Leather [fic]
Title: Leather
Author: shadowbyrd
Rating: G
Prompt: 18. Black for fanfic100
Word Count: 2315
Pairing(s): Hints of Jack/Nine, Ten/Rose
Summary: Death leaves empty rooms full of former treasures.
A/N: Crossover with Doctor Who.
He found it at Jackie Tyler’s old flat.
After discovering her and Rose’s names on the list of the dead, he was on the phone to the Met, spinning some tale about potential involvement with a Torchwood case and requesting they put a uniform on guard. They hadn’t been much pleased at being asked favours of the very organisation that they were exerting so much time and manpower to clean up after, and the fact that Jack was from a completely different branch hadn’t cut a lot of ice, but he had won out through petty bureaucracy.
He left the wreckage of Torchwood tower to relieve the Constable as soon as he was able to hand the clean up operation over to someone else. He’d only been to there once, when they stopped off so Rose could surprise her Mum on her birthday (and get some laundry done on the sly.) and that had been brief; Jack and the Doctor had left them to the mother-daughter bonding and gone down the pub.
Even so, the silence made the flat seem like a completely different place; miserable and abandoned. He looked over the family pictures with a sad smile. It was hard to believe that that sweet little girl in the sunhat, grinning behind an ice cream was dead and gone. Hard to believe, seeing a photo on to of the TV that he was sure he or maybe the Doctor had taken, that she wasn’t just out of sight, that he couldn’t pick up the phone, dial a number and hear her voice (he’s been trying her mobile number every week this year. No answer). Hard to believe he’d never meet her again, never exchange yelled greetings and pick her up and swing her around in a tight hug. So hard to believe looking at her pictures that he'd never touch her again.
He circled the living room, still only just gathering another coat of dust, and looked in on the kitchen. He hesitated about going into the bedrooms, but, remembering that he did have a legitimate duty to remove any alien trinkets that Rose might have picked up on her travels, he gave in.
He ended up taking an old backpack from her wardrobe (still bearing a few exercise books from school) and filling it with her bits and pieces, many of which, he realised with a pang, he’d never seen before.
They’d left him behind, but the sight-seeing and the souvenir shopping had gone on. He remembered even now the look on her face when the Doctor was saying goodbye to that girl (Lydia - no, Lynda. With a “Y”) and remembered reading reports about a journalist in Ealing called Sarah-Jane Smith, the UNIT scientist Liz Shaw, a runaway girl in a bulky jacket calling herself “Ace”. Picking people up and dropping them again clearly wasn’t a new thing with him. Maybe Rose was used to it too.
It hurt thinking like that.
He moved onto Jackie’s room. There was less here, though Rose had clearly taken every opportunity to shower her mother with alien treasures. Little wonder, given the pokey little flat that they’d been sharing. And yet here, they were little more than pretty knick-knacks cluttering up the place. He piled them in too.
He pulled the backpack onto his back, thoughts flitting briefly back to his first day of school, how he hadn’t wanted to leave. The day he packed up and left home for good. He’d not looked back and his mother hadn’t looked up from her chores.
He looked again a picture of Jackie, struggling to keep a six year old Rose in her lap long enough for the picture to be taken. The holos had stopped in his house after the attack. What was left of his family had been close only in terms of proximity.
Shaking himself, he opened the door to the spare room and shut the door quickly behind him. Turning to face the room, he found it much as he had expected it, only browner; a plain, characterless room with a few cardboard boxes of junk that wouldn’t fit anywhere else stuffed in the corners and the bare basics of furniture; bed, dressing table, ward -
For a moment, Jack could only stare numbly. It couldn’t be. It just - it couldn’t.
But it was. Hanging on the door of the wardrobe, as though set aside for the next morning was the Doctor’s battered old leather coat.
Jack reached out a hand, then stumbled forward into the wardrobe, both hands grasping at it, rolling the cracked leather between his fingers.
He had seen the CCTV. He had been the acting head of Torchwood Three for the past six or seven years - reports and sightings had come across his desk at least once a fortnight. A bright suit and an ankle length brown trench coat. A younger face, a slighter frame. He’d seen him so many times, but he’d never really - it just hadn’t sunk in. But now - now it was here, right before his eyes.
No more U-boat captain.
Jack pressed his face to it, convinced for a moment he could feel the broad warm chest beneath it that should have been there, his eyes wet.
He was gone. He was really gone.
Jack folded it over his arm and locked the flat behind him, leaving the key under the mat for whoever was going to come and pack up the rest.
When they had returned to Cardiff, and Jack had gotten back to his brown, plain characterless room beneath the depths of the Hub he’d hung it up on the front of his wardrobe.
Looking at it now, almost two years later, Jack felt a numb misery looking back on his past stupidity. Even then he hadn’t really understood. He had seen a new face in the candid photos, witnessed a new energy on amateur video. It was a younger, sprier body. Nothing more. Underneath it all, he was still the same man he had been before.
He would be delighted to see Jack again. He’d be horrified at what had happened. He’d be only too willing to help. He’d be able to put Jack right.
He’d turned tail and run the second that he’d seen him approach. He knew exactly what had happened and left Jack anyway, alone and confused and very out of his depth. He couldn’t look at him, because Jack was just wrong. A fixed point in the ever-changing ripple of the universe. He didn’t even know where to begin.
Jack stroked the leather and sighed. He closed his eyes and ran his hands down the sleeves of the jacket.
He was the same. Exactly the same person. And yet so catastrophically different Jack caught himself wondering, hoping that he’d gotten the wrong person somehow; that the real Doctor was out there somewhere still, grinning and bossy and stamping his feet, moaning about the cold because he put his jacket down somewhere and he never picked it up again.
But he wasn’t. Not lost in some far and junk-filled corner of the universe. He wasn’t going to step into Jack’s path one day, poking an index finger at Jack and demanding his jacket back.
That Doctor - his Doctor was gone. Forever.
He took the cuff of one of the sleeves (he couldn’t remember which hand he’d shook when they were finally introduced, and it niggled at him, like a forgotten name that brought the story that you were telling to a dead halt) and raised it to his lips.
“Nice knowing you, Mr Spock.” he muttered into the fabric. He dropped the sleeve again and watched it flap back against the wardrobe door.
It felt strange and slightly sacrilegious. Disrespectful, almost. But, somewhere under all the Time Agency training, Con man wile and twentieth-century living, Jack was still a desert boy. If you came across a body, the first thing you did was take anything that could be used; after all, the dead didn’t have need for them and it was hard enough for the living to get by without perching awkwardly on ceremony.
Of course, this wasn’t the desert - far from it, this was Cardiff - but there was still danger. Not that that was why he was wearing it.
He paused outside the door and cleared his throat. He wasn’t going to turn around and walk again. For better or for worse, he was not that man anymore; not the coward who pretended to be a war hero and enjoyed all the perks of being an American Captain in a bombed and broken London without doing any of the work.
But he was still…sometimes he wasn’t quite brave enough. Every now and then he needed someone to walk with him. To be there when he looked back, thinking about turning to around to look at him, and without words tell him no. To nod to show they had his back. To stay and watch and help him see it through.
He didn’t have the Doctor - not his, not anyone’s - but he had enough of him here, just enough.
He raised his hand and knocked.
A moment later Toshiko answered, doing a double take when she saw the leather jacket. “What’s going on?” she asked “Are we needed?”
“You are.” said Jack “Mind if I come in?”
“Um. Okay.” She didn’t want to, not after what happened yesterday, but Jack had observed that she often had difficulty actually refusing him. All because he had set her free. He covered his eyes. The lines he could have crossed, if he were that different man.
“What’s this about exactly?” asked Tosh, defensive posture only emphasising her uncertain tone.
Jack sighed, glancing at the ceiling for a moment. They were only just in her hallway. What passed for it in her flat anyway - there weren’t so much rooms as there were spaces, too few things scattered about in an attempt to fill them. She really didn’t want him here.
He folded his hands behind his back, like he was giving a speech to the cadets, or reciting something at school. “I just wanted to say - the thing with Tommy; it was a really shitty situation, and if I could help it, I wouldn’t have put you there. Which doesn’t really mean a whole lot, but there you go.” It came out even flatter than he’d thought it would.
“Is that it?” asked Toshiko.
Jack pursed his lips. “No. I -” his hands reached of their own accord, gripping the lapels. He glanced down and looked up at Toshiko. “You know what this is right?”
Toshiko nodded.
“This is the Doctor I knew.” he said. He wrung the lapels between his fingers, making the leather creak gently. “Not the one I left with. He’s changed since…” Jack gave up and began again. “He’s not the same. He’s no worse, he’s no better - but he’s not who he was. Not who I wanted him to be.”
It hurt to actually say it out loud, to admit it to someone even someone who didn’t fully understand. “What I’m trying to say, is that I understand. Both sides, really.” He laughed weakly “And I am sorry.”
Toshiko nodded slowly. “I know you are.” But not I forgive you.
Jack was at a loss for what to say next, trying to think of something else, something that might better explain it all to her. But then, he had a flash of inspiration.
“You met him. With the Space Pig, remember? You remember what he was like? How it felt when you were in the room with him?”
Toshiko was smiling faintly at the memory. “Anything’s possible.”
Jack smiled back, releasing the lapels and shrugging the jacket. He held it out to her. “Here.”
She laughed, baffled. “What?”
“Here.” said Jack again, jerking his hand. “Try it on.”
Toshiko just looked at him. Not the kind of look she’d shot him two days ago, but the kind that were usually accompanied with an empty bourbon creams packet. “Stop messing around, it’s far too big -”
“Humour me.” said Jack, grinning now because he knew that she would.
Toshiko rolled her eyes and took it from him, slipping her arms into too-wide sleeves and shrugging into on her shoulders. She held her arms out in a half-hearted pose. “Go on, then. How do I look?”
“How do you feel?” asked Jack.
Toshiko shrugging, bringing one arm up to keep the jacket from falling off. “I don’t know.”
“You feel dangerous?” Toshiko laughed again. “Because you look it. Grand and magnificent and terrifying.”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“Anything’s possible.” Jack murmured, still smiling.
Toshiko gave his arm a little shove. “Shut up.” She started to shake it off, but Jack set a hand on her shoulder, holding it in place.
“Keep it.”
Toshiko’s eyes went comically wide. “Really?”
Jack shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. “Well, just for now. I would like it back eventually. I need to feel powerful every now and then.”
“Jack. You’re immortal.” Toshiko pointed out.
“I know.” said Jack. “Call me when you think you’re ready, I’ll come back here for it.”
“Of course.” Toshiko said. “Will you warm enough getting back?”
“I’ll be fine.” said Jack, hand already on the door handle. “Just make sure you are too, okay?”
Toshiko nodded. “Okay.”
“Night, Tosh.” said Jack opening the door.
“Night, Jack.” said Toshiko.
Downstairs the night air was sharp and cool against his skin, the wind making his eyes water a little. He hopped down the steps towards the building’s car park. He gave a mental nod to the man (now jacketless) who might, in an alternate reality, still have Jack’s back.
Mission accomplished
“Good thing, too.” Jack muttered, climbing into the SUV and shutting the door. “It makes a nice change, but leather really isn’t me.”
A/N: Dedicated to my Granddad. Thanks for the memories.
Author: shadowbyrd
Rating: G
Prompt: 18. Black for fanfic100
Word Count: 2315
Pairing(s): Hints of Jack/Nine, Ten/Rose
Summary: Death leaves empty rooms full of former treasures.
A/N: Crossover with Doctor Who.
He found it at Jackie Tyler’s old flat.
After discovering her and Rose’s names on the list of the dead, he was on the phone to the Met, spinning some tale about potential involvement with a Torchwood case and requesting they put a uniform on guard. They hadn’t been much pleased at being asked favours of the very organisation that they were exerting so much time and manpower to clean up after, and the fact that Jack was from a completely different branch hadn’t cut a lot of ice, but he had won out through petty bureaucracy.
He left the wreckage of Torchwood tower to relieve the Constable as soon as he was able to hand the clean up operation over to someone else. He’d only been to there once, when they stopped off so Rose could surprise her Mum on her birthday (and get some laundry done on the sly.) and that had been brief; Jack and the Doctor had left them to the mother-daughter bonding and gone down the pub.
Even so, the silence made the flat seem like a completely different place; miserable and abandoned. He looked over the family pictures with a sad smile. It was hard to believe that that sweet little girl in the sunhat, grinning behind an ice cream was dead and gone. Hard to believe, seeing a photo on to of the TV that he was sure he or maybe the Doctor had taken, that she wasn’t just out of sight, that he couldn’t pick up the phone, dial a number and hear her voice (he’s been trying her mobile number every week this year. No answer). Hard to believe he’d never meet her again, never exchange yelled greetings and pick her up and swing her around in a tight hug. So hard to believe looking at her pictures that he'd never touch her again.
He circled the living room, still only just gathering another coat of dust, and looked in on the kitchen. He hesitated about going into the bedrooms, but, remembering that he did have a legitimate duty to remove any alien trinkets that Rose might have picked up on her travels, he gave in.
He ended up taking an old backpack from her wardrobe (still bearing a few exercise books from school) and filling it with her bits and pieces, many of which, he realised with a pang, he’d never seen before.
They’d left him behind, but the sight-seeing and the souvenir shopping had gone on. He remembered even now the look on her face when the Doctor was saying goodbye to that girl (Lydia - no, Lynda. With a “Y”) and remembered reading reports about a journalist in Ealing called Sarah-Jane Smith, the UNIT scientist Liz Shaw, a runaway girl in a bulky jacket calling herself “Ace”. Picking people up and dropping them again clearly wasn’t a new thing with him. Maybe Rose was used to it too.
It hurt thinking like that.
He moved onto Jackie’s room. There was less here, though Rose had clearly taken every opportunity to shower her mother with alien treasures. Little wonder, given the pokey little flat that they’d been sharing. And yet here, they were little more than pretty knick-knacks cluttering up the place. He piled them in too.
He pulled the backpack onto his back, thoughts flitting briefly back to his first day of school, how he hadn’t wanted to leave. The day he packed up and left home for good. He’d not looked back and his mother hadn’t looked up from her chores.
He looked again a picture of Jackie, struggling to keep a six year old Rose in her lap long enough for the picture to be taken. The holos had stopped in his house after the attack. What was left of his family had been close only in terms of proximity.
Shaking himself, he opened the door to the spare room and shut the door quickly behind him. Turning to face the room, he found it much as he had expected it, only browner; a plain, characterless room with a few cardboard boxes of junk that wouldn’t fit anywhere else stuffed in the corners and the bare basics of furniture; bed, dressing table, ward -
For a moment, Jack could only stare numbly. It couldn’t be. It just - it couldn’t.
But it was. Hanging on the door of the wardrobe, as though set aside for the next morning was the Doctor’s battered old leather coat.
Jack reached out a hand, then stumbled forward into the wardrobe, both hands grasping at it, rolling the cracked leather between his fingers.
He had seen the CCTV. He had been the acting head of Torchwood Three for the past six or seven years - reports and sightings had come across his desk at least once a fortnight. A bright suit and an ankle length brown trench coat. A younger face, a slighter frame. He’d seen him so many times, but he’d never really - it just hadn’t sunk in. But now - now it was here, right before his eyes.
No more U-boat captain.
Jack pressed his face to it, convinced for a moment he could feel the broad warm chest beneath it that should have been there, his eyes wet.
He was gone. He was really gone.
Jack folded it over his arm and locked the flat behind him, leaving the key under the mat for whoever was going to come and pack up the rest.
When they had returned to Cardiff, and Jack had gotten back to his brown, plain characterless room beneath the depths of the Hub he’d hung it up on the front of his wardrobe.
Looking at it now, almost two years later, Jack felt a numb misery looking back on his past stupidity. Even then he hadn’t really understood. He had seen a new face in the candid photos, witnessed a new energy on amateur video. It was a younger, sprier body. Nothing more. Underneath it all, he was still the same man he had been before.
He would be delighted to see Jack again. He’d be horrified at what had happened. He’d be only too willing to help. He’d be able to put Jack right.
He’d turned tail and run the second that he’d seen him approach. He knew exactly what had happened and left Jack anyway, alone and confused and very out of his depth. He couldn’t look at him, because Jack was just wrong. A fixed point in the ever-changing ripple of the universe. He didn’t even know where to begin.
Jack stroked the leather and sighed. He closed his eyes and ran his hands down the sleeves of the jacket.
He was the same. Exactly the same person. And yet so catastrophically different Jack caught himself wondering, hoping that he’d gotten the wrong person somehow; that the real Doctor was out there somewhere still, grinning and bossy and stamping his feet, moaning about the cold because he put his jacket down somewhere and he never picked it up again.
But he wasn’t. Not lost in some far and junk-filled corner of the universe. He wasn’t going to step into Jack’s path one day, poking an index finger at Jack and demanding his jacket back.
That Doctor - his Doctor was gone. Forever.
He took the cuff of one of the sleeves (he couldn’t remember which hand he’d shook when they were finally introduced, and it niggled at him, like a forgotten name that brought the story that you were telling to a dead halt) and raised it to his lips.
“Nice knowing you, Mr Spock.” he muttered into the fabric. He dropped the sleeve again and watched it flap back against the wardrobe door.
It felt strange and slightly sacrilegious. Disrespectful, almost. But, somewhere under all the Time Agency training, Con man wile and twentieth-century living, Jack was still a desert boy. If you came across a body, the first thing you did was take anything that could be used; after all, the dead didn’t have need for them and it was hard enough for the living to get by without perching awkwardly on ceremony.
Of course, this wasn’t the desert - far from it, this was Cardiff - but there was still danger. Not that that was why he was wearing it.
He paused outside the door and cleared his throat. He wasn’t going to turn around and walk again. For better or for worse, he was not that man anymore; not the coward who pretended to be a war hero and enjoyed all the perks of being an American Captain in a bombed and broken London without doing any of the work.
But he was still…sometimes he wasn’t quite brave enough. Every now and then he needed someone to walk with him. To be there when he looked back, thinking about turning to around to look at him, and without words tell him no. To nod to show they had his back. To stay and watch and help him see it through.
He didn’t have the Doctor - not his, not anyone’s - but he had enough of him here, just enough.
He raised his hand and knocked.
A moment later Toshiko answered, doing a double take when she saw the leather jacket. “What’s going on?” she asked “Are we needed?”
“You are.” said Jack “Mind if I come in?”
“Um. Okay.” She didn’t want to, not after what happened yesterday, but Jack had observed that she often had difficulty actually refusing him. All because he had set her free. He covered his eyes. The lines he could have crossed, if he were that different man.
“What’s this about exactly?” asked Tosh, defensive posture only emphasising her uncertain tone.
Jack sighed, glancing at the ceiling for a moment. They were only just in her hallway. What passed for it in her flat anyway - there weren’t so much rooms as there were spaces, too few things scattered about in an attempt to fill them. She really didn’t want him here.
He folded his hands behind his back, like he was giving a speech to the cadets, or reciting something at school. “I just wanted to say - the thing with Tommy; it was a really shitty situation, and if I could help it, I wouldn’t have put you there. Which doesn’t really mean a whole lot, but there you go.” It came out even flatter than he’d thought it would.
“Is that it?” asked Toshiko.
Jack pursed his lips. “No. I -” his hands reached of their own accord, gripping the lapels. He glanced down and looked up at Toshiko. “You know what this is right?”
Toshiko nodded.
“This is the Doctor I knew.” he said. He wrung the lapels between his fingers, making the leather creak gently. “Not the one I left with. He’s changed since…” Jack gave up and began again. “He’s not the same. He’s no worse, he’s no better - but he’s not who he was. Not who I wanted him to be.”
It hurt to actually say it out loud, to admit it to someone even someone who didn’t fully understand. “What I’m trying to say, is that I understand. Both sides, really.” He laughed weakly “And I am sorry.”
Toshiko nodded slowly. “I know you are.” But not I forgive you.
Jack was at a loss for what to say next, trying to think of something else, something that might better explain it all to her. But then, he had a flash of inspiration.
“You met him. With the Space Pig, remember? You remember what he was like? How it felt when you were in the room with him?”
Toshiko was smiling faintly at the memory. “Anything’s possible.”
Jack smiled back, releasing the lapels and shrugging the jacket. He held it out to her. “Here.”
She laughed, baffled. “What?”
“Here.” said Jack again, jerking his hand. “Try it on.”
Toshiko just looked at him. Not the kind of look she’d shot him two days ago, but the kind that were usually accompanied with an empty bourbon creams packet. “Stop messing around, it’s far too big -”
“Humour me.” said Jack, grinning now because he knew that she would.
Toshiko rolled her eyes and took it from him, slipping her arms into too-wide sleeves and shrugging into on her shoulders. She held her arms out in a half-hearted pose. “Go on, then. How do I look?”
“How do you feel?” asked Jack.
Toshiko shrugging, bringing one arm up to keep the jacket from falling off. “I don’t know.”
“You feel dangerous?” Toshiko laughed again. “Because you look it. Grand and magnificent and terrifying.”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“Anything’s possible.” Jack murmured, still smiling.
Toshiko gave his arm a little shove. “Shut up.” She started to shake it off, but Jack set a hand on her shoulder, holding it in place.
“Keep it.”
Toshiko’s eyes went comically wide. “Really?”
Jack shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. “Well, just for now. I would like it back eventually. I need to feel powerful every now and then.”
“Jack. You’re immortal.” Toshiko pointed out.
“I know.” said Jack. “Call me when you think you’re ready, I’ll come back here for it.”
“Of course.” Toshiko said. “Will you warm enough getting back?”
“I’ll be fine.” said Jack, hand already on the door handle. “Just make sure you are too, okay?”
Toshiko nodded. “Okay.”
“Night, Tosh.” said Jack opening the door.
“Night, Jack.” said Toshiko.
Downstairs the night air was sharp and cool against his skin, the wind making his eyes water a little. He hopped down the steps towards the building’s car park. He gave a mental nod to the man (now jacketless) who might, in an alternate reality, still have Jack’s back.
Mission accomplished
“Good thing, too.” Jack muttered, climbing into the SUV and shutting the door. “It makes a nice change, but leather really isn’t me.”
A/N: Dedicated to my Granddad. Thanks for the memories.