[FIC] Sixty days of sweat and dirt / 2
Title: Sixty days of sweat and dirt
Part: Two
Word Count: 7800
Summary: Heading down through Hammond, J-- runs into something which isn't a meth lab, a young woman, and a pair of not-unfriendly ghosts.
A/N: I DON'T KNOW WHY THESE THINGS KEEP GETTING EPIC WHILE I'M NOT WATCHING. This has to be serialized because it won't all fit in one post. It's unbeta'd. It's a first rough draft and probably won't make it to a second. It's to be continued. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: OCs are mine. Jack was yoinked from the BBC and drastically AU'd. Desmond Descant belogns to kawaiispinel. The Rift is a lot of peoples'. Opinions listed in this fic are those of the characters and not of any Barrowman. Reading fic does not enable reader to fly.
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Jim, he thought, walking down the side of State Highway 20. Jim was a repulsively common name that still fit the naming conventions. Possibly Jake, though Jake was too close to Jack for comfort, and he almost had to wonder why he was following the naming conventions at all in this place when the Chula and Time Agency were just as unreliable as they always had been. The answer was obvious, though: he was rid of his time with Torchwood, he was rid of his time as a renegade Agent, and if he got rid of his training as an Agent proper, there would be nothing left to hold on to.
In any case he needed a name of some sort, and the naming convention made them easier to internalize. The sooner he could internalize an alias the sooner he could use the journals again. It might not be the best safeguard against the system getting hacked, but a Jacob or a Justin or a Joel would raise fewer flags than Judas. He could go by J, could draw it out to Jay, but J was an interstitial, a name code, a nonidentity. After getting an emotion limiter stuck in his head, after having all sense of self broken to hell, after living one set of lies or incomplete truths and then another then another, he'd had enough of being a nonperson.
He was walking aimlessly south, planning to close out the night on the road before turning off it, wondering where to go from there.
In a way it was probably a good thing that he'd left Anata's bar. They were all beginning to get too familiar, Bell and Marcus and even Anata from the way she'd had Marcus tell him about life on the lam and the way she'd put those ten bills into his hand. He'd never planned to stay long anyway.
He stopped at one point to work a stone out from between the treads of his shoe.
He'd never planned anything. Escape Torchwood, escape Chicago, leave Illinois, find somewhere to get his bearings and move decisively on from there. The problem was, when he'd paused to take his bearings, all he'd learned was that he was nowhere, in more ways than one.
J read a mile marker as he walked past; he squinted at the next sign in the distance. He didn't know what he wanted, other than not to end up in a cell or staring at the faces of everyone he'd ruined. Tried to ruin. Whatever. He couldn't even fall one way or the other - ultimate contrition, ultimate enmity. He wanted both. He hated both. There was no way out, that way.
Ten minutes later he stepped off the road to let a semi past, which blared at him irately. It continued north, toward Whiting, toward the border. He kept walking.
The last act of Jack Harkness had been an act of submission - to Elashte, to some notion of moral propriety handed down from a man who couldn't live it either, to the current structure of the world and the fact that someone like him was afforded no place in it. The first act of Judas Reyc had been to grab onto the nearest hand and ask it to guide him, and the Chula had shut him up and thrown him back to the lambs and the wolves.
Now he was out for himself. No one to fail him, no one to fail, no one to expect the things that made failing possible. After the vastness of space and time it was a damn small world, but at least it was large enough to lose himself in.
Two miles down the road he caught the telltale scent of fire.
MARY - Hammond, IN
I-90, the Indiana Toll Road, held close to the northern Indiana border before dipping into Ohio, but here in the northwest corner of the state it was just changing directions from southeast to east. It cut through a NIMBY-zoned patch of land by the sewage treatment facility on W 152nd and Highway 20, dominated mostly by dead grass, radio towers, and a green and muddy creek taking a wide arc through the area.
It also overlooked a large white van half-buried under camouflage nets in a ditch perhaps a quarter of a mile off the road, which was now industriously burning.
J came upon it at a jog. No one was in the area, and no one's voices could be heard, but vans didn't tend to catch themselves on fire and the flames themselves, licking out of the hood, were more than self-evident.
They were also a distressing shade of alcohol-blue.
Reflex dictated the run down to the side of the van, not that he had any conscious interest in do-gooding; if nothing else, engine fires usually burned an oily dark orange, not the hot blue-white better suited to an alcohol fire. Something was strange, strange meant specialized knowledge, specialized knowledge was leverage and power, and if Whiting had been any indication, this area wasn't big on supernatural presence beyond the native.
There was no one in the driver's seat, or the passenger's. He ducked to the back and pulled one hand inside his jacket sleeve, pulling open the rear door, but the back compartment was similarly empty - all it boasted was a line of covered buckets, a battery-powered camp lantern hanging from the ceiling, and more lab equipment than belonged in an unmarked white van of honorable intent. The air, however, was strangely cool, and with the amount of fire going on at the front of the van, it was a good question how the hell the rear compartment wasn't-
He knocked the lid off a bucket and winced away from a faint blue glow emanating from within. The rest of the equipment in here was more or less self-explanatory - material for refining, for chemical production of something or other, most likely drugs, most likely meth given the industrial-sized jars of over-the-counters, but as little as he knew about meth production, he was reasonably certain that phosphorescence like this wasn't normal.
Especially when, now that he looked at it up close, it bore an eerie similarity to Čerenkov radiation.
He reached up and turned off the lantern, expecting to see if any of the stuff had spilled.
Instead he saw, in the sudden darkness, a glowing blue mist suffusing the cabin, concentrated around the barrels but permeating the walls and the remains of a broken beaker on the ground. He turned.
Then he saw the ghosts.
One was reaching for the beaker, extending her hand - it was female-shaped, though further specifics were blurred - and snapping back, as though replaying the last two seconds as the beaker had dropped. The other had been caught mid-startle, rising from a crouch and turning before finding itself crouched again, both of them jerking forward and back in symphony.
And then he heard the sirens.
There was a fact he'd neglected to remind himself of in his curiosity - sometimes, especially in the middle of the night, police would close on a location without their lights or sirens on. This, they did both to avoid waking up the neighborhood and to keep their suspects from noticing a noisy lightshow descending on them. Of course, once they had the suspects enclosed in a ring of cars, it didn't much matter.
The sirens started up like a pack of wolves, chorusing in from different directions, and J only opened the van door long enough to poke his head out and confirm that. The air outside was sharp, smoke-smeared and cold, he was stuck in a van with something decidedly not a normal meth lab, and now he was cornered by police.
Great. It would figure that the ones who actually got him against a proverbial wall were the ones after him on suspicion of the wrong crime.
He pulled the door shut, growling at his surroundings. From the front of the van the fire had progressed to an audible crackle, and he could feel the air warming imperceptibly - nothing like the searing heat he should have been feeling, but not a good sign anyway. So, he was caught between a line of cops and an engine fire. Brilliant.
Well, the police weren't going to approach so long as the van was threatening to explode. That was some consolation, except for the fact that exploding vans were notoriously even less safe than edgy police officers. Until then the only danger was that he'd be sublimed into a glowing blue ghost caught in a repeating loop.
"This is ridiculous."
Someone had employed a loudspeaker. The noise came in garbled by distance and walls - step out, hands up, the usual. The van offered no clever escapes, other than hoping that the explosion, when it occurred, would send him flying at a trajectory they couldn't follow or trace before he revived.
"Okay, think."
Getting caught was a bad idea, even if there wouldn't be much evidence after the van exploded. (A wad of cash and absolutely no identification would not go over well.) Running might just get him riddled full of bullets, or at least tasered long enough to temporarily disable him, and god tasering was not something he wanted to relive at the moment.
Loudspeaker man was becoming more enunciated, more insistent. J walked to the front of the compartment, tapping the wall and grabbing his hand back with a hiss. Something was getting hot, even if the fog kept the air temperature low.
"What the hell were you two doing in here?" he asked the ghosts.
Unsurprisingly, they didn't answer.
He pressed his fingers into his temples. Right. He needed a way out. Something which wouldn't be stopped, wouldn't be shot...
Something occurred to him.
"This..."
It wasn't as though shifters weren't tactically advantaged for just this reason.
"...is ridiculous."
He stripped down. Replacing the clothes - and the money! - would be a problem, but it would be easier than breaking out of a jail cell under suspicion of drug manufacturing.
Shifter, Marcus had said. Shifters became animals; animals were non-noteworthy. Unless of course he turned into something totally inappropriate for this area like an echidna or a kangaroo or something, but at least he had more of a chance of confounding the police and getting out of the haunted van as something wildly unexpected than as a human.
He closed his eyes. Focused on becoming small; focused on the sick bone-ache he'd felt when Elliot had gone after him in the bar, focused on being not human-
All his muscles cramped at once. They were contracting, pulling in with enough force that they shrunk the bones along with them - his skin was getting thicker, bristling with a short coat of fur, and he bit back a yell that turned into a yelp as his throat restructured itself and his teeth threw themselves forward and took the rest of his jaw dragging with them. He hit the ground and scrambled to his feet, then fell into a different equilibrium altogether.
Four legs. Different vision - he blinked. That would take some getting used to. Everything in the room smelled vividly, and he'd had a pretty good sense of smell before - he could smell humans, his own clothing, chemicals, paper, the fire-
He turned, trying to catch a glimpse of himself and hearing claws scrape across the floor. He saw a dark haunch and a short tail; turned the other way and made a full circle, then heard himself making an agitated Hroooou... and shook his head. he could feel ears flapping against his skull. Something quadripedal, at least, probably a dog, and oh, how he should have anticipated that.
He felt strong, though. Deep chest, solid legs. He could feel his heart thumping resolutely in the barrel of his ribs. Balance took care of itself; his body knew how to move, his paws knew how to grip the floor, and if he had to make a run for it...
He turned to the door. Already something was pressing down through his legs; the canine instinct to Run! Chase! Movemovemovemove- making his muscles tense and tremor. He could feel motion trembling just beneath his fur, ready to spill over-
He let it.
He burst through the door with a bark that seemed part of the great release of energy, feeling the ground his his feet like a springboard. Then he was off, thundering through the scrubgrass and veering from the the two policecars, diving down like an arrow into the night.
It was, on reflection, too easy.
He hadn't paid any attention to the direction he was heading, and only slowed when he broke past a line of houses and found himself in a residential district. Then he relaxed into a trot, mouth slacking open to let the air hit his tongue and cool him. He raised his head, all but prancing down the street before coming to rest under a flickering streetlight and turning to look behind him.
No pursuit. Far too easy. It wasn't half as satisfying that way.
After a moment he realized that his tail was wagging, making smug little sweeps through the air, and he told himself Stop that. Getting away from the police only represented an escape from a problem he shouldn't have found himself in in the first place. And now he was lost somewhere in some city in Indiana, with no clothes and no identifiers that'd prevent him from being taken to a pound if anyone found him.
His tail stopped by itself.
He turned. The smells of this area were different - dust and lawns and someone's trash and cats. He'd never paid much attention to what cats smelled like, but that smell couldn't be anything else. Especially as it lay across the top of a fence and down through a hole near the bottom corner in a very catlike way. The run had brought a lot of his own scent to the surface, too, comfortable and familiar even though he'd never been a dog before.
The streetlight flickered out. After most of a second, it flickered back on.
Okay. Now what?
His ear flicked. Somewhere, he could hear a pair of people walking and chatting - a man and a woman. He shook out his fur - now that he wasn't moving, the cold was cutting in with a vengeance. Still, it sounded as though they were coming this way, and he could at least see if they were going to or from anywhere interesting.
Keep following the first thing that presents itself. Well, it's worked this far, for a certain definition...
He sat down, shaking out his fur again. Waited.
It didn't take them long to come around the corner, both of them bundled up against the night and the frost forming on every available surface. The woman had a fake-fur lined hat with flaps tied under her chin, and the man had a set of ultrathin earmuffs and two scarves. He was listening with an absent expression as she talked about somewhere she'd sent her resume - "And, I mean, for the money they're offering, a BA should look pretty good to them. No way are they going to get a Masters. Not in a million years."
The man saw J first, and put out a hand to stop his companion. J tried swishing his tail, widening his eyes - there was a definite edge of wariness to the man's expression, and J had no way of telling how scruffy he looked.
The woman, on the other hand, seemed instantly charmed.
She pushed aside her friends arm, pulling off one glove and offering her bare fingers for his inspection. "Well, hey, there. You lost, boy?"
"Uh, Mary?" the guy said, taking the sleeve of her upper arm and giving a slight tug. "That's a rottweiler. Maybe you shouldn't stick your hand in its face."
J's right ear flicked involuntarily, as he made a show of sniffing Mary's fingers and obviously not attacking. Rottweiler? Good to put a breed to it, I guess, but-
"It's fine," Mary said, reaching slowly back to scratch behind J's ears. J exhaled. Well, this is about as dignified as my night's gonna get. "Look, he's obviously been socialized. He probably just slipped his collar somewhere." She looked down at him. "What's your name, boy?" Now she seemed to be investigating how much slack existed in the skin between his ears. J gave her about thirty seconds before she started making nonlingual noises and playing with his jowls. "And wh-Jesus!"
Jesus, he thought, turning to see what the two were staring at now. There's a name I never considered.
The streetlight had flickered out again. In the sudden dip into darkness, the two ghosts from the van had sprung to visibility.
"Jesus, me and Joseph," Mary said, but quietly.
J cringed. After the mad dash he'd made to get away from the most obvious place in Indiana, he didn't need a glowing marker on his position following him through the night. He bared his teeth at the ghosts and growled, then slunk behind Mary's legs. Maybe if he interrupted their line of sight...
Yeah, right. Mary squeaked and stumbled back, calves bumping into him and sending him stumbling half a step sideways. The ghosts didn't move, though when the streetlight flickered on a moment later, they vanished into the overall yellow haze. J heard himself rumble at the spot where they had been.
"Okay. This is getting a bit freaky," the guy said. "Let's just back away slowly from the glowing weird things and the angry dog..."
"Yeah..." Mary said, pulling her glove back on.
Nice meeting you, J thought, and shook himself out again. And then nearly threw himself to the ground at a concussion of noise from the direction of the highway.
You are KIDDING me....
Back the way he'd come, the fire in the van had finally advanced to the point where it overcame the blue fog and made it to the gas tank. The van exploded with a not-so-muffled BOOM(pop) and a flash of light searing up into the air, tinged faint blue even in the greyed-out color spread J could see. He flattened his ears. Well. There probably went all chance of retrieving his clothes and wages. He heard an unhappy Ourrrrrrr... come out of his chest, and Mary's hand landed on his shoulders. "You all right, boy?"
J turned, sitting down again to better stare up at her. No, I'm not. I'm being stalked by imprint echoes, I just lost about $250 and my only set of clothes, and you haven't said a single thing which was useful for me to overhear.
Lights in windows were peppering on across the nearby houses, and J could hear at least one enterprising citizen thumping down their stairs. "We should check that out," Mary said, still staring off toward the explosion.
The man she was with, quite rightfully, looked at her like she was insane. "It's gotta be, like, ten degrees out here, things are exploding, and some seriously creepy-ass shit is going down," he said. "I'm going home."
Mary's expression and tone both slid toward annoyance. "Ben..."
"Home, call the police, and defrost myself," Ben said. "You're still invited."
Mary turned away, raking her fingers across J's skull again. "I'll see you tomorrow. Puppy, you coming?"
What, because maybe some of my money is still airborne and not too on fire? He snorted. Why not. I still don't know what the hell is going on.
Mary had already started walking, hands jammed into her pockets, steps quick and somewhat fumbling. J followed, moving fast to keep his own paws from becoming numb.
I would like a do-over on this night. I suppose it's too much to ask for that explosion to put me into a time loop, isn't it?
The trip back seemed longer, possibly because he was no longer running from the law. The weight of annoyance and anticipation stretched it out as well, until they finally came to the edge of the residential and low-commercial areas and stepped out onto the grass, catching the flickering red and blue of the police car lights.
Conspicuously absent, however, were any actual police.
J's ear flicked. He scented the air, which by now was a medley of faint humans and dead grass and the overwhelming overtone of van smoke. He tossed his head, trying not to sneeze.
"Cops got here fast," Mary said, hesitating at the edge of the field.
Yeah, J thought, starting down. The van was a flaming husk, now orange-yellow tinged with blue-green and already dying down, and even if he could die, it looked as though the explosion portion of the evening might have been over. Ask what happened after that.
Mary stepped after him, hurrying to keep up. J glanced back at her - she was looking around the place, but still wasn't saying anything, and was apparently trying to keep him in her sights.
More people need to talk to themselves around animals and crime scenes. It'd make my job a lot easier.
He tried for a short, inquisitive noise, but what came out of his still-unfamiliar throat was more like a whine. Mary walked up and scratched clumsily behind one ear again. "I know. This is pretty weird."
Okay. I'm going to need to talk with someone if I'm going to get anywhere, and I don't want to resort to mime.
An ambulance had arrived after the police cars, and the back was open. J moved for it, peering around the door and, when no one moved inside, jumping in and rooting around. He pawed one of the doors open and sunk his teeth into a blanket, dragging it out onto the grass where he could try to spread it out over himself.
Mary approached, watching curiously.
He concentrated on being human. He'd managed to hold a shift away back in the bar by focusing hard on what he was, so the same should work for initiating a shift, shouldn't it?
As it turned out, "what he was" was cold.
Fur aside, rottweilers were shorthaired dogs and he honestly hadn't expected so much of a change between that and his human form. That had been a mistake. Whether it was nerve desensitization, better insulation, or what, he couldn't tell, but the night air now was like a metal plate pressing into every inch of his body, biting down until he had to hold his muscles rigid so they wouldn't shiver.
Sometime while his skull was reworking itself, color returning to his vision in sparks and novas, Mary caught her breath and almost screamed.
Well, so much for breaking this slowly.
The last of his bones snapped into place and he pulled back inside the blanket, poking his head out one end. God, it was dark, and it was cold, but the immediate world was glutted with detail and everything sounded softer and farther away. Even Mary, whose breathing was still obtrusively rapid and loud.
"It's all right," he said, crouching down and pulling the woefully inadequate blanket tighter around his shoulders. "I just wanted to ask you something. I couldn't do that..."
Her eyes weren't getting any less wide.
"...well, as a dog."
She swllowed.
"Are you, like..." she began, and lapsed into a silence heavy with the sort of awkwardness that only comes when both parties are aware that one of them is about to say something stupendously stupid. "Some kind of... fairytale prince, or something?"
J stared. There were just too many ways to answer that, none of them particularly nice. Yeah. I'm the Rottweiler Prince. Unfortunately people willing to kiss a dog were way too common, so the evil witch who cursed me required me to drag a young woman out to a field full of empty police cars in the small hours of the night...
"I'm running the risk of literally freezing my balls off," he said, raising his eyebrows, "so can we bypass the - I know Indiana isn't Chicago, but how have you managed to miss-?" He shook his head. "No. Shapeshifter. Trust me, I was surprised, too. Do you have any idea what's happening here?"
Mary swallowed again. Then her jaw worked like she was about to go for a third. Jason grit his teeth.
"Please don't start screaming."
"I'm not-" Mary said. Squeaked. Something. She kept staring at him, like if she looked hard enough she'd find an explanation writ in the air between them. "Um. Not - I mean."
He watched her for a few seconds more. When it seemed as though she wouldn't have a nervous breakdown, he nodded and started talking again. "I was just passing through and I saw that van over there," he said. "It hadn't exploded yet. I was just looking into it when everyone showed up, and I... well, I suppose I panicked a bit." That's a lie, but there are so many things she doesn't need to know about him. "I turned into a dog and ran. Look, I was just passing through. I know nothing about this." He watched her eyes - she was unbalanced, and that made any tells easier to spot. "Do you?"
Mary moved her head like she was going to look away from him, look around, but her eyes didn't agree to do so. "About ghosts?"
"The ghosts. The van. The explosion - any of it. Especially why-" He looked back over his shoulder. Yeah, there were the Odd Couple, still attached to him, still startling, still reacting. "-I seem to have adopted two."
Mary shook her head slowly, eyes still fixed. "I was just thinking I ate some seriously bad tacos."
That was helpful.
Jason shivered. "...okay. I'm freezing, and this blanket must be made of tissue paper. I'm gonna put on a fur coat."
He turned, huddling into himself and willing the change to start. If this was going to be his night, he was going to get really good at this by the time it was over.
He looked back, and Mary was watching him like someone might watch a trainwreck in slow motion. He snorted. Look, at least you don't have to feel it.
He waited for a bit. Her eyes flicked up to his and then back to his side, where they latched by his ribcage and didn't move. He shook his head.
Right. I'll just keep looking around, shall I?
He trotted off toward the van.
A meter or two later he heard Mary stumbling after him. "Waitaminnit. Waitaminnit. Guy!" She slowed as he stopped, turning back to face her. "Can you - you can, like, understand me when you're like this, um... right?"
...what.
Honestly, he had no reason to expect her to know the ins and outs of shapeshifting, but he'd forgotten how aggravating it could be dealing with the chronically uninformed. At least, aggravating when he was in a mood like the one he was in now. At other times, he'd be loving this.
He met her eyes, and nodded deliberately.
"Okay." She swallowed yet again. He almost wanted to find something for her to chew on so at least it'd make sense. "There's this drug going around. I don't know much about it. I'm not into that. But it's called 'ghost'. I mean, there are probably a bunch of names, but that's what I hear about. It's made with a bunch of chemicals and stuff. They say it could get to be as big a problem as meth because there are a lot of industrial chemicals in Indiana, kinda like how meth is a problem because it's made with stuff you use on farms and the Midwest is kinda the place for farms..."
And now she was babbling. He exhaled, bracing himself to the shock of cold on furless skin, and cracked his bones back into humanity again. That at least got her to stop talking, but now she'd gone back to the staring and going pale.
"Hey," he said, trying to sound friendly before he had to bite down to stop his teeth from chattering. Speaking through gritted teeth was rarely reassuring. "Your name is Mary, right?"
She nodded convulsively. "Yeah. Mary. Whittaker."
"Okay. I'm-" ...Josh. James. Jonas. Jeremy. "-Jason. And I know this's gotta be freaky for you-"
She managed a short, choked laugh.
"-but it's okay. I'm just this guy. Where I come from, this sort of thing is perfectly normal."
That got more of a laugh. Too much of one, actually, starting high in Mary's throat and rising. J - Jason - winced. Hurrah. Hysteria.
"I know I turn into a dog."
Mary shoved both gloved hands across her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking. After a moment she dropped her hands again, pulling her arms across her chest. "Yeah. Yeah you do, Jason, you turn into a dog."
"I'm not going to hurt you."
She inhaled. Her throat was tight enough that noise came out of it; a high eeeeh... which sounded distant across the way his ears were beginning to ache. "Why are there ghosts?"
"That's what I'd like to know." He was shivering now; he couldn't help it. His feet were in the painful stage just before going numb. The air felt like knives against his skin. "I'm going to turn back into a dog now, okay? It's less cold that way." Despite the fact that his coat was really not meant for this. "I'm going to take a look at the wreckage of that van. You don't have to come with me."
She shook her head. "You're the only person who's gonna believe me about any of this. I'm coming."
He had to start liking her, at least a little.
Shifting back, this time, didn't hurt quite as much as slowly freezing. He shook himself out, looked back at Mary, and trotted toward the van. Mary ran after him. "Okay. I don't know much about ghost. I don't do... you know, anything. Not even pot. But I know a few people have been hospitalized for it - ghost, I mean. You're-"
She didn't swallow, for which Jason was inordinately grateful.
"You're trying to figure this out, right?"
He paused, head swiveling back before one of his paws hit the ground. I'm trying to figure this out?
She was looking at him with a light shade of desperation to her eyes. That was the look Torchwood got from members of the public, some of the time. The look that begged them to fix things no one had known could go wrong.
Here and now, it made his skin crawl.
"This drug that's going around," Mary said, forging on even after Jason's ears went down. "One of the people who's in the hospital from it. She's - my brother's girlfriend. Fiancé. He's really..." She trailed off. "Could you help?"
Jason cringed. I'm not exactly the sort of person who goes around helping anyone. Maybe once, but that's a long time and a lot of psychics behind me. Don't you have people to investigate this?
...of course they didn't. They didn't even know what shapeshifters were.
He let out a whine, trotting toward the van again. Mary followed. "I can get you some clothes," she offered. "I mean, if you wanted to talk to me."
I don't. I don't want anything to do with this, except to know why I have ghosts following me. I'm not the person you should be asking for anything. He slowed at the edge of the blast radius from the van, sniffing as he went. Not scorched, which was odd. But definitely windblasted; the dead-already scrubgrass was flattened and slicked to the ground. Mary crouched down beside him, taking a deep breath.
"As far as I can tell you're the only one asking questions, anyway. Even the police don't really care. I mean, about the drug. They're trying to stop it. But no one cares what it is."
Get out, said something in his mind. You need to get out now.
He'd made a career out of ignoring that voice.
...maybe it was time to change.
He shifted back, wondering if the shifting mechanism would get worn out like a muscle, begin to ache more than it did. And trying, and trying not to, meet Mary's eyes.
"I can't," he said, eyes finally resting somewhere near Mary's shoulder, where the flap of her hat brushed the fabric of her coat. "I know. It's weird. Probably... terrifying, from where you are. But I can't help."
Mary stepped back, opening up the distance to the posture of human-to-human rather than human-to-dog. "What do you mean? Like, is it just-"
"Look, sometimes things just happen and you can't fix them," J said, looking up sharply. "It sucks. I know. One time I tried fixing everything-"
He shut himself up before he could remember Elashte reaching into his mind, before he could remember the sick twist of the Delta Wave and his own consciousness rising beneath his conscious self like nausea up the throat.
"This," he said, motioning to the field, to the empty space where he was sure the ghosts still hung, "is so far beyond me. I can't do anything. I cannot help."
Mary looked injured. Maybe she thought that seeing one miracle, even one so prosaic as a man turning into an animal, entitled her to all the rest.
"So you're just some guy." She shook her head. "Some guy who turns into a dog. And that's it."
"Yeah," he said. "Unfortunately 'ghost expert' doesn't come with the territory."
"You don't even want to try?"
And she could say that - so terribly simple, from her point of view. Try. As though just because she didn't have a plan didn't mean he shouldn't; as though trying was the least that could be asked of anyone. He was beginning to wonder if it should be the most.
What I want doesn't really matter. Don't you get that? "I." He shook his head. I don't owe you anything. I'm not the person you should be looking to. I can't. "...no. I don't."
Mary threw up her hands, standing up again. "Never mind. I guess. Sorry for bothering you."
"Sorry I'm not-" Jason began. What I was. "-more help."
He inhaled, closed his eyes, reached for the shift.
"Wait."
Mary was pulling off her gloves, reaching into her purse, pulling out a small notepad and a purple pen. She wrote a few lines and tore off the sheet, offering it to him. It was a name, phone number, and email address.
"If you find out anything," she said. "Or you find anyone who knows about this. Count you point them at me? I know I'm not - it'd mean a lot," she finished. "If it's not too much trouble."
Jason took the paper, reading the information, letting it stick in his mind. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "I can do that." He held the note back out, looking at her eyes. "But I wouldn't wait up."
"Having trouble sleeping anyway," Mary muttered, taking the paper and tucking it into her purse. "Good luck. You know, with - whatever."
"You too," Jason said, but he was already shifting. A few moments later they parted ways, her back through the field, him off through the night.
-
A few hours later he was back in the city, following a terribly faint scent-trail and scratching at the most likely door as the sun rose at the edge of town.
It wasn't the best trip back in, especially given the chorus of Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. running though his head. Cutting and running was supposed to be so easy. Why wasn't it?
It took a few minutes, during which he circled around to bark at windows at least twice, but Mary came down wrapped in a powder-blue robe and blinking sleep from her eyes. She stopped with her hand on the screen door, looking down at him.
"...Jason?"
He nodded.
A few blinks later she pushed the door open, and he slipped into the house. After the frost-edged night, the heat of the air had an almost liquid presence rolling along his fur.
Mary closed the door after him, pulling her robe tighter against the breath of winter which had followed him in. "You want those clothes?"
He nodded again. Mary shook her head, walking back toward a set of stairs and muttering something about bad tacos again.
Jason followed, doing his best - which wasn't quite enough - to keep at a respectable walking pace and not an eager trot.
"This is my aunt and uncle's house," Mary said, leading him up the stairs. "Major snowbirds. They're in Flagstaff right now, and they pay me to watch their house. And, you know, this place is way nicer than my apartment..."
She pushed open the door to a bedroom and walked to the closet, pulling aside a number of clothes that looked like they might receive use and pulling out a handful of hangers from the far corner.
"My uncle keeps saying he should have taken these to the Salvation Army years ago," she explained. "I guess I'll just tell him I took them for him."
She laid them out on the bed - a sportsjacket, a button-up T-shirt, a pair of blue slacks and what were apparently a pair of bowling shoes on the bed without looking at him as he began to shift. By the time he was mostly upright she'd wandered back to the closet, poking around the clothes hanging there.
"Sorry if those aren't exactly, you know, your style."
"I'll survive," Jason said, and turned away - more for her sake than his - to begin dressing.
After a moment, when the sounds of cloth rustling had more or less faded away, she turned back and pulled a cell phone out of one of the pockets of her robe. "Don't get any ideas," she said, waggling the phone at him. He could hear her arm in its sleeve, the faint noise of the air. "Grabbed it when I heard you barking. I have the police on speed-dial."
He exhaled. "If I was going to do anything dastardly to you, I would have done it back in the big empty field where no one would look for you and there wouldn't be witnesses to see me leaving your door. Trust me, I'm not... one to bite the hand that feeds."
Even if he was. He never planned to be.
He finished up the buttons on his shirt before turning back to her. "Look, I said I can't help you, but I know people who can. Probably. Like I said, I'm no expert on ghosts or anything, but..."
Mary crossed her arms. "But you know people who are?"
"Something like that." He buttoned the shirt, smoothed it down, and winced. Not the type of clothing he was used to walking around in. Still, better than being a dog or naked in the bitter cold. Not something he was enjoying walking to the next town in, but it would only be a while, wouldn't it? He wouldn't freeze. He'd manage.
All of a sudden, he was very, very weary.
"You have anywhere to sit down?" he asked. I imagine you'd be more comfortable if we weren't talking in a bedroom.
Mary sized him up, then turned to the hall. "Yeah; in the dining room. I'll make coffee. Follow me."
-
Jason hadn't realized how hungry he was until he smelled the coffee making its way through Mary's aunt-and-uncle's coffeemaker, not that he was going to say anything. He sat on one of the wooden chairs by the dining room table, drawing maps and patterns on the tablecloth with the tip of his finger.
"So this is where things are going to get a bit complicated and freaky for you," he said, half-glancing over his shoulder when the coffee had finished percolating and he could hear Mary pouring it. "But, if it helps, it's probably not as freaky as having people in your town keep turning into ghosts."
Mary finished pouring the coffee and brought him a mug, taking a seat herself. "I was going to say. Is it freakier than you turning into a dog?"
Jason hid a grim smirk behind the edge of his coffee mug. "Chicago? Yeah, a bit."
Mary took a sip, put the coffee on the table, and went back to the kitchen. When she returned she had a half-empty half-gallon of milk, a box of sugar cubes, and a spoon. "So when did Chicago come into this?" she asked, dropping three cubes into the coffee and finishing with a splash of milk.
"Just now." Jason watched, then took a drink of his own coffee and managed not to make a face. It wasn't Ianto's. It wasn't coffeeshop fare. But he wasn't drinking it for the taste, was he? And it wasn't like his standards for everything else hadn't dropped when he took on this exile. "There's someone there who can help you. A few people, actually, but I can only recommend one in good faith."
Or at least the good faith born of hear-say. Mary swished the coffee in its mug. "Okay..."
"And there are a few things you need to know before you go looking for him." Jason held up his fingers, ticking off the points. "One, he looks exactly like me. No relation, but it's creepy as hell. Two, Chicago is weirdness central. People turning into dogs? That's pretty tame. And it's not the safest place to be, now especially. Three? Ad this is the big one?" He looked over the table, meeting Mary's eyes. "He cannot know I sent you. He cannot. He can't know that you got his name from me, he can't know that you've seen someone with his face, he can't know that someone passed through your town on the day when all this happened. Nothing that can link him to me." He held her eyes, watching for the tells, watching for agreement. "Understand?"
She looked back at him, holding her mug closer. "This isn't going to get me in, like, legal trouble, is it?"
He made himself laugh. It wasn't quite casual. "You? No. He's legit. He's just not a big fan of... well, me."
She tilted her head. "Oh, so, you guys are in a fight, or something-"
"Or something. Yeah. Agree or disagree?"
"This isn't binding, or anything? I mean, I say yes, and it's not like I can't back out or-"
Jason closed his eyes. He really didn't need this to be complicated. "It's name and an address. He's a paranormal investigator. Talk to him, don't talk to him, buy him flowers, I don't care. I just need to know that he won't know I'm around."
He could feel her staring at him. "...okay," she said finally. "I'll make up something about how a friend of a cousin told me about him. Is that cool?"
"That's cool." He opened his eyes again. "His name's Desmond D. Descant. He's been doing this sort of thing for longer than it might look, apparently. Lots longer. Do you have something to take down an address on?"
"He doesn't have, like, a phone number?" Mary asked, but she got up and walked into the livingroom anyway. "Email address?"
"No idea," Jason said. "There's a network of... we don't use those as much." Explaining psychic journals was far too much work. "And I can't promise he'll be in his office on any given day, either. I'm sorry. It sucks, but it's what I have."
Mary came back in with a legal pad and a pencil. "I can stake the place out, if I need to. Leave him a letter, or something. Desmond..."
"D. Descant, paranormal investigator." Mary took down the information, and the address Jason hoped he remembered correctly. She read it back to him, and he nodded.
"All right, then," she said, laying pencil and paper down. "How do I get in touch with you if I need something?"
"You don't." Jason finished the coffee and set the mug down, pushing away from the table. "Like I said. I'm just passing through. I'm not someone you want to rely on, anyway."
Mary exhaled, curling her hands around the mug. For a moment she looked obviously alone, as though her entire life, the friends and family he knew she had somewhere, were all lost in the space between her and the walls of the house.
Then she straightened her back, putting the mug down and standing. "Hey. At least it's a start, right?"
He smiled thinly. "Right. Gotta start somewhere."
He turned around, walking to the door.
"Thanks for coffee. And the clothes."
He pushed open the door, stepping out into the early-morning darkness.
Halfway to the sidewalk the door creaked open, and Mary stopped him. "Hey, Jason?"
He turned back. Mary was in the doorway, brushing her hair off her shoulder. He showed a hand in a half-shrug. "Something?"
"Thanks," Mary said. "You're the first lead I've got."
A few of the fine hairs on the back of his neck pricked up, and he looked away. "Don't thank me," he called back, over his shoulder. "Really. Don't."
He was dreading the response as he walked away. Fortunately, it didn't materialize. He heard the click of the latch as Mary went back inside, and he left Hammond and most of its ghosts behind.
Part: Two
Word Count: 7800
Summary: Heading down through Hammond, J-- runs into something which isn't a meth lab, a young woman, and a pair of not-unfriendly ghosts.
A/N: I DON'T KNOW WHY THESE THINGS KEEP GETTING EPIC WHILE I'M NOT WATCHING. This has to be serialized because it won't all fit in one post. It's unbeta'd. It's a first rough draft and probably won't make it to a second. It's to be continued. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: OCs are mine. Jack was yoinked from the BBC and drastically AU'd. Desmond Descant belogns to kawaiispinel. The Rift is a lot of peoples'. Opinions listed in this fic are those of the characters and not of any Barrowman. Reading fic does not enable reader to fly.
-
Jim, he thought, walking down the side of State Highway 20. Jim was a repulsively common name that still fit the naming conventions. Possibly Jake, though Jake was too close to Jack for comfort, and he almost had to wonder why he was following the naming conventions at all in this place when the Chula and Time Agency were just as unreliable as they always had been. The answer was obvious, though: he was rid of his time with Torchwood, he was rid of his time as a renegade Agent, and if he got rid of his training as an Agent proper, there would be nothing left to hold on to.
In any case he needed a name of some sort, and the naming convention made them easier to internalize. The sooner he could internalize an alias the sooner he could use the journals again. It might not be the best safeguard against the system getting hacked, but a Jacob or a Justin or a Joel would raise fewer flags than Judas. He could go by J, could draw it out to Jay, but J was an interstitial, a name code, a nonidentity. After getting an emotion limiter stuck in his head, after having all sense of self broken to hell, after living one set of lies or incomplete truths and then another then another, he'd had enough of being a nonperson.
He was walking aimlessly south, planning to close out the night on the road before turning off it, wondering where to go from there.
In a way it was probably a good thing that he'd left Anata's bar. They were all beginning to get too familiar, Bell and Marcus and even Anata from the way she'd had Marcus tell him about life on the lam and the way she'd put those ten bills into his hand. He'd never planned to stay long anyway.
He stopped at one point to work a stone out from between the treads of his shoe.
He'd never planned anything. Escape Torchwood, escape Chicago, leave Illinois, find somewhere to get his bearings and move decisively on from there. The problem was, when he'd paused to take his bearings, all he'd learned was that he was nowhere, in more ways than one.
J read a mile marker as he walked past; he squinted at the next sign in the distance. He didn't know what he wanted, other than not to end up in a cell or staring at the faces of everyone he'd ruined. Tried to ruin. Whatever. He couldn't even fall one way or the other - ultimate contrition, ultimate enmity. He wanted both. He hated both. There was no way out, that way.
Ten minutes later he stepped off the road to let a semi past, which blared at him irately. It continued north, toward Whiting, toward the border. He kept walking.
The last act of Jack Harkness had been an act of submission - to Elashte, to some notion of moral propriety handed down from a man who couldn't live it either, to the current structure of the world and the fact that someone like him was afforded no place in it. The first act of Judas Reyc had been to grab onto the nearest hand and ask it to guide him, and the Chula had shut him up and thrown him back to the lambs and the wolves.
Now he was out for himself. No one to fail him, no one to fail, no one to expect the things that made failing possible. After the vastness of space and time it was a damn small world, but at least it was large enough to lose himself in.
Two miles down the road he caught the telltale scent of fire.
MARY - Hammond, IN
I-90, the Indiana Toll Road, held close to the northern Indiana border before dipping into Ohio, but here in the northwest corner of the state it was just changing directions from southeast to east. It cut through a NIMBY-zoned patch of land by the sewage treatment facility on W 152nd and Highway 20, dominated mostly by dead grass, radio towers, and a green and muddy creek taking a wide arc through the area.
It also overlooked a large white van half-buried under camouflage nets in a ditch perhaps a quarter of a mile off the road, which was now industriously burning.
J came upon it at a jog. No one was in the area, and no one's voices could be heard, but vans didn't tend to catch themselves on fire and the flames themselves, licking out of the hood, were more than self-evident.
They were also a distressing shade of alcohol-blue.
Reflex dictated the run down to the side of the van, not that he had any conscious interest in do-gooding; if nothing else, engine fires usually burned an oily dark orange, not the hot blue-white better suited to an alcohol fire. Something was strange, strange meant specialized knowledge, specialized knowledge was leverage and power, and if Whiting had been any indication, this area wasn't big on supernatural presence beyond the native.
There was no one in the driver's seat, or the passenger's. He ducked to the back and pulled one hand inside his jacket sleeve, pulling open the rear door, but the back compartment was similarly empty - all it boasted was a line of covered buckets, a battery-powered camp lantern hanging from the ceiling, and more lab equipment than belonged in an unmarked white van of honorable intent. The air, however, was strangely cool, and with the amount of fire going on at the front of the van, it was a good question how the hell the rear compartment wasn't-
He knocked the lid off a bucket and winced away from a faint blue glow emanating from within. The rest of the equipment in here was more or less self-explanatory - material for refining, for chemical production of something or other, most likely drugs, most likely meth given the industrial-sized jars of over-the-counters, but as little as he knew about meth production, he was reasonably certain that phosphorescence like this wasn't normal.
Especially when, now that he looked at it up close, it bore an eerie similarity to Čerenkov radiation.
He reached up and turned off the lantern, expecting to see if any of the stuff had spilled.
Instead he saw, in the sudden darkness, a glowing blue mist suffusing the cabin, concentrated around the barrels but permeating the walls and the remains of a broken beaker on the ground. He turned.
Then he saw the ghosts.
One was reaching for the beaker, extending her hand - it was female-shaped, though further specifics were blurred - and snapping back, as though replaying the last two seconds as the beaker had dropped. The other had been caught mid-startle, rising from a crouch and turning before finding itself crouched again, both of them jerking forward and back in symphony.
And then he heard the sirens.
There was a fact he'd neglected to remind himself of in his curiosity - sometimes, especially in the middle of the night, police would close on a location without their lights or sirens on. This, they did both to avoid waking up the neighborhood and to keep their suspects from noticing a noisy lightshow descending on them. Of course, once they had the suspects enclosed in a ring of cars, it didn't much matter.
The sirens started up like a pack of wolves, chorusing in from different directions, and J only opened the van door long enough to poke his head out and confirm that. The air outside was sharp, smoke-smeared and cold, he was stuck in a van with something decidedly not a normal meth lab, and now he was cornered by police.
Great. It would figure that the ones who actually got him against a proverbial wall were the ones after him on suspicion of the wrong crime.
He pulled the door shut, growling at his surroundings. From the front of the van the fire had progressed to an audible crackle, and he could feel the air warming imperceptibly - nothing like the searing heat he should have been feeling, but not a good sign anyway. So, he was caught between a line of cops and an engine fire. Brilliant.
Well, the police weren't going to approach so long as the van was threatening to explode. That was some consolation, except for the fact that exploding vans were notoriously even less safe than edgy police officers. Until then the only danger was that he'd be sublimed into a glowing blue ghost caught in a repeating loop.
"This is ridiculous."
Someone had employed a loudspeaker. The noise came in garbled by distance and walls - step out, hands up, the usual. The van offered no clever escapes, other than hoping that the explosion, when it occurred, would send him flying at a trajectory they couldn't follow or trace before he revived.
"Okay, think."
Getting caught was a bad idea, even if there wouldn't be much evidence after the van exploded. (A wad of cash and absolutely no identification would not go over well.) Running might just get him riddled full of bullets, or at least tasered long enough to temporarily disable him, and god tasering was not something he wanted to relive at the moment.
Loudspeaker man was becoming more enunciated, more insistent. J walked to the front of the compartment, tapping the wall and grabbing his hand back with a hiss. Something was getting hot, even if the fog kept the air temperature low.
"What the hell were you two doing in here?" he asked the ghosts.
Unsurprisingly, they didn't answer.
He pressed his fingers into his temples. Right. He needed a way out. Something which wouldn't be stopped, wouldn't be shot...
Something occurred to him.
"This..."
It wasn't as though shifters weren't tactically advantaged for just this reason.
"...is ridiculous."
He stripped down. Replacing the clothes - and the money! - would be a problem, but it would be easier than breaking out of a jail cell under suspicion of drug manufacturing.
Shifter, Marcus had said. Shifters became animals; animals were non-noteworthy. Unless of course he turned into something totally inappropriate for this area like an echidna or a kangaroo or something, but at least he had more of a chance of confounding the police and getting out of the haunted van as something wildly unexpected than as a human.
He closed his eyes. Focused on becoming small; focused on the sick bone-ache he'd felt when Elliot had gone after him in the bar, focused on being not human-
All his muscles cramped at once. They were contracting, pulling in with enough force that they shrunk the bones along with them - his skin was getting thicker, bristling with a short coat of fur, and he bit back a yell that turned into a yelp as his throat restructured itself and his teeth threw themselves forward and took the rest of his jaw dragging with them. He hit the ground and scrambled to his feet, then fell into a different equilibrium altogether.
Four legs. Different vision - he blinked. That would take some getting used to. Everything in the room smelled vividly, and he'd had a pretty good sense of smell before - he could smell humans, his own clothing, chemicals, paper, the fire-
He turned, trying to catch a glimpse of himself and hearing claws scrape across the floor. He saw a dark haunch and a short tail; turned the other way and made a full circle, then heard himself making an agitated Hroooou... and shook his head. he could feel ears flapping against his skull. Something quadripedal, at least, probably a dog, and oh, how he should have anticipated that.
He felt strong, though. Deep chest, solid legs. He could feel his heart thumping resolutely in the barrel of his ribs. Balance took care of itself; his body knew how to move, his paws knew how to grip the floor, and if he had to make a run for it...
He turned to the door. Already something was pressing down through his legs; the canine instinct to Run! Chase! Movemovemovemove- making his muscles tense and tremor. He could feel motion trembling just beneath his fur, ready to spill over-
He let it.
He burst through the door with a bark that seemed part of the great release of energy, feeling the ground his his feet like a springboard. Then he was off, thundering through the scrubgrass and veering from the the two policecars, diving down like an arrow into the night.
It was, on reflection, too easy.
He hadn't paid any attention to the direction he was heading, and only slowed when he broke past a line of houses and found himself in a residential district. Then he relaxed into a trot, mouth slacking open to let the air hit his tongue and cool him. He raised his head, all but prancing down the street before coming to rest under a flickering streetlight and turning to look behind him.
No pursuit. Far too easy. It wasn't half as satisfying that way.
After a moment he realized that his tail was wagging, making smug little sweeps through the air, and he told himself Stop that. Getting away from the police only represented an escape from a problem he shouldn't have found himself in in the first place. And now he was lost somewhere in some city in Indiana, with no clothes and no identifiers that'd prevent him from being taken to a pound if anyone found him.
His tail stopped by itself.
He turned. The smells of this area were different - dust and lawns and someone's trash and cats. He'd never paid much attention to what cats smelled like, but that smell couldn't be anything else. Especially as it lay across the top of a fence and down through a hole near the bottom corner in a very catlike way. The run had brought a lot of his own scent to the surface, too, comfortable and familiar even though he'd never been a dog before.
The streetlight flickered out. After most of a second, it flickered back on.
Okay. Now what?
His ear flicked. Somewhere, he could hear a pair of people walking and chatting - a man and a woman. He shook out his fur - now that he wasn't moving, the cold was cutting in with a vengeance. Still, it sounded as though they were coming this way, and he could at least see if they were going to or from anywhere interesting.
Keep following the first thing that presents itself. Well, it's worked this far, for a certain definition...
He sat down, shaking out his fur again. Waited.
It didn't take them long to come around the corner, both of them bundled up against the night and the frost forming on every available surface. The woman had a fake-fur lined hat with flaps tied under her chin, and the man had a set of ultrathin earmuffs and two scarves. He was listening with an absent expression as she talked about somewhere she'd sent her resume - "And, I mean, for the money they're offering, a BA should look pretty good to them. No way are they going to get a Masters. Not in a million years."
The man saw J first, and put out a hand to stop his companion. J tried swishing his tail, widening his eyes - there was a definite edge of wariness to the man's expression, and J had no way of telling how scruffy he looked.
The woman, on the other hand, seemed instantly charmed.
She pushed aside her friends arm, pulling off one glove and offering her bare fingers for his inspection. "Well, hey, there. You lost, boy?"
"Uh, Mary?" the guy said, taking the sleeve of her upper arm and giving a slight tug. "That's a rottweiler. Maybe you shouldn't stick your hand in its face."
J's right ear flicked involuntarily, as he made a show of sniffing Mary's fingers and obviously not attacking. Rottweiler? Good to put a breed to it, I guess, but-
"It's fine," Mary said, reaching slowly back to scratch behind J's ears. J exhaled. Well, this is about as dignified as my night's gonna get. "Look, he's obviously been socialized. He probably just slipped his collar somewhere." She looked down at him. "What's your name, boy?" Now she seemed to be investigating how much slack existed in the skin between his ears. J gave her about thirty seconds before she started making nonlingual noises and playing with his jowls. "And wh-Jesus!"
Jesus, he thought, turning to see what the two were staring at now. There's a name I never considered.
The streetlight had flickered out again. In the sudden dip into darkness, the two ghosts from the van had sprung to visibility.
"Jesus, me and Joseph," Mary said, but quietly.
J cringed. After the mad dash he'd made to get away from the most obvious place in Indiana, he didn't need a glowing marker on his position following him through the night. He bared his teeth at the ghosts and growled, then slunk behind Mary's legs. Maybe if he interrupted their line of sight...
Yeah, right. Mary squeaked and stumbled back, calves bumping into him and sending him stumbling half a step sideways. The ghosts didn't move, though when the streetlight flickered on a moment later, they vanished into the overall yellow haze. J heard himself rumble at the spot where they had been.
"Okay. This is getting a bit freaky," the guy said. "Let's just back away slowly from the glowing weird things and the angry dog..."
"Yeah..." Mary said, pulling her glove back on.
Nice meeting you, J thought, and shook himself out again. And then nearly threw himself to the ground at a concussion of noise from the direction of the highway.
You are KIDDING me....
Back the way he'd come, the fire in the van had finally advanced to the point where it overcame the blue fog and made it to the gas tank. The van exploded with a not-so-muffled BOOM(pop) and a flash of light searing up into the air, tinged faint blue even in the greyed-out color spread J could see. He flattened his ears. Well. There probably went all chance of retrieving his clothes and wages. He heard an unhappy Ourrrrrrr... come out of his chest, and Mary's hand landed on his shoulders. "You all right, boy?"
J turned, sitting down again to better stare up at her. No, I'm not. I'm being stalked by imprint echoes, I just lost about $250 and my only set of clothes, and you haven't said a single thing which was useful for me to overhear.
Lights in windows were peppering on across the nearby houses, and J could hear at least one enterprising citizen thumping down their stairs. "We should check that out," Mary said, still staring off toward the explosion.
The man she was with, quite rightfully, looked at her like she was insane. "It's gotta be, like, ten degrees out here, things are exploding, and some seriously creepy-ass shit is going down," he said. "I'm going home."
Mary's expression and tone both slid toward annoyance. "Ben..."
"Home, call the police, and defrost myself," Ben said. "You're still invited."
Mary turned away, raking her fingers across J's skull again. "I'll see you tomorrow. Puppy, you coming?"
What, because maybe some of my money is still airborne and not too on fire? He snorted. Why not. I still don't know what the hell is going on.
Mary had already started walking, hands jammed into her pockets, steps quick and somewhat fumbling. J followed, moving fast to keep his own paws from becoming numb.
I would like a do-over on this night. I suppose it's too much to ask for that explosion to put me into a time loop, isn't it?
The trip back seemed longer, possibly because he was no longer running from the law. The weight of annoyance and anticipation stretched it out as well, until they finally came to the edge of the residential and low-commercial areas and stepped out onto the grass, catching the flickering red and blue of the police car lights.
Conspicuously absent, however, were any actual police.
J's ear flicked. He scented the air, which by now was a medley of faint humans and dead grass and the overwhelming overtone of van smoke. He tossed his head, trying not to sneeze.
"Cops got here fast," Mary said, hesitating at the edge of the field.
Yeah, J thought, starting down. The van was a flaming husk, now orange-yellow tinged with blue-green and already dying down, and even if he could die, it looked as though the explosion portion of the evening might have been over. Ask what happened after that.
Mary stepped after him, hurrying to keep up. J glanced back at her - she was looking around the place, but still wasn't saying anything, and was apparently trying to keep him in her sights.
More people need to talk to themselves around animals and crime scenes. It'd make my job a lot easier.
He tried for a short, inquisitive noise, but what came out of his still-unfamiliar throat was more like a whine. Mary walked up and scratched clumsily behind one ear again. "I know. This is pretty weird."
Okay. I'm going to need to talk with someone if I'm going to get anywhere, and I don't want to resort to mime.
An ambulance had arrived after the police cars, and the back was open. J moved for it, peering around the door and, when no one moved inside, jumping in and rooting around. He pawed one of the doors open and sunk his teeth into a blanket, dragging it out onto the grass where he could try to spread it out over himself.
Mary approached, watching curiously.
He concentrated on being human. He'd managed to hold a shift away back in the bar by focusing hard on what he was, so the same should work for initiating a shift, shouldn't it?
As it turned out, "what he was" was cold.
Fur aside, rottweilers were shorthaired dogs and he honestly hadn't expected so much of a change between that and his human form. That had been a mistake. Whether it was nerve desensitization, better insulation, or what, he couldn't tell, but the night air now was like a metal plate pressing into every inch of his body, biting down until he had to hold his muscles rigid so they wouldn't shiver.
Sometime while his skull was reworking itself, color returning to his vision in sparks and novas, Mary caught her breath and almost screamed.
Well, so much for breaking this slowly.
The last of his bones snapped into place and he pulled back inside the blanket, poking his head out one end. God, it was dark, and it was cold, but the immediate world was glutted with detail and everything sounded softer and farther away. Even Mary, whose breathing was still obtrusively rapid and loud.
"It's all right," he said, crouching down and pulling the woefully inadequate blanket tighter around his shoulders. "I just wanted to ask you something. I couldn't do that..."
Her eyes weren't getting any less wide.
"...well, as a dog."
She swllowed.
"Are you, like..." she began, and lapsed into a silence heavy with the sort of awkwardness that only comes when both parties are aware that one of them is about to say something stupendously stupid. "Some kind of... fairytale prince, or something?"
J stared. There were just too many ways to answer that, none of them particularly nice. Yeah. I'm the Rottweiler Prince. Unfortunately people willing to kiss a dog were way too common, so the evil witch who cursed me required me to drag a young woman out to a field full of empty police cars in the small hours of the night...
"I'm running the risk of literally freezing my balls off," he said, raising his eyebrows, "so can we bypass the - I know Indiana isn't Chicago, but how have you managed to miss-?" He shook his head. "No. Shapeshifter. Trust me, I was surprised, too. Do you have any idea what's happening here?"
Mary swallowed again. Then her jaw worked like she was about to go for a third. Jason grit his teeth.
"Please don't start screaming."
"I'm not-" Mary said. Squeaked. Something. She kept staring at him, like if she looked hard enough she'd find an explanation writ in the air between them. "Um. Not - I mean."
He watched her for a few seconds more. When it seemed as though she wouldn't have a nervous breakdown, he nodded and started talking again. "I was just passing through and I saw that van over there," he said. "It hadn't exploded yet. I was just looking into it when everyone showed up, and I... well, I suppose I panicked a bit." That's a lie, but there are so many things she doesn't need to know about him. "I turned into a dog and ran. Look, I was just passing through. I know nothing about this." He watched her eyes - she was unbalanced, and that made any tells easier to spot. "Do you?"
Mary moved her head like she was going to look away from him, look around, but her eyes didn't agree to do so. "About ghosts?"
"The ghosts. The van. The explosion - any of it. Especially why-" He looked back over his shoulder. Yeah, there were the Odd Couple, still attached to him, still startling, still reacting. "-I seem to have adopted two."
Mary shook her head slowly, eyes still fixed. "I was just thinking I ate some seriously bad tacos."
That was helpful.
Jason shivered. "...okay. I'm freezing, and this blanket must be made of tissue paper. I'm gonna put on a fur coat."
He turned, huddling into himself and willing the change to start. If this was going to be his night, he was going to get really good at this by the time it was over.
He looked back, and Mary was watching him like someone might watch a trainwreck in slow motion. He snorted. Look, at least you don't have to feel it.
He waited for a bit. Her eyes flicked up to his and then back to his side, where they latched by his ribcage and didn't move. He shook his head.
Right. I'll just keep looking around, shall I?
He trotted off toward the van.
A meter or two later he heard Mary stumbling after him. "Waitaminnit. Waitaminnit. Guy!" She slowed as he stopped, turning back to face her. "Can you - you can, like, understand me when you're like this, um... right?"
...what.
Honestly, he had no reason to expect her to know the ins and outs of shapeshifting, but he'd forgotten how aggravating it could be dealing with the chronically uninformed. At least, aggravating when he was in a mood like the one he was in now. At other times, he'd be loving this.
He met her eyes, and nodded deliberately.
"Okay." She swallowed yet again. He almost wanted to find something for her to chew on so at least it'd make sense. "There's this drug going around. I don't know much about it. I'm not into that. But it's called 'ghost'. I mean, there are probably a bunch of names, but that's what I hear about. It's made with a bunch of chemicals and stuff. They say it could get to be as big a problem as meth because there are a lot of industrial chemicals in Indiana, kinda like how meth is a problem because it's made with stuff you use on farms and the Midwest is kinda the place for farms..."
And now she was babbling. He exhaled, bracing himself to the shock of cold on furless skin, and cracked his bones back into humanity again. That at least got her to stop talking, but now she'd gone back to the staring and going pale.
"Hey," he said, trying to sound friendly before he had to bite down to stop his teeth from chattering. Speaking through gritted teeth was rarely reassuring. "Your name is Mary, right?"
She nodded convulsively. "Yeah. Mary. Whittaker."
"Okay. I'm-" ...Josh. James. Jonas. Jeremy. "-Jason. And I know this's gotta be freaky for you-"
She managed a short, choked laugh.
"-but it's okay. I'm just this guy. Where I come from, this sort of thing is perfectly normal."
That got more of a laugh. Too much of one, actually, starting high in Mary's throat and rising. J - Jason - winced. Hurrah. Hysteria.
"I know I turn into a dog."
Mary shoved both gloved hands across her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking. After a moment she dropped her hands again, pulling her arms across her chest. "Yeah. Yeah you do, Jason, you turn into a dog."
"I'm not going to hurt you."
She inhaled. Her throat was tight enough that noise came out of it; a high eeeeh... which sounded distant across the way his ears were beginning to ache. "Why are there ghosts?"
"That's what I'd like to know." He was shivering now; he couldn't help it. His feet were in the painful stage just before going numb. The air felt like knives against his skin. "I'm going to turn back into a dog now, okay? It's less cold that way." Despite the fact that his coat was really not meant for this. "I'm going to take a look at the wreckage of that van. You don't have to come with me."
She shook her head. "You're the only person who's gonna believe me about any of this. I'm coming."
He had to start liking her, at least a little.
Shifting back, this time, didn't hurt quite as much as slowly freezing. He shook himself out, looked back at Mary, and trotted toward the van. Mary ran after him. "Okay. I don't know much about ghost. I don't do... you know, anything. Not even pot. But I know a few people have been hospitalized for it - ghost, I mean. You're-"
She didn't swallow, for which Jason was inordinately grateful.
"You're trying to figure this out, right?"
He paused, head swiveling back before one of his paws hit the ground. I'm trying to figure this out?
She was looking at him with a light shade of desperation to her eyes. That was the look Torchwood got from members of the public, some of the time. The look that begged them to fix things no one had known could go wrong.
Here and now, it made his skin crawl.
"This drug that's going around," Mary said, forging on even after Jason's ears went down. "One of the people who's in the hospital from it. She's - my brother's girlfriend. Fiancé. He's really..." She trailed off. "Could you help?"
Jason cringed. I'm not exactly the sort of person who goes around helping anyone. Maybe once, but that's a long time and a lot of psychics behind me. Don't you have people to investigate this?
...of course they didn't. They didn't even know what shapeshifters were.
He let out a whine, trotting toward the van again. Mary followed. "I can get you some clothes," she offered. "I mean, if you wanted to talk to me."
I don't. I don't want anything to do with this, except to know why I have ghosts following me. I'm not the person you should be asking for anything. He slowed at the edge of the blast radius from the van, sniffing as he went. Not scorched, which was odd. But definitely windblasted; the dead-already scrubgrass was flattened and slicked to the ground. Mary crouched down beside him, taking a deep breath.
"As far as I can tell you're the only one asking questions, anyway. Even the police don't really care. I mean, about the drug. They're trying to stop it. But no one cares what it is."
Get out, said something in his mind. You need to get out now.
He'd made a career out of ignoring that voice.
...maybe it was time to change.
He shifted back, wondering if the shifting mechanism would get worn out like a muscle, begin to ache more than it did. And trying, and trying not to, meet Mary's eyes.
"I can't," he said, eyes finally resting somewhere near Mary's shoulder, where the flap of her hat brushed the fabric of her coat. "I know. It's weird. Probably... terrifying, from where you are. But I can't help."
Mary stepped back, opening up the distance to the posture of human-to-human rather than human-to-dog. "What do you mean? Like, is it just-"
"Look, sometimes things just happen and you can't fix them," J said, looking up sharply. "It sucks. I know. One time I tried fixing everything-"
He shut himself up before he could remember Elashte reaching into his mind, before he could remember the sick twist of the Delta Wave and his own consciousness rising beneath his conscious self like nausea up the throat.
"This," he said, motioning to the field, to the empty space where he was sure the ghosts still hung, "is so far beyond me. I can't do anything. I cannot help."
Mary looked injured. Maybe she thought that seeing one miracle, even one so prosaic as a man turning into an animal, entitled her to all the rest.
"So you're just some guy." She shook her head. "Some guy who turns into a dog. And that's it."
"Yeah," he said. "Unfortunately 'ghost expert' doesn't come with the territory."
"You don't even want to try?"
And she could say that - so terribly simple, from her point of view. Try. As though just because she didn't have a plan didn't mean he shouldn't; as though trying was the least that could be asked of anyone. He was beginning to wonder if it should be the most.
What I want doesn't really matter. Don't you get that? "I." He shook his head. I don't owe you anything. I'm not the person you should be looking to. I can't. "...no. I don't."
Mary threw up her hands, standing up again. "Never mind. I guess. Sorry for bothering you."
"Sorry I'm not-" Jason began. What I was. "-more help."
He inhaled, closed his eyes, reached for the shift.
"Wait."
Mary was pulling off her gloves, reaching into her purse, pulling out a small notepad and a purple pen. She wrote a few lines and tore off the sheet, offering it to him. It was a name, phone number, and email address.
"If you find out anything," she said. "Or you find anyone who knows about this. Count you point them at me? I know I'm not - it'd mean a lot," she finished. "If it's not too much trouble."
Jason took the paper, reading the information, letting it stick in his mind. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "I can do that." He held the note back out, looking at her eyes. "But I wouldn't wait up."
"Having trouble sleeping anyway," Mary muttered, taking the paper and tucking it into her purse. "Good luck. You know, with - whatever."
"You too," Jason said, but he was already shifting. A few moments later they parted ways, her back through the field, him off through the night.
-
A few hours later he was back in the city, following a terribly faint scent-trail and scratching at the most likely door as the sun rose at the edge of town.
It wasn't the best trip back in, especially given the chorus of Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. running though his head. Cutting and running was supposed to be so easy. Why wasn't it?
It took a few minutes, during which he circled around to bark at windows at least twice, but Mary came down wrapped in a powder-blue robe and blinking sleep from her eyes. She stopped with her hand on the screen door, looking down at him.
"...Jason?"
He nodded.
A few blinks later she pushed the door open, and he slipped into the house. After the frost-edged night, the heat of the air had an almost liquid presence rolling along his fur.
Mary closed the door after him, pulling her robe tighter against the breath of winter which had followed him in. "You want those clothes?"
He nodded again. Mary shook her head, walking back toward a set of stairs and muttering something about bad tacos again.
Jason followed, doing his best - which wasn't quite enough - to keep at a respectable walking pace and not an eager trot.
"This is my aunt and uncle's house," Mary said, leading him up the stairs. "Major snowbirds. They're in Flagstaff right now, and they pay me to watch their house. And, you know, this place is way nicer than my apartment..."
She pushed open the door to a bedroom and walked to the closet, pulling aside a number of clothes that looked like they might receive use and pulling out a handful of hangers from the far corner.
"My uncle keeps saying he should have taken these to the Salvation Army years ago," she explained. "I guess I'll just tell him I took them for him."
She laid them out on the bed - a sportsjacket, a button-up T-shirt, a pair of blue slacks and what were apparently a pair of bowling shoes on the bed without looking at him as he began to shift. By the time he was mostly upright she'd wandered back to the closet, poking around the clothes hanging there.
"Sorry if those aren't exactly, you know, your style."
"I'll survive," Jason said, and turned away - more for her sake than his - to begin dressing.
After a moment, when the sounds of cloth rustling had more or less faded away, she turned back and pulled a cell phone out of one of the pockets of her robe. "Don't get any ideas," she said, waggling the phone at him. He could hear her arm in its sleeve, the faint noise of the air. "Grabbed it when I heard you barking. I have the police on speed-dial."
He exhaled. "If I was going to do anything dastardly to you, I would have done it back in the big empty field where no one would look for you and there wouldn't be witnesses to see me leaving your door. Trust me, I'm not... one to bite the hand that feeds."
Even if he was. He never planned to be.
He finished up the buttons on his shirt before turning back to her. "Look, I said I can't help you, but I know people who can. Probably. Like I said, I'm no expert on ghosts or anything, but..."
Mary crossed her arms. "But you know people who are?"
"Something like that." He buttoned the shirt, smoothed it down, and winced. Not the type of clothing he was used to walking around in. Still, better than being a dog or naked in the bitter cold. Not something he was enjoying walking to the next town in, but it would only be a while, wouldn't it? He wouldn't freeze. He'd manage.
All of a sudden, he was very, very weary.
"You have anywhere to sit down?" he asked. I imagine you'd be more comfortable if we weren't talking in a bedroom.
Mary sized him up, then turned to the hall. "Yeah; in the dining room. I'll make coffee. Follow me."
-
Jason hadn't realized how hungry he was until he smelled the coffee making its way through Mary's aunt-and-uncle's coffeemaker, not that he was going to say anything. He sat on one of the wooden chairs by the dining room table, drawing maps and patterns on the tablecloth with the tip of his finger.
"So this is where things are going to get a bit complicated and freaky for you," he said, half-glancing over his shoulder when the coffee had finished percolating and he could hear Mary pouring it. "But, if it helps, it's probably not as freaky as having people in your town keep turning into ghosts."
Mary finished pouring the coffee and brought him a mug, taking a seat herself. "I was going to say. Is it freakier than you turning into a dog?"
Jason hid a grim smirk behind the edge of his coffee mug. "Chicago? Yeah, a bit."
Mary took a sip, put the coffee on the table, and went back to the kitchen. When she returned she had a half-empty half-gallon of milk, a box of sugar cubes, and a spoon. "So when did Chicago come into this?" she asked, dropping three cubes into the coffee and finishing with a splash of milk.
"Just now." Jason watched, then took a drink of his own coffee and managed not to make a face. It wasn't Ianto's. It wasn't coffeeshop fare. But he wasn't drinking it for the taste, was he? And it wasn't like his standards for everything else hadn't dropped when he took on this exile. "There's someone there who can help you. A few people, actually, but I can only recommend one in good faith."
Or at least the good faith born of hear-say. Mary swished the coffee in its mug. "Okay..."
"And there are a few things you need to know before you go looking for him." Jason held up his fingers, ticking off the points. "One, he looks exactly like me. No relation, but it's creepy as hell. Two, Chicago is weirdness central. People turning into dogs? That's pretty tame. And it's not the safest place to be, now especially. Three? Ad this is the big one?" He looked over the table, meeting Mary's eyes. "He cannot know I sent you. He cannot. He can't know that you got his name from me, he can't know that you've seen someone with his face, he can't know that someone passed through your town on the day when all this happened. Nothing that can link him to me." He held her eyes, watching for the tells, watching for agreement. "Understand?"
She looked back at him, holding her mug closer. "This isn't going to get me in, like, legal trouble, is it?"
He made himself laugh. It wasn't quite casual. "You? No. He's legit. He's just not a big fan of... well, me."
She tilted her head. "Oh, so, you guys are in a fight, or something-"
"Or something. Yeah. Agree or disagree?"
"This isn't binding, or anything? I mean, I say yes, and it's not like I can't back out or-"
Jason closed his eyes. He really didn't need this to be complicated. "It's name and an address. He's a paranormal investigator. Talk to him, don't talk to him, buy him flowers, I don't care. I just need to know that he won't know I'm around."
He could feel her staring at him. "...okay," she said finally. "I'll make up something about how a friend of a cousin told me about him. Is that cool?"
"That's cool." He opened his eyes again. "His name's Desmond D. Descant. He's been doing this sort of thing for longer than it might look, apparently. Lots longer. Do you have something to take down an address on?"
"He doesn't have, like, a phone number?" Mary asked, but she got up and walked into the livingroom anyway. "Email address?"
"No idea," Jason said. "There's a network of... we don't use those as much." Explaining psychic journals was far too much work. "And I can't promise he'll be in his office on any given day, either. I'm sorry. It sucks, but it's what I have."
Mary came back in with a legal pad and a pencil. "I can stake the place out, if I need to. Leave him a letter, or something. Desmond..."
"D. Descant, paranormal investigator." Mary took down the information, and the address Jason hoped he remembered correctly. She read it back to him, and he nodded.
"All right, then," she said, laying pencil and paper down. "How do I get in touch with you if I need something?"
"You don't." Jason finished the coffee and set the mug down, pushing away from the table. "Like I said. I'm just passing through. I'm not someone you want to rely on, anyway."
Mary exhaled, curling her hands around the mug. For a moment she looked obviously alone, as though her entire life, the friends and family he knew she had somewhere, were all lost in the space between her and the walls of the house.
Then she straightened her back, putting the mug down and standing. "Hey. At least it's a start, right?"
He smiled thinly. "Right. Gotta start somewhere."
He turned around, walking to the door.
"Thanks for coffee. And the clothes."
He pushed open the door, stepping out into the early-morning darkness.
Halfway to the sidewalk the door creaked open, and Mary stopped him. "Hey, Jason?"
He turned back. Mary was in the doorway, brushing her hair off her shoulder. He showed a hand in a half-shrug. "Something?"
"Thanks," Mary said. "You're the first lead I've got."
A few of the fine hairs on the back of his neck pricked up, and he looked away. "Don't thank me," he called back, over his shoulder. "Really. Don't."
He was dreading the response as he walked away. Fortunately, it didn't materialize. He heard the click of the latch as Mary went back inside, and he left Hammond and most of its ghosts behind.