt hair, bent over what was easily, even after seven decades of data-sampling, the best pair of legs that he had seen on Planet Earth. Then, she squinted up to stare at him, and Jack found himself looking down at the face of a woman who looked like a goddess. (There was an easy explanation for that. But the Thirties had set Jack’s generic expectations firmly to thrift-store realism, and he didn’t think of it.)
Once, such a face alone would have been enough to arrest Jack’s onward movement. But the Jack Harkness of 1940 bis was not the man he had been the first time around - before the TARDIS; before the Game Station; before Rose and death and glory and The Doctor. Now, it was almost as important that this woman didn’t seem to have a friend, beside the half-empty bottle of expensive brandy in her hand.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said. “I’m Captain Jack Harkness. Room down there for a passenger?”
“I am Diana,” she said. “And I am drunk. Always Diana; very seldom drunk.” She patted the pavement. “You may sit down.”
***
Jack settled on the curb next to Very Seldom Drunk Diana. The cold stone was insistent through the seat of his pants. He considered trying to cadge a swig of the brandy, but the intentness with which Diana was applying herself to it suggested that her necessity was yet greater than his.
“Looks like you’ve been enjoying quite the session there,” he said.
“Mm,” said Diana, absently. Her gaze was fixed upon the sky over the East End. Smoke hovered above unquenched fires.
“When did you get started?”
Diana’s brow furrowed. “Tuesday,” she said, at last. “Or maybe the Tuesday before that. It's hard for me to get drunk. I need a run-up.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what brought this on?”
“You’re doing it again.”
Historically, people had tended to say variations on that to Jack when he had just accomplished something amazing, appalling, or, for preference, both. Business had been slow on that front since the last coronation but three; Jack had forgotten how much he’d felt the lack. Diana’s next words, however, revealed his misapprehension.
“You’re all doing it again,” she said. “I thought I’d made my peace with the fact that it didn’t need my brother. I hadn’t.” She took a pull of brandy long enough to make Jack wince before continuing. “I knew the darkness was in you, but I thought… I hoped… you’d learned. And then, in twenty years - twenty tiny years - you do it again. Except harder, and with even more genocide.”
Jack considered, as Diana stared at the sky, and hunched her solid shoulders. All those second persons were instructive; “twenty tiny years”, doubly so. Diana shouldn’t even have been a teenager by the Armistice.
Jack wondered, briefly, whether he had another ageless prophet on his hands. The century will turn twice before you find each other again. Diana could just about be The Tarot Girl’s taller, buffer, not-so-creepy sister, who had forsaken portentousness and card games for the gym. (Not that pumping iron would be a big thing for a while yet; Jack hadn’t realized how much he’d miss lycra.) But there were so many other possibilities.
“You’re not human, are you?” he said, at last. Not subtle, by any mean, but subtle could fuck itself. It was five a. m.; his ass was cold; and Earth was already playing footsie on its second date with Hell.
“No.” Diana peered as though seeing him properly for the first time. “And neither are you. Not completely. Not any more. My apologies,” she added hastily, as Jack flinched, “I am drunk; I did not mean to cause offence.”
“None taken. Well, maybe just a little.” Diana proffered the almost-empty bottle; Jack accepted it. “Something happened to me. Now, I can’t die.”
“Even gods die. I have established this, empirically.”
“Is that what you are?” Jack wiped his mouth, and returned the bottle. “A god?”
“Yes. I am the last god left that walks on Gaea.” Diana waved an arm. Its sweep took in the whole of London: the parts on fire; the parts that had been on fire; and the parts that would be on fire before too long. “As you can see, I’m doing a great job.”
***
Shortly thereafter, Diana heard the tell-tale crack of masonry in a neighbouring street. Jack spent much of that morning ferrying people to safety, and telling passers-by that Diana was simply leaning against the wall (”Sorry, gentlemen: my gal came over funny…”) which she was actually holding up. Diana sustained the full weight of the collapsing building for a little under an hour, until Jack had helped all the denizens to safety. Then, she was noisily sick over his shoes.
This episode fostered three beliefs in Jack: first, that Diana sometimes wanted to be a cynical and disaffected loner, but sucked at it; second, that, in all likelihood, she really was a god; and third, that he now had blackmail material on one of the very few people with whom he was pretty much guaranteed to be waiting out the Twentieth Century.
All three of these beliefs were quite correct.
***
Diana worked in the museum sector. She changed jobs, every now and again, but not as often as an immortality rookie might have expected. Jack had learnt at the Time Agency, long before he had contracted his own case of glacial ageing, that people tended not to pursue lines of investigation that would potentially make their own lives more difficult. Institutions were prepared not to ask a helluva lot of questions about an employee who worked that hard; looked that good; and, for some reason, never needed to borrow workmen or forklift trucks when she was moving big exhibits. This would all become more of a challenge once they started networking computers and databases at century’s end, but cross that bridge once someone got around to building it.
After the War, Jack ran into her most often at fancy parties.
“Do you ever wonder,” she said, at the opening bash for the London Transport Museum in 1980, “whether we are right to live in such seclusion?”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jack, as he received a top-up of Champagne. Diana smiled warmly at the wait staff, but held a hand over her glass. “In case you haven’t noticed, Diana, there’s a measure of difference between Captain Jack Harkness and a hermit.”
“I know. And I know, too, that you have loved, in your time upon this world.”
“I have,” said Jack, thinking of Angelo, and Lucia, and Estelle. He drained the glass.
“But your eyes always stay trained upon that promised reunion - the one that will come once the century has turned over twice. I have my solitude; you have your wait.” Diana set down her flute. “I’m no longer as sure as I was that either is wise.”
“Well,” Jack plucked a canapé from a passing tray, “at least we have each other.”
“Yes. I have an idea about that. I think that the likes of us collect, if we let ourselves, particular...” Diana hesitated for a moment “… genres of people as their friends. Not necessarily as lovers…”
“More’s the pity,” said Jack, with feeling. He looked at the double-deckers, and tried not to engage in happy speculations about thighs that could dead-lift them wrapped around him. Diana’s momentarily narrowed eyes suggested that she knew exactly where his thoughts had headed, but she pressed on:
“… not necessarily as lovers, and other friends are just as dear. But there are some… types to which we return.”
“I’m not buying it,” said Jack. “You think that because the love of your life and I have a little in common, that you’re always going to be collecting men with great jaw-lines and funky outfits, who like to zip around in the sky and save the day? If that were true, I’d be constantly finding intense brunette women with amazing legs who spend half their time starry-eyed about the wonders of the world, and half smacking the bits of the world that don’t get with the programme.” He bit down on the salmon. “Q. E. D..”
Diana opened her mouth to reply. At this point, however, a problem arose with the insufficiently curated Underground exhibit, and it became hard to hear conversation over the screaming. Jack and Diana spent the rest of the evening respectively shooting and punching Yeti.
***
“I never thought I’d see you again,” said Rose. Her voice was muffled against Jack’s chest.
“I never gave up,” said Jack, into her hair. “I’ve waited so, so long.”
“But not long enough,” said The Doctor. His eyes flickered between Jack’s face and the TV screen; of course, he’d already worked it out. Jack had missed exactly this: Rose’s compassion; the candour and the genius of The Doctor. They had made him the man that he was now. And the man he was now couldn’t not do what needed to be done.
Jack kissed the top of Rose’s head, and gently slipped out of her arms. He threw The Doctor a salute, and drew a breath.
“I renounce my wish,” he said.
***
“Did you wish for him?” Jack asked.
“Yes. I did.”
“But you gave him up.”
“Yes.” Diana rested her elbows on the ledge of the balcony, and looked down at the Thames. “I did. I was selfish; it took me far too long. You were stronger than I was.”
“It was easier for me. I knew that all I had to do was go on waiting. And now,” Jack gestured back at the bulk of Tate Modern, “now the century has turned over twice. It won’t be long.”
“Jack… this reunion won’t be what you expect. Things will be different. Better, I hope. But different.”
“You can’t know that, Diana.”
Diana glanced at Jack’s face, and changed the subject. “The Curator of the National Gallery is a very strange man indeed.”
“Alien?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll look into it,” said Jack.
He didn’t.
***
Not much later, Jack got his reunion. It was not what he had expected, even leaving aside the part where the serving UK Prime Minister repeatedly tortured him to death. (Jack never found out what happened to Diana during that period, though he did recall hearing Saxon mutter darkly once that something would have to be done about Spice Girl Island.)
Diana’s analysis was entirely vindicated. Jack decided that a mature and proportionate response to this would be to avoid her for more than a decade so that she couldn’t say “I told you so”, which he duly did. Jack now had other people to say “I told you so” at him, anyway.
Other people. A gift the fullness of which, after all these years, he could finally acknowledge. Jack sighed; steeled himself; and (within barely another twelvemonth or two) picked up the ’phone.
It was time that Diana and he met each other’s friends.
***
“Gwen,” said Jack, “meet Diana of Themyscira. Diana, meet Gwen Cooper.”
Diana looked at Gwen’s hair. Diana looked at Gwen’s legs. Diana opened her mouth.
“Not one single word,” said Jack.
***
“Diana’s amazing,” said Gwen. “How did you two meet?”
“She was drunk and depressed; I barged in thinking about something else; and a building collapsed,” said Jack.
“Usually, those things happen in the opposite order.”
“Very funny.” Jack drank up his tea. “It horrifies me how well you two get on.”
“Were you expecting us to fight over you?”
“It’d be hot,” said Jack hopefully.
“It’d be short,” said Gwen. “On my best day, I’d land one punch she barely noticed before Diana KOed me with her thumb. But one of the things about being a normal person, which, you may recall, was why you hired me, long ago…”
“Yeah - kinda started rethinking that after the first time that you decked me.”
“… one of the things about being a normal person, is putting up with the knowledge that there’s always someone in your extended friendship circle who’s smarter than you, nicer than you, prettier than you, cooler than you, and could most likely kick your arse. I can live with that, Jack: Anwen’s godmother is Martha Jones.” Gwen put down her own tea. “It’s good that there’s someone who’s that for you.”
Jack harrumphed. “Diana is not cooler than me.”
“Diana is in every way cooler than you, Jack.”
“I have an invisible ’plane.”
“You had an invisible ’plane. It exploded. Diana can make any ’plane invisible by concentrating.”
“I have an underground base.”
“You had an underground base. It exploded. Diana told me that her stone-rich mate in that new crew of hers lets her use his. I have a strong suspicion that it’s bigger than yours was.”
Jack snorted.
“She talked a lot, while you were playing with Anwen, about that new crew you’re both off to meet. They sound less preoccupied with sex than Torchwood was. Mind you: so is Anwen’s rabbit. I think they’re good for her, like I hope… I hope we were for you. ”
“Mmm,” said Jack. His eyes were far away.
“Rhys and I named our son after him, you know,” Gwen said quietly, after a long silence. “It’s a good Welsh name. He’s not forgotten.”
“Thank you.” Jack rose and pulled Gwen into a hug. “I’m sorry Rhys was picking up at the school. Tell him I said ‘hi’.”
“Understood. Don’t be a stranger.”
Jack looked out into the garden over Gwen’s shoulder. Diana was teaching Anwen a dance move, or possibly a spin-kick. After more than a century out in the world, he still wasn’t sure she understood the difference.
***
“Gwen’s great,” said Diana, as she accompanied Jack back out on to the country lane. “Outside Themyscira, I’ve seldom seen a faster jab.”
Jack stopped. “Are you telling me that you two sparred while I was playing with Anwen?”
“Gwen felt that having you there might make you over-excited.”
Jack scowled, and walked on quickly. The scheduled rendezvous with a Wayne Enterprises jet at the nearest private airport was only half an hour away.
Diana - naturally - had no trouble keeping up. “Why did your friend try to borrow my lasso?” she asked.
“It’s probably better if I don’t answer that.” Jack unlocked his car. “Gwen and Rhys can be… innovative.”
“Humanity,” said Diana, settling into the passenger seat, “has an astounding appetite for perverting wonders.”
“Yeah. It’s why we love them.”
“Yes.” Diana clicked her seat-belt, and smiled. “I suppose it is.”
FINIS