[FIC] Extreme Ways
Title: Extreme Ways
Characters: Owen Harper, Leona Sandric, Jack Harkness, with a cameo by Luke Roberts.
Words: ~5400
Beta: None, unfortunately. You can tell because there are giant infodumps all over the place and the beginning, middle, and ending are just barely on speaking terms.
Rating: R/18 for darkness.
Summary: Then it fell apart. Like it always does.
Disclaimer: THIS IS NONCANON. If this were canon, I might cry. Indulgence is asked for the overindulgent self-reflective passages. Jack Harkness, Owen Harper and the rest of the Torchwood contingent belong to the BBC. Leona Sandric is mine, Luke Roberts is Rizzy's, Harry Mayborne is MGM's, Arlin Keysa/Aaron Islington is L Savich's, and whoever else might have been mentioned belongs to whoever they belong to. Zero Wing is the intellectual property of Toaplan or something.
-
The best thing anyone ever did was put a pub in the Sunset Vista Estates.
At least that was Owen's opinion five minutes ago. Now he's getting a bad feeling from the shift in the buzz of conversation, the crackle of silence from the direction of the door. When someone big walks in you can feel it in the air.
Leona walks behind him, and Owen could tell it was her even without the full-length mirror behind the bartender. It's the fingers trailing up the back of the neck: hot, so she's really not interested, but assured, so he's going to spend the night in the palm of her hand anyway. Fuck. Next time the bottle comes back to his room.
"Hasn't anyone ever told you it's bad luck to drink alone?" she says, melting into a seat beside him and watching the mirror without looking in his direction. He returns the favour, staring into the last swallow of whiskey in his glass.
"Leona."
"Your old friends are problems; I can see why you liked them," she says, never mind that like is not a word which applies with great regularity or accuracy to Owen's opinions of people in general. He's more concerned with what could possibly concern her in a way that would concern him.
"My old friends didn't listen to me when we were friends," he says. "You want me to do something about them now?"
Leona calls the bartender to with a quirked little finger. A flick of her index and he's pouring her a shot from a bottle she'd indicated, and a slight inclination of her head and he's pouring another for Owen. It's always annoying, Leona's habit of buying him when she could say jump and he'd have to. Orders he can swallow; he doesn't like being bought.
"There's this man," she says, "the best efforts of First Angels and Organization agents alike can't seem to take down. That's a bit embarrassing, don't you think? Older and wiser and more established people just keep on failing. I'm sure if we put our minds to it, we could find a way to succeed."
That's a you-and-I "we", cleverly disguised as an Organization "we". Leona's always been ambitious.
"Jack?" Owen says, and eyes her. "I haven't even been back since he's been in charge. Last I saw him he was beating a path for the nearest door, never to return for maybe two weeks this time."
Finest moment, that. Chasing him out of the Tower once and shooting him in the head once before: the only two times he'd controlled anything between them. He finishes his drink.
"I've got nothing on him."
"You've got everything on him," Leona says, leaning in close enough he can feel the heat off her skin. Then she turns her head, so to all appearances she's talking to her reflection in the mirror, another Leona who's leaning just as close to a mirror-Owen who wants just as little to do with her. "You know he's been sniffing around after you. Got a bit too close to one of my boys the other day."
Jack can't keep anything of his to himself.
"You know, you should meet him," Owen says. "Probably just your type." And if she has a problem, she can learn for herself how impossible it is to fix those.
Leona leans forward. "What would you say if I said we could kill him?"
Owen's hand tightens on his glass, and he stares down at the refractions of light through the liquid. Yeah, funny thing about killing Jack. Really funny thing. "I'd say one of us was having a wet dream."
Leona chuckles, and the bartender sweeps by again in two flicks of her fingers and an eyebrow raised in commanding arch. Yeah, just Leona's type. The same smug cockiness, the same world spread out for her pickings. It's a pattern he's in, even if he technically works under Mayborne. His entire life he's been selling his soul to progressively worse buyers, and it's a wonder he has anything left to sell. "You were the one who came in with that lovely list of ways we could."
"Yeah, stake through the heart, way too much radiation. Big list." It's times like this Owen regrets not being a paranoid little fuck; he could have copied that entry out longhand. Photocopied it. Something. Now that he doesn't count as Torchwood in anyone's eyes, it's not like he has access to it any more.
Maybe there's something to be said for keeping an exit strategy.
"Hurt him and keep him from healing," Leona says. "Easy in principle. Hard when you can't get someone in close, and Luke's a kitten, even when he's not. Can't ask him to put a knife through someone."
That's what Owen gets. The dirty work. At least it's a break from legwork and support. "And what," he asks, "makes you think he won't shoot me as soon as he finds me?"
Oh, that's unlikely, he knows, unless Jack's in the mood to be cleaning up loose ends. Hell if Owen's ever known what Jack was thinking. Leona is either of the same opinion or thinks she knows something more - or doesn't care for Owen's life one way or another - and slips a hand over Owen's thigh.
Still hot. Still uninterested, and the grip says You think you have a choice? more than I can make this worth your while. "Oh, Owen," she purrs. "You think we don't take care of our own?"
Torchwood thought that, too.
"Why are you seeing to this?" He's just drunk enough not to care what he says, not drunk enough not to be able to say it. "Killing people is Islington's job. You keep the whores."
Leona smiles like he's lucky to survive that question, or maybe it's just she knows something he doesn't know. Big surprise. "Can't let the boys do all the heavy lifting, can we?" Translation: she's always a foot up on the game, and slow and steady wins.
The game is about what you'd expect: the Organization prizes Leona because Leona gets things done; Leona cares for the Organization because the Organization gives her power. The Organization cares for Owen because he once sold them the information they needed to knock a threat out of the game for a while. Owen doesn't care for the Organization at all.
-
Owen came to the Organization because it was better than going back to the Conrad Hotel and working as a doctor around a bunch of archangels, half of whom were still raw at Torchwood for Jack killing a bunch of their friends. This sort of problem was basically everywhere he went. Jack Harkness cast a very large shadow.
Of course, the thing about dumping your special operatives is that you've got to take precautions to make sure other special ops groups don't poach them away from you, and the thing about Torchwood is it's never been good at taking precautions on anything.
Five days after Owen turned up on the streets, the Organization tore down Torchwood's bank accounts. Threw a bit of legal trouble their way concerning the deeds to the Tower, which was a fine way to make it look to the local Neqa'el that Torchwood got into more trouble, perhaps, than he wanted to associate with. A bit of espionage here, a bit of misinformation there, one or two Torchwood employees picked up and taken for rides - oh, no one got hurt. Mayborne wasn't the type to drop a hammer when a feather would do. But Gwen sent him away and he sent them reeling, and it's been a month or two and Torchwood's just now creeping out of its shadows with Jack at the helm. Serves them right.
For the most part there's no love lost between Owen and Torchwood, Jack least of all. Well. Tosh he still feels bad about, before reminding himself there's no fucking reason why he should. Not as if her voice was raised in protest when Gwen told him to get out and take his hacking apart of the team with him. Not like she'd take his side against Jack, even having more than enough reason to.
It hadn't been a trial of worth or fitness, it had been a battle of cults of personality and Jack, even in absentia, had won. So what? Jack always wins; it's in the rules of any game he plays. It reminds Owen of Leona, in a way, but with Leona it's a bit more of a gamble. With Jack it's always been a stacked deck.
Jack came back from trying to kill, rape or torture them all and wedged himself into Torchwood like a fifth and radioactive wheel - didn't do much but poison them all. Owen took the initiative and cornered him one day, pointed out that they'd be better off without him and without him dropping in every few lunar cycles and leaving them to hang from his mistakes the rest of the time, and wonder of wonders, Jack left. Gwen took issue with his making sense and told him to get the hell away from Torchwood. Kicked him to the kerb of friendly fair Chicago and all he had to trade on, in the absence of unfailing love for Harkness Their Lord And Saviour, was what really only looked like intimate knowledge of the most presumptuous Wanderer organisation to fall through and set up shop.
This is what he got for it: a nice, quiet flat in the Sunset Vista Estates, an exercise room, a steady paycheck. Access to whores he doesn't care about, drinks that do nothing for him, a snarl of power plays he tries to ignore which will probably kill him one day.
It's enough.
It's enough that he's still a thorn in Torchwood's side, even here across the city. It's enough that he can take the gun from his shoulder holster and hang it from the headboard of his bed and not think about where it came from or what it'll be shooting in a day. It's enough that Jack fucking Harkness isn't a face he has to see when he comes in, even if he is, because they're going to kill him. It's enough that even if things have gone wrong they've gone wrong in a nice and orderly way and a way he really should have predicted.
When Owen gets back to his room, he flips through his journal to keep up on whatever's going on. Takes a moment to either write or talk himself out of writing a note to Jack that just says [leave me alone], and once he's closed the cover he's not certain if he wrote it or not.
He drops onto the bed on his face, without changing out of his work clothes.
It's enough that even if he can't have the life he thinks he's earned, at least he's on point in destroying it. Except that's not enough for anything. It's not what he wanted, so of course it's what he gets.
At least sleep comes easier with alcohol.
-
The next day, after Mayborne has him in for a quick medical check over an agent shipping off to Cambodia, and after Mayborne gives him absolutely no concern and an almost Jackish level of insouciance about the fact that Leona's trying to slip him an executive order on the side, Owen checks his journal to find that Leona's asked him out to a hotel room somewhere at a time she's written down to the minute. [Don't be late.] He brings his pistol and a basic medkit with him, because it's not in neutral territory and he doesn't trust Leona as far as he could throw her.
He drives out to the hotel and takes the stairs up to the room indicated - lifts are asking for trouble, really - and knocks, and a scrawny kid with blond-tipped hair opens the door. A bit disheveled, not dressed like anyone important - worn jeans, plain shirt. Owen has the feeling he should know him, from the Organization, from somewhere else...
"...Leona sent me," he says, stepping in on instinct when the kid steps back, if only to get out of the hall.
"I'm... not working," the kid says, and that's when Owen recognizes him and freezes. Luke. Luke Roberts. Owen's not comfortable around any of Leona's whores, but it's a hell of a lot worse when they're friends with people he's supposedly been friends with who Leona wants dead.
And suddenly Owen's got the feeling that Leona's not coming.
"I've got to leave," Owen says, with a hand drawing his Sig Sauer on instinct, but when Leona sets you up you get set up well and just when he's turning back to the door is when Jack nudges it open.
On Owen's end, there's a beat of shocked silence. On Jack's end there's not, and before Owen can get his gun up Jack's got him by the wrist and is twisting the pistol out. Luke's jumped back and there's the phump of clothing hitting the floor and then a tiny calico cat is sprinting past Jack's feet and out the door. Owen has to wonder if Luke could see this coming.
It doesn't help that Jack knows more about how Owen holds a gun than Owen does. More about his reactions, sometimes it seems like more about him. It's what he does, half study and half sculpting, all held together with that particular Harkness élan. Weapons training, Jack still managed to get his hands all over them, No, carry your weight through your hips, like this-
Yeah, he made them good. He made them fucking good, all while half of them he was sizing up for a good fuck, and Owen doesn't owe him anything. He's not the one with Jack against a wall, using every inch and pound of a superior size to keep him there, and saying-
"Long time no see, Owen."
Owen can't decide if it'll be worse to struggle and still not get away or to stand here and just take this as the way things are gonna be. "I was kinda hoping it'd be longer."
Jack sighs, and looks down at Luke's clothes. Then he steps back, but he takes Owen's pistol with him.
Owen steps away from the wall, edging farther into the room because it's the only way away from the wall that doesn't take him closer to Jack. Jack watches him move. There's something different about him, or maybe something the same, but the last time Owen ran into him Jack was half-mad and holding himself together like a junkie through the quakes. This is the old Jack watching him, except the old Jack never kept him reminded of how easily he could kill him, except the old Jack was working for the same team Owen was once upon a time.
"I can't convince myself that where you are now is a step up," Jack says, once it looks like neither of them is about to kill the other.
"Yeah, well..." It's hard to stand there and be smart at the person you drove out of your business, when he's come back to run the show and you've fallen back to a face in the crowd. "Maybe you shouldn't examine it too closely; might strain something. And I know you've always had a problem with that, you know. That... thinking."
Not his cleverest reply, and Jack doesn't seem to think so either. He watches Owen for a moment, and Owen grimaces and looks away. Kicks one pair of jeans sans pants at a chair.
It's not that Jack won. Jack always wins. It's the disappointment in his eyes.
"You know," Jack says, letting his hand wander to the back of a chair. "Your job is still open." Which isn't a big surprise, as they have plenty of medics anyway; after a while it doesn't matter who's Torchwood Three and who's Torchwood Four, so why find a guy to replace him when there's no practical hole to fill? Really, it's more a question why he's bringing it up at all.
Or it should be. Except Owen knows Jack, and Jack forgives, forgives, forgives - he likes being in a position to forgive, it means he's in the right and they're in the wrong and he's got the power and they're there to thank him. That's the way it's always been, except for that lovely stint with Thane, and if he hadn't snapped and torn everyone around him apart Jack would still be playing the angel. Everyone was all too willing to pay back that forgiveness except Owen saw the shark behind the smile, and the way Jack's looking at him now...
"I like where I am," Owen lies, and sets his jaw.
A flash of something passes through the muscles by Jack's eyes, like he's angry or maybe he's troubled and Owen's no good at reading people anyway. "I can get you out," Jack says, and that's just I, not a we of any sort, and Owen isn't about to become the next Suzie Costello, to be rehabilitated on Jack's good graces.
And even if Leona didn't kill him, Mayborne would. Owen's face twists into something he'd like to be wry amusement at Jack's little fantasy world, where he controls everything if he just tries hard enough. Thing is, he can't tell if he'd be amused because it's too true or not at all.
"No, mate. You can't."
Jack keeps watching him. "This isn't what you wanted," he says, at length.
Then Owen's face does twist, but doesn't go farther than that - he's got nothing to say to that, nothing to hit back with, nothing-
Jack flips the pistol and offers it to him, butt-first. Owen snatches it back.
"I'm sorry," Jack says, and Owen almost shoots him there.
Bastard turns and walks away before he's decided to take the chance.
-
First thing he does when he's back in his flat again is write a note to Leona. It almost reads [i am going to kill you in your sleep], but then he remembers that the Organization isn't Torchwood, Leona isn't Jack, and no one maintains an illusion that he's part of a family here and the occasional snark and bile is part of normal interchange. The note he writes is much more careful; [you could have got me killed] instead.
Three and a half hours later, not that he's counting, she replies simply [Now you want him off our backs as much as I do.]
It takes him another five hours to get to where he doesn't want to rip the covers off the journal and throw it in a fire, which, given that his flat doesn't have a fireplace, would take some creativity. He almost goes down to the pub but who's to say Leona wouldn't be there waiting, and he stops just short of putting his desk lamp - or his desk - through his window.
At the end of five, when his hands aren't shaking half so much as they had been, he sits down and scrawls [you use luke as bait. why not hand him off to islington?]
Quickly, too quickly, she writes back [How well does shooting him really work, Owen? You told us all about Thane.]
[so what am i supposed to do?]
He can almost feel her smugness on the other side of the page. [Whatever you need to do.]
It takes him ten minutes not to put his fist into a wall.
[and WHAT's in it for me?]
Even Leona's handwriting, that neatly controlled cursive, makes him think she's smiling. [You get to see him dead.]
-
Never work for Rakshasa. Owen doesn't, but Mayborne is too laid-back to keep Leona off his people and that makes basically all of Black December the go-to guys for the modern-day Whore of Babylon. But it's not the whore part that bothers him so much as the fact that Leona thinks anything that ends in a spray of blood is a good way to solve a problem, and if you spend enough time with her crooning over you, it begins to sound like a pretty good idea.
-
He drops a note to Jack the next day. It's simple, just a place and time, chosen partly because he wants Jack off his guard and partly because he wants to throw something in Jack's face, and this is the worst thing he can think to throw.
He drives out to a construction site in a part of Chicago which never recovered from the economic slump of the plague, climbs up a few floors to a room with a gaping hole in one wall, pulls his gun, and looks around.
The place is a mess. It's been a mess for a long time, and no one's cleaned it up but the elements. There are still clipped-through handcuffs hanging from pipes, still bloodstains, faded and brown, on the floor. Still plenty of evidence what happened here. What Thane was doing here, even when Thane and the done-to haven't been part of the picture for half a year.
Owen hadn't seen this room, during or after. During, he was useless with the rest of Torchwood. After, he was in the back of an SUV, or in the TARDIS, or wherever, holding people together with both hands.
Now that he's seeing it, it's hard to fit Jack in with the cuffs and the tools that rolled into corners or under bundles of wires that no one took away. Of course, he's used to thinking of Thane as something which pushed right up against the skin in Jack, and if you scrape hard enough he'll come up just to prove there's no point in believing goodness from anyone.
This was a bad idea, Owen thinks. Getting Jack off his guard is worth a lot, but not the possibility that this is one of those games where it doesn't matter if the bait gets eaten, the pawn gets sacrificed, the-
The flash of a teleport cuts off any solution he might have found. Owen snaps around to see Jack standing there, expression tight and grim. He doesn't need to take stock of where they are - but then, he wouldn't, would he?
"I'm guessing this isn't a cry for help," Jack says, and Owen almost loses it and laughs. What else is Jack supposed to think it is?
"You," Owen says, "are ten different kinds of shit at helping anyone."
"I know," Jack says. "But I can't stop trying."
Sure you can, Owen thinks. Not trying is the easy part.
Jack steps forward and Owen steps back, and Jack freezes so fast you'd think there was something in the wall behind him. It takes a moment for Owen to recognize there is - a giant gaping hole opening up onto nothing. Jack is still staring like the horsemen of the apocalypse are closing in from the gap, and it's just a few more steps back and no matter how hard Jack charged his hands would close on empty air.
And that's the advantage Owen is looking for, isn't it? If the problem is that Jack always wins, how much is it worth, the threat that he might lose?
It's funny, that. Every advantage Owen could look for or try for and they roll of Jack like water off a duck's back. Shoot him, shun him, nothing does anything until Owen's gun goes up under Owen's chin and that's when Jack looks scared.
Jack's not good with things he can't control.
Jack is holding himself still, watching Owen like for the first time in his life he doesn't know the rules. "What do you want from me?"
From me. It's always Jack, Jack at the middle of everything, and Owen's hand tightens on the gun in a way that has nothing to do with suicide and everything to do with control as a last resort. Fuck him over, fuck him up, Jack's still asking what he can do for Owen and Owen doesn't even know if he's darkly amused. He tilts his head like he's pulling back from shaking it. "You think you're going to give me what I want?"
Jack just watches him. "Try me."
Give me my life back.
Owen's eyes flick to the hands Jack is keeping from going for him or a gun. Funny how threats work out between them. Say I'll kill you and Jack rolls his eyes and spreads his hands. Say I'll kill myself and he's begging.
"Take off your wrist... device. Thing." He indicates it with a quick finger. "That; take it off."
Jack hesitates, half-turning his head to watch him from the corner of his eye. "Why?"
Owen chuckles. It's the kind of chuckle you get when someone decides to squeeze it out of you. Because I want to shoot you in the head. "You don't know why?" Because it's every unfair advantage you've ever had.
"Owen..." Jack says, and Owen digs the barrel of the gun up into his skin. Jack tenses visibly.
"Do it," Owen whispers. Ignore the absurdity. Your old pariah, your black sheep, will shoot himself if you don't take off a wristband. It's not the most outrageous thing he's ever asked - asking Torchwood, even by implication, to give him anything like meaning was that.
Jack moves slowly, but it's a no-sudden-moves kind of slow and not a stalling slow. He undoes the wrist device, bends down to place it on the floor, and takes two steps back from it. His attention is fixed on Owen and the gun in his hands.
Owen honestly doesn't think Jack knows what's coming until Jack closes his eyes.
Martyr.
Owen fires the bullet.
It crashes through skin and bone and brain and out the other side, painting a spray of gore out into the room and Jack hits the floor in a sprawl while Owen steps forward. It's an average of 38 seconds, revival from a gunshot to the head, but he's got insurance this time. Insurance comes as a metal rod the length of his shin, tapered to a point at one end, that Owen rolls Jack onto his back for and drives down into his heart.
It's a clever little thing Leona came up with. All the subtlety of a machete and beartraps, but it keeps the job done. The rod goes in between the ribs and through the heart and out the other side and then the clamps go on the rod to keep it from sliding out. It takes a bit of force - it takes a lot of force, dragging it through those last few inches once Jack's been rolled onto his side, through the muscle, out between the bones - and by the time it's done Owen's breath is scraping in his throat.
Even if he thinks the dignity of death is a fairy story, pushing and shoving and mangling a corpse so it flops about in its own blood on the floor would turn his stomach even if he didn't know the man the corpse used to be. Jack's on his side, because having a rod jammed through your chest doesn't allow you to lie peacefully supine, and there's blood on Owen's hands and trouser legs and still seeping out of Jack and through his coat and onto the floor.
If this was supposed to fix anything - for him, for Leona, for the Org - he's not feeling it.
Owen lets his head drop, lets his forehead rest on Jack's shoulder where he can smell the man's cologne, except he's been sure for a while that it's probably not cologne. It's not because of the obvious questions - where would he get it here, why'd no one else have it - but it's because this isn't the first time he's handled Jack's corpse, and it was the first time that told him.
It wasn't the bullet to the head. That got him time to open the Rift and while he would have hauled Jack to the morgue after some thought, he didn't get a chance because Jack got up all aghast before he could and then went to the Beast and let it kill him just-
Like this.
And then three days in the morgue and he didn't decompose, came walking out like Jesus (and doesn't that just fit the pattern, John, Jack, Judas, Jesus) and the first time Owen ever broke down in front of him (never let the bastards see you cry) Jack had been there holding him, and he'd smelled mostly like the morgue and a bit exactly like this.
Minus the blood.
And who thinks of that, really?-save the world, die and ressurect, who thinks I'd better freshen up and just has a bottle on hand? And it's odd now, that here where Owen's apparently won and there are still things left to do, agents to contact before Torchwood finds them and additional precautions to take, that he's fixating on the smell of Jack's skin beneath the bloody wool of his coat.
The problem is that all of this, chasing Jack off, joining the Org, it was never about who deserved to live or anyone deserving to die. It was about Jack fucking up everything he touched, Owen trying not to touch anything, Torchwood being a collection of people who wouldn't know the way out of their problems if they came with a roadmap, all of them needing something different and cancelling each others' signals. Now he's here and there is no signal, all noise, and having Jack dead doesn't make that much difference against having him alive.
So what's he here for?
There's always the one solution, of course. Pull out the rod, let the wound heal, pretend none of this ever happened even when the blood spilled between them makes it clear that it did. Jack forgave him for killing him once. Jack at his position at the top and centre of everything, Jack always forgives.
Of course Leona doesn't, and Leona is the one waiting for him to come back with Jack's corpse.
-
-
Putting a pub in the Sunset Vista Estates was the best thing anyone ever did.
Owen is three drinks down and working on becoming really drunk when Leona walks behind him, and Owen could tell it was her even without the mirror behind the bartender and the crackle of silence in the air. It's the fingers trailing up the back of his neck: hot, so she's really not interested, but there, testing every joint in his spine in a way the feels far more invasive than anything his job has him do.
"I like the look of blood on a man," Leona says, hand slipping down as she slides into a seat beside him. A flick of her wrist and the bartender is pouring a glass for her, which she caresses and doesn't drink.
"I killed him," Owen says. "That's really all you asked me to do."
Leona turns to him. "You know, I like working with you," she says, and that's not true. She likes to control him, and that's something he recognises when he sees it.
"He's probably still there," he says. Probably. Depending on how much Jack tells his team, how much his team is looking out for him. "Islington's guys know where."
He starts raising the glass to his mouth and Leona catches his hand, closing both her palms over it and pulling him around to look into her eyes.
As for being bought and sold, as for having bosses with the worlds in their laps, Owen has to say he's not too impressed with those eyes.
"I hope he is," Leona says. Then, finger by finger, she releases him. "You'd better finish your drink."
Yeah. No time like the present.
Owen drinks. Leona watches them both in the mirror. Picking out the reflected faces, the crowd he gets lost in here, Owen notices one of them behind them - one of Leona's secretaries, watching his journal, waiting for the news to come in.
Characters: Owen Harper, Leona Sandric, Jack Harkness, with a cameo by Luke Roberts.
Words: ~5400
Beta: None, unfortunately. You can tell because there are giant infodumps all over the place and the beginning, middle, and ending are just barely on speaking terms.
Rating: R/18 for darkness.
Summary: Then it fell apart. Like it always does.
Disclaimer: THIS IS NONCANON. If this were canon, I might cry. Indulgence is asked for the overindulgent self-reflective passages. Jack Harkness, Owen Harper and the rest of the Torchwood contingent belong to the BBC. Leona Sandric is mine, Luke Roberts is Rizzy's, Harry Mayborne is MGM's, Arlin Keysa/Aaron Islington is L Savich's, and whoever else might have been mentioned belongs to whoever they belong to. Zero Wing is the intellectual property of Toaplan or something.
-
The best thing anyone ever did was put a pub in the Sunset Vista Estates.
At least that was Owen's opinion five minutes ago. Now he's getting a bad feeling from the shift in the buzz of conversation, the crackle of silence from the direction of the door. When someone big walks in you can feel it in the air.
Leona walks behind him, and Owen could tell it was her even without the full-length mirror behind the bartender. It's the fingers trailing up the back of the neck: hot, so she's really not interested, but assured, so he's going to spend the night in the palm of her hand anyway. Fuck. Next time the bottle comes back to his room.
"Hasn't anyone ever told you it's bad luck to drink alone?" she says, melting into a seat beside him and watching the mirror without looking in his direction. He returns the favour, staring into the last swallow of whiskey in his glass.
"Leona."
"Your old friends are problems; I can see why you liked them," she says, never mind that like is not a word which applies with great regularity or accuracy to Owen's opinions of people in general. He's more concerned with what could possibly concern her in a way that would concern him.
"My old friends didn't listen to me when we were friends," he says. "You want me to do something about them now?"
Leona calls the bartender to with a quirked little finger. A flick of her index and he's pouring her a shot from a bottle she'd indicated, and a slight inclination of her head and he's pouring another for Owen. It's always annoying, Leona's habit of buying him when she could say jump and he'd have to. Orders he can swallow; he doesn't like being bought.
"There's this man," she says, "the best efforts of First Angels and Organization agents alike can't seem to take down. That's a bit embarrassing, don't you think? Older and wiser and more established people just keep on failing. I'm sure if we put our minds to it, we could find a way to succeed."
That's a you-and-I "we", cleverly disguised as an Organization "we". Leona's always been ambitious.
"Jack?" Owen says, and eyes her. "I haven't even been back since he's been in charge. Last I saw him he was beating a path for the nearest door, never to return for maybe two weeks this time."
Finest moment, that. Chasing him out of the Tower once and shooting him in the head once before: the only two times he'd controlled anything between them. He finishes his drink.
"I've got nothing on him."
"You've got everything on him," Leona says, leaning in close enough he can feel the heat off her skin. Then she turns her head, so to all appearances she's talking to her reflection in the mirror, another Leona who's leaning just as close to a mirror-Owen who wants just as little to do with her. "You know he's been sniffing around after you. Got a bit too close to one of my boys the other day."
Jack can't keep anything of his to himself.
"You know, you should meet him," Owen says. "Probably just your type." And if she has a problem, she can learn for herself how impossible it is to fix those.
Leona leans forward. "What would you say if I said we could kill him?"
Owen's hand tightens on his glass, and he stares down at the refractions of light through the liquid. Yeah, funny thing about killing Jack. Really funny thing. "I'd say one of us was having a wet dream."
Leona chuckles, and the bartender sweeps by again in two flicks of her fingers and an eyebrow raised in commanding arch. Yeah, just Leona's type. The same smug cockiness, the same world spread out for her pickings. It's a pattern he's in, even if he technically works under Mayborne. His entire life he's been selling his soul to progressively worse buyers, and it's a wonder he has anything left to sell. "You were the one who came in with that lovely list of ways we could."
"Yeah, stake through the heart, way too much radiation. Big list." It's times like this Owen regrets not being a paranoid little fuck; he could have copied that entry out longhand. Photocopied it. Something. Now that he doesn't count as Torchwood in anyone's eyes, it's not like he has access to it any more.
Maybe there's something to be said for keeping an exit strategy.
"Hurt him and keep him from healing," Leona says. "Easy in principle. Hard when you can't get someone in close, and Luke's a kitten, even when he's not. Can't ask him to put a knife through someone."
That's what Owen gets. The dirty work. At least it's a break from legwork and support. "And what," he asks, "makes you think he won't shoot me as soon as he finds me?"
Oh, that's unlikely, he knows, unless Jack's in the mood to be cleaning up loose ends. Hell if Owen's ever known what Jack was thinking. Leona is either of the same opinion or thinks she knows something more - or doesn't care for Owen's life one way or another - and slips a hand over Owen's thigh.
Still hot. Still uninterested, and the grip says You think you have a choice? more than I can make this worth your while. "Oh, Owen," she purrs. "You think we don't take care of our own?"
Torchwood thought that, too.
"Why are you seeing to this?" He's just drunk enough not to care what he says, not drunk enough not to be able to say it. "Killing people is Islington's job. You keep the whores."
Leona smiles like he's lucky to survive that question, or maybe it's just she knows something he doesn't know. Big surprise. "Can't let the boys do all the heavy lifting, can we?" Translation: she's always a foot up on the game, and slow and steady wins.
The game is about what you'd expect: the Organization prizes Leona because Leona gets things done; Leona cares for the Organization because the Organization gives her power. The Organization cares for Owen because he once sold them the information they needed to knock a threat out of the game for a while. Owen doesn't care for the Organization at all.
-
Owen came to the Organization because it was better than going back to the Conrad Hotel and working as a doctor around a bunch of archangels, half of whom were still raw at Torchwood for Jack killing a bunch of their friends. This sort of problem was basically everywhere he went. Jack Harkness cast a very large shadow.
Of course, the thing about dumping your special operatives is that you've got to take precautions to make sure other special ops groups don't poach them away from you, and the thing about Torchwood is it's never been good at taking precautions on anything.
Five days after Owen turned up on the streets, the Organization tore down Torchwood's bank accounts. Threw a bit of legal trouble their way concerning the deeds to the Tower, which was a fine way to make it look to the local Neqa'el that Torchwood got into more trouble, perhaps, than he wanted to associate with. A bit of espionage here, a bit of misinformation there, one or two Torchwood employees picked up and taken for rides - oh, no one got hurt. Mayborne wasn't the type to drop a hammer when a feather would do. But Gwen sent him away and he sent them reeling, and it's been a month or two and Torchwood's just now creeping out of its shadows with Jack at the helm. Serves them right.
For the most part there's no love lost between Owen and Torchwood, Jack least of all. Well. Tosh he still feels bad about, before reminding himself there's no fucking reason why he should. Not as if her voice was raised in protest when Gwen told him to get out and take his hacking apart of the team with him. Not like she'd take his side against Jack, even having more than enough reason to.
It hadn't been a trial of worth or fitness, it had been a battle of cults of personality and Jack, even in absentia, had won. So what? Jack always wins; it's in the rules of any game he plays. It reminds Owen of Leona, in a way, but with Leona it's a bit more of a gamble. With Jack it's always been a stacked deck.
Jack came back from trying to kill, rape or torture them all and wedged himself into Torchwood like a fifth and radioactive wheel - didn't do much but poison them all. Owen took the initiative and cornered him one day, pointed out that they'd be better off without him and without him dropping in every few lunar cycles and leaving them to hang from his mistakes the rest of the time, and wonder of wonders, Jack left. Gwen took issue with his making sense and told him to get the hell away from Torchwood. Kicked him to the kerb of friendly fair Chicago and all he had to trade on, in the absence of unfailing love for Harkness Their Lord And Saviour, was what really only looked like intimate knowledge of the most presumptuous Wanderer organisation to fall through and set up shop.
This is what he got for it: a nice, quiet flat in the Sunset Vista Estates, an exercise room, a steady paycheck. Access to whores he doesn't care about, drinks that do nothing for him, a snarl of power plays he tries to ignore which will probably kill him one day.
It's enough.
It's enough that he's still a thorn in Torchwood's side, even here across the city. It's enough that he can take the gun from his shoulder holster and hang it from the headboard of his bed and not think about where it came from or what it'll be shooting in a day. It's enough that Jack fucking Harkness isn't a face he has to see when he comes in, even if he is, because they're going to kill him. It's enough that even if things have gone wrong they've gone wrong in a nice and orderly way and a way he really should have predicted.
When Owen gets back to his room, he flips through his journal to keep up on whatever's going on. Takes a moment to either write or talk himself out of writing a note to Jack that just says [leave me alone], and once he's closed the cover he's not certain if he wrote it or not.
He drops onto the bed on his face, without changing out of his work clothes.
It's enough that even if he can't have the life he thinks he's earned, at least he's on point in destroying it. Except that's not enough for anything. It's not what he wanted, so of course it's what he gets.
At least sleep comes easier with alcohol.
-
The next day, after Mayborne has him in for a quick medical check over an agent shipping off to Cambodia, and after Mayborne gives him absolutely no concern and an almost Jackish level of insouciance about the fact that Leona's trying to slip him an executive order on the side, Owen checks his journal to find that Leona's asked him out to a hotel room somewhere at a time she's written down to the minute. [Don't be late.] He brings his pistol and a basic medkit with him, because it's not in neutral territory and he doesn't trust Leona as far as he could throw her.
He drives out to the hotel and takes the stairs up to the room indicated - lifts are asking for trouble, really - and knocks, and a scrawny kid with blond-tipped hair opens the door. A bit disheveled, not dressed like anyone important - worn jeans, plain shirt. Owen has the feeling he should know him, from the Organization, from somewhere else...
"...Leona sent me," he says, stepping in on instinct when the kid steps back, if only to get out of the hall.
"I'm... not working," the kid says, and that's when Owen recognizes him and freezes. Luke. Luke Roberts. Owen's not comfortable around any of Leona's whores, but it's a hell of a lot worse when they're friends with people he's supposedly been friends with who Leona wants dead.
And suddenly Owen's got the feeling that Leona's not coming.
"I've got to leave," Owen says, with a hand drawing his Sig Sauer on instinct, but when Leona sets you up you get set up well and just when he's turning back to the door is when Jack nudges it open.
On Owen's end, there's a beat of shocked silence. On Jack's end there's not, and before Owen can get his gun up Jack's got him by the wrist and is twisting the pistol out. Luke's jumped back and there's the phump of clothing hitting the floor and then a tiny calico cat is sprinting past Jack's feet and out the door. Owen has to wonder if Luke could see this coming.
It doesn't help that Jack knows more about how Owen holds a gun than Owen does. More about his reactions, sometimes it seems like more about him. It's what he does, half study and half sculpting, all held together with that particular Harkness élan. Weapons training, Jack still managed to get his hands all over them, No, carry your weight through your hips, like this-
Yeah, he made them good. He made them fucking good, all while half of them he was sizing up for a good fuck, and Owen doesn't owe him anything. He's not the one with Jack against a wall, using every inch and pound of a superior size to keep him there, and saying-
"Long time no see, Owen."
Owen can't decide if it'll be worse to struggle and still not get away or to stand here and just take this as the way things are gonna be. "I was kinda hoping it'd be longer."
Jack sighs, and looks down at Luke's clothes. Then he steps back, but he takes Owen's pistol with him.
Owen steps away from the wall, edging farther into the room because it's the only way away from the wall that doesn't take him closer to Jack. Jack watches him move. There's something different about him, or maybe something the same, but the last time Owen ran into him Jack was half-mad and holding himself together like a junkie through the quakes. This is the old Jack watching him, except the old Jack never kept him reminded of how easily he could kill him, except the old Jack was working for the same team Owen was once upon a time.
"I can't convince myself that where you are now is a step up," Jack says, once it looks like neither of them is about to kill the other.
"Yeah, well..." It's hard to stand there and be smart at the person you drove out of your business, when he's come back to run the show and you've fallen back to a face in the crowd. "Maybe you shouldn't examine it too closely; might strain something. And I know you've always had a problem with that, you know. That... thinking."
Not his cleverest reply, and Jack doesn't seem to think so either. He watches Owen for a moment, and Owen grimaces and looks away. Kicks one pair of jeans sans pants at a chair.
It's not that Jack won. Jack always wins. It's the disappointment in his eyes.
"You know," Jack says, letting his hand wander to the back of a chair. "Your job is still open." Which isn't a big surprise, as they have plenty of medics anyway; after a while it doesn't matter who's Torchwood Three and who's Torchwood Four, so why find a guy to replace him when there's no practical hole to fill? Really, it's more a question why he's bringing it up at all.
Or it should be. Except Owen knows Jack, and Jack forgives, forgives, forgives - he likes being in a position to forgive, it means he's in the right and they're in the wrong and he's got the power and they're there to thank him. That's the way it's always been, except for that lovely stint with Thane, and if he hadn't snapped and torn everyone around him apart Jack would still be playing the angel. Everyone was all too willing to pay back that forgiveness except Owen saw the shark behind the smile, and the way Jack's looking at him now...
"I like where I am," Owen lies, and sets his jaw.
A flash of something passes through the muscles by Jack's eyes, like he's angry or maybe he's troubled and Owen's no good at reading people anyway. "I can get you out," Jack says, and that's just I, not a we of any sort, and Owen isn't about to become the next Suzie Costello, to be rehabilitated on Jack's good graces.
And even if Leona didn't kill him, Mayborne would. Owen's face twists into something he'd like to be wry amusement at Jack's little fantasy world, where he controls everything if he just tries hard enough. Thing is, he can't tell if he'd be amused because it's too true or not at all.
"No, mate. You can't."
Jack keeps watching him. "This isn't what you wanted," he says, at length.
Then Owen's face does twist, but doesn't go farther than that - he's got nothing to say to that, nothing to hit back with, nothing-
Jack flips the pistol and offers it to him, butt-first. Owen snatches it back.
"I'm sorry," Jack says, and Owen almost shoots him there.
Bastard turns and walks away before he's decided to take the chance.
-
First thing he does when he's back in his flat again is write a note to Leona. It almost reads [i am going to kill you in your sleep], but then he remembers that the Organization isn't Torchwood, Leona isn't Jack, and no one maintains an illusion that he's part of a family here and the occasional snark and bile is part of normal interchange. The note he writes is much more careful; [you could have got me killed] instead.
Three and a half hours later, not that he's counting, she replies simply [Now you want him off our backs as much as I do.]
It takes him another five hours to get to where he doesn't want to rip the covers off the journal and throw it in a fire, which, given that his flat doesn't have a fireplace, would take some creativity. He almost goes down to the pub but who's to say Leona wouldn't be there waiting, and he stops just short of putting his desk lamp - or his desk - through his window.
At the end of five, when his hands aren't shaking half so much as they had been, he sits down and scrawls [you use luke as bait. why not hand him off to islington?]
Quickly, too quickly, she writes back [How well does shooting him really work, Owen? You told us all about Thane.]
[so what am i supposed to do?]
He can almost feel her smugness on the other side of the page. [Whatever you need to do.]
It takes him ten minutes not to put his fist into a wall.
[and WHAT's in it for me?]
Even Leona's handwriting, that neatly controlled cursive, makes him think she's smiling. [You get to see him dead.]
-
Never work for Rakshasa. Owen doesn't, but Mayborne is too laid-back to keep Leona off his people and that makes basically all of Black December the go-to guys for the modern-day Whore of Babylon. But it's not the whore part that bothers him so much as the fact that Leona thinks anything that ends in a spray of blood is a good way to solve a problem, and if you spend enough time with her crooning over you, it begins to sound like a pretty good idea.
-
He drops a note to Jack the next day. It's simple, just a place and time, chosen partly because he wants Jack off his guard and partly because he wants to throw something in Jack's face, and this is the worst thing he can think to throw.
He drives out to a construction site in a part of Chicago which never recovered from the economic slump of the plague, climbs up a few floors to a room with a gaping hole in one wall, pulls his gun, and looks around.
The place is a mess. It's been a mess for a long time, and no one's cleaned it up but the elements. There are still clipped-through handcuffs hanging from pipes, still bloodstains, faded and brown, on the floor. Still plenty of evidence what happened here. What Thane was doing here, even when Thane and the done-to haven't been part of the picture for half a year.
Owen hadn't seen this room, during or after. During, he was useless with the rest of Torchwood. After, he was in the back of an SUV, or in the TARDIS, or wherever, holding people together with both hands.
Now that he's seeing it, it's hard to fit Jack in with the cuffs and the tools that rolled into corners or under bundles of wires that no one took away. Of course, he's used to thinking of Thane as something which pushed right up against the skin in Jack, and if you scrape hard enough he'll come up just to prove there's no point in believing goodness from anyone.
This was a bad idea, Owen thinks. Getting Jack off his guard is worth a lot, but not the possibility that this is one of those games where it doesn't matter if the bait gets eaten, the pawn gets sacrificed, the-
The flash of a teleport cuts off any solution he might have found. Owen snaps around to see Jack standing there, expression tight and grim. He doesn't need to take stock of where they are - but then, he wouldn't, would he?
"I'm guessing this isn't a cry for help," Jack says, and Owen almost loses it and laughs. What else is Jack supposed to think it is?
"You," Owen says, "are ten different kinds of shit at helping anyone."
"I know," Jack says. "But I can't stop trying."
Sure you can, Owen thinks. Not trying is the easy part.
Jack steps forward and Owen steps back, and Jack freezes so fast you'd think there was something in the wall behind him. It takes a moment for Owen to recognize there is - a giant gaping hole opening up onto nothing. Jack is still staring like the horsemen of the apocalypse are closing in from the gap, and it's just a few more steps back and no matter how hard Jack charged his hands would close on empty air.
And that's the advantage Owen is looking for, isn't it? If the problem is that Jack always wins, how much is it worth, the threat that he might lose?
It's funny, that. Every advantage Owen could look for or try for and they roll of Jack like water off a duck's back. Shoot him, shun him, nothing does anything until Owen's gun goes up under Owen's chin and that's when Jack looks scared.
Jack's not good with things he can't control.
Jack is holding himself still, watching Owen like for the first time in his life he doesn't know the rules. "What do you want from me?"
From me. It's always Jack, Jack at the middle of everything, and Owen's hand tightens on the gun in a way that has nothing to do with suicide and everything to do with control as a last resort. Fuck him over, fuck him up, Jack's still asking what he can do for Owen and Owen doesn't even know if he's darkly amused. He tilts his head like he's pulling back from shaking it. "You think you're going to give me what I want?"
Jack just watches him. "Try me."
Give me my life back.
Owen's eyes flick to the hands Jack is keeping from going for him or a gun. Funny how threats work out between them. Say I'll kill you and Jack rolls his eyes and spreads his hands. Say I'll kill myself and he's begging.
"Take off your wrist... device. Thing." He indicates it with a quick finger. "That; take it off."
Jack hesitates, half-turning his head to watch him from the corner of his eye. "Why?"
Owen chuckles. It's the kind of chuckle you get when someone decides to squeeze it out of you. Because I want to shoot you in the head. "You don't know why?" Because it's every unfair advantage you've ever had.
"Owen..." Jack says, and Owen digs the barrel of the gun up into his skin. Jack tenses visibly.
"Do it," Owen whispers. Ignore the absurdity. Your old pariah, your black sheep, will shoot himself if you don't take off a wristband. It's not the most outrageous thing he's ever asked - asking Torchwood, even by implication, to give him anything like meaning was that.
Jack moves slowly, but it's a no-sudden-moves kind of slow and not a stalling slow. He undoes the wrist device, bends down to place it on the floor, and takes two steps back from it. His attention is fixed on Owen and the gun in his hands.
Owen honestly doesn't think Jack knows what's coming until Jack closes his eyes.
Martyr.
Owen fires the bullet.
It crashes through skin and bone and brain and out the other side, painting a spray of gore out into the room and Jack hits the floor in a sprawl while Owen steps forward. It's an average of 38 seconds, revival from a gunshot to the head, but he's got insurance this time. Insurance comes as a metal rod the length of his shin, tapered to a point at one end, that Owen rolls Jack onto his back for and drives down into his heart.
It's a clever little thing Leona came up with. All the subtlety of a machete and beartraps, but it keeps the job done. The rod goes in between the ribs and through the heart and out the other side and then the clamps go on the rod to keep it from sliding out. It takes a bit of force - it takes a lot of force, dragging it through those last few inches once Jack's been rolled onto his side, through the muscle, out between the bones - and by the time it's done Owen's breath is scraping in his throat.
Even if he thinks the dignity of death is a fairy story, pushing and shoving and mangling a corpse so it flops about in its own blood on the floor would turn his stomach even if he didn't know the man the corpse used to be. Jack's on his side, because having a rod jammed through your chest doesn't allow you to lie peacefully supine, and there's blood on Owen's hands and trouser legs and still seeping out of Jack and through his coat and onto the floor.
If this was supposed to fix anything - for him, for Leona, for the Org - he's not feeling it.
Owen lets his head drop, lets his forehead rest on Jack's shoulder where he can smell the man's cologne, except he's been sure for a while that it's probably not cologne. It's not because of the obvious questions - where would he get it here, why'd no one else have it - but it's because this isn't the first time he's handled Jack's corpse, and it was the first time that told him.
It wasn't the bullet to the head. That got him time to open the Rift and while he would have hauled Jack to the morgue after some thought, he didn't get a chance because Jack got up all aghast before he could and then went to the Beast and let it kill him just-
Like this.
And then three days in the morgue and he didn't decompose, came walking out like Jesus (and doesn't that just fit the pattern, John, Jack, Judas, Jesus) and the first time Owen ever broke down in front of him (never let the bastards see you cry) Jack had been there holding him, and he'd smelled mostly like the morgue and a bit exactly like this.
Minus the blood.
And who thinks of that, really?-save the world, die and ressurect, who thinks I'd better freshen up and just has a bottle on hand? And it's odd now, that here where Owen's apparently won and there are still things left to do, agents to contact before Torchwood finds them and additional precautions to take, that he's fixating on the smell of Jack's skin beneath the bloody wool of his coat.
The problem is that all of this, chasing Jack off, joining the Org, it was never about who deserved to live or anyone deserving to die. It was about Jack fucking up everything he touched, Owen trying not to touch anything, Torchwood being a collection of people who wouldn't know the way out of their problems if they came with a roadmap, all of them needing something different and cancelling each others' signals. Now he's here and there is no signal, all noise, and having Jack dead doesn't make that much difference against having him alive.
So what's he here for?
There's always the one solution, of course. Pull out the rod, let the wound heal, pretend none of this ever happened even when the blood spilled between them makes it clear that it did. Jack forgave him for killing him once. Jack at his position at the top and centre of everything, Jack always forgives.
Of course Leona doesn't, and Leona is the one waiting for him to come back with Jack's corpse.
-
-
Putting a pub in the Sunset Vista Estates was the best thing anyone ever did.
Owen is three drinks down and working on becoming really drunk when Leona walks behind him, and Owen could tell it was her even without the mirror behind the bartender and the crackle of silence in the air. It's the fingers trailing up the back of his neck: hot, so she's really not interested, but there, testing every joint in his spine in a way the feels far more invasive than anything his job has him do.
"I like the look of blood on a man," Leona says, hand slipping down as she slides into a seat beside him. A flick of her wrist and the bartender is pouring a glass for her, which she caresses and doesn't drink.
"I killed him," Owen says. "That's really all you asked me to do."
Leona turns to him. "You know, I like working with you," she says, and that's not true. She likes to control him, and that's something he recognises when he sees it.
"He's probably still there," he says. Probably. Depending on how much Jack tells his team, how much his team is looking out for him. "Islington's guys know where."
He starts raising the glass to his mouth and Leona catches his hand, closing both her palms over it and pulling him around to look into her eyes.
As for being bought and sold, as for having bosses with the worlds in their laps, Owen has to say he's not too impressed with those eyes.
"I hope he is," Leona says. Then, finger by finger, she releases him. "You'd better finish your drink."
Yeah. No time like the present.
Owen drinks. Leona watches them both in the mirror. Picking out the reflected faces, the crowd he gets lost in here, Owen notices one of them behind them - one of Leona's secretaries, watching his journal, waiting for the news to come in.