Fic: "All the Stars in the Sky" [Jack/Diane, PG-13]
Title: All the Stars in the Sky
Author: Shane Mayhem
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Jack/Diane
Spoilers: Post-CoE.
Notes: Apologies to Frederick Forsyth. I really didn't mean it. But hey, ripping off ideas from published authors' stories is how fanfic happens. If you like this story, you have the incredible beta skills of neifile7 to thank. She's amazing.
Summary: Some time after the end of Jack's world, he realizes that things just keep going.
Someday, he will know all their names.
Someday, he will speak those names as they all burn out before him, one by one.
That day is not today, though. The stars are still mysteries, most of them, though he's visited the systems of more of them than he cares to remember. Today--although he knows from personal experience that one day all of the stars and the currents between them, the winds of the vacuum of space and the gravitational pull of black holes and nebulae, will be mapped and named like the streams and currents of Earth's oceans-- today he can still feel a desolate ache when he looks at the vastness of space. Like a limitless horizon, it calls to him. Old sailor.
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die
Jack grins humorlessly to himself, tracing the bottom of his glass in uncertain circles on the titanium top of the bar. Light stains the shining metal--red and orange and green--washed up in pools of liquid sweated or spilled from liquor glasses throughout the night. Many of those empty glasses are his. He's actually quite, depressingly drunk. He has been for...
Well. What's time when you've got an eternity of it spread out before you? Maybe he's been here for days, maybe weeks. He's stopped caring about the passage of time, which is a good thing, since he probably couldn't be reliably called upon to remember how a clock works at this point, let alone what time it is, what day it is, what year, or what century. It all runs together in his head. Sometimes he sort of sobers up and finds himself thinking that he really should get back to the Hub. Sometimes he thinks he's still waiting for the Doctor, that it's sometime in the middle of nineteenth century.
Sometimes, even more disconcertingly, he'll suddenly be certain that he's in London, that the War is still in full swing, and that the air raid sirens are about to go off any minute. In those moments, he feels a kind of guilt-ridden panic so intense that he has to close his eyes and lower his head until Time goes away again.
But right now he's thinking about the stars. Trying to pick one he hasn't heard of off the revolving star chart on the wall above the bar. It's just for show, not accurate and not meant to be, and so it's a pretty fruitless endeavor. Besides, his wristband is a smoldering piece of junk now, having been used and abused beyond its original design until, after this last jump, it gave up the ghost for good. Maybe he'll just hop another shipping transport tomorrow. Maybe, with any luck, they'll be bound for the Outer Systems, stop over on some backwater planet like an island in the Pacific, as empty as he is. Maybe he'll jump ship there, strand himself. Forever.
The lights of the display sparkle in the table top, and Jack realizes he's been staring at it from an ever-narrowing distance for quite a while now, eyes half-closed. He pulls himself into a more upright position, almost falls off his chair completely, and taps his glass on the bar, signalling the bartender. The poker-faced young man refills Jack's glass without comment. Jack mutters his thanks and tips it down his throat, a brief sting of warmth, something that his tongue doesn't even taste.
A few seconds after he's swallowed, Jack's stomach informs him that it's had too much, and that he's going to vomit right now. Pushing away from the bar with a groan, he somehow makes it out the side door before everything comes up. And keeps coming up. Jack's on his knees against the side of the building, hands braced on the wall, coughing and gasping for breaths as his belly convulses and vomit stings in the back of his nose and throat.
Been around the bend, have you, old boy? Not too good by the looks of it.
Voices from the past, faces that flicker behind his tightly-shut eyes. Names he can't always remember, or ones that come a few seconds too late to his churning mind, ending up mismatched with the wrong face. He's not sure how long it lasts. Hours, days. He gradually comes around to an awareness of his fingers pressed so hard against the wall they feel rubbed raw, his head hung, spitting weakly as his stomach lurches to a shaky stop. A flush of heat on the back of his neck has cooled to icy sweat. His head won't stop spinning, and so he doesn't move yet, trying to take deep breaths. It's been a while since he's been so poorly, but it's nothing he hasn't done before. Breathe.
"I say...are you alright?"
Another voice. Jack makes a barely-audible whimper as he shuts his eyes tighter, trying to push it out of his mind. But the voice is insistent in the way it threads through his vague consciousness and slowly he realizes that he's actually hearing it, the words spoken aloud, somewhere above him. A human voice. Female, soft, hesitant.
"Hello? Are you going to live, there?"
Jack nods his head, very carefully. The motion makes his gut churn again, and he gags, but there's nothing left in him this time and he only coughs out gluey saliva and thin bile. There's something familiar about the voice the next time it sounds, closer to his ear this time, as the voice's owner crouches beside him.
"Well, you're sure not getting home in this state. Do you want me to get you a ride?"
Jack wants to laugh; there is a universe of complication that this kind woman doesn't understand, an abyss of pointlessness of which she's innocently unaware. "I'll be fine," he croaks miserably, hands starting to slip down the wall as he loses consciousness. He feels her grab onto his upper arm and jerk him backward to keep him from passing out face-first in his own vomit, and from a long way away he hears her gasp.
~~~
Stars dangle from the ceiling in the darkness, soft glowing balls of light that bear no resemblance to the reality they're supposed to represent. Jack has looked into the vacuum of space often enough to know that the light of the stars is hard and sharp.
His head is throbbing. He can barely open his eyes. His back aches and he feels like he's been punched repeatedly in the gut. But he's not lying in the street--instead he's stretched out on a sofa with his coat over him. His boots have been removed. So has his gun belt, and a mindless impulse to move suddenly makes him flail a bit until his fingers contact the smooth holster of the ancient Webley, on the floor. He lies back until he can open his eyes fully without stabbing pain, and then works on gradually pulling his wracked body into a sitting position. This results in further waves of nausea and he has to draw his knees up so that he can rest his head on them, smothering the feeling in the rhythm of his own breathing.
"You're awake."
She's there in the doorway of the darkened room. She sounds subdued, tired. He looks up and sees her silhouetted, long curls loose around her shoulders, tall and curvy, her antiquated flight jacket open and sliding down her arms. She's leaning there with her hip cocked, a glass of something in her hand.
His brain slowly assembles the puzzle pieces, and disorientation shatters the scene again--he shuts his eyes, sucks in a hitching breath.
"Diane...Diane Holmes?"
"The very one. I certainly never thought I'd see you again, Captain Jack Harkness."
She crosses to him, bends down beside him until her hair tickles the top of his head. She's pressing the cold cup into his limp hand. Water. He swallows thickly, but suddenly he's overcome with a powerful thirst, and gulps it down. His stomach protests only weakly, and he finds that if he leans back and rubs it a little, he'll be alright.
He looks up at her as memory comes flooding back and he reorganizes the pieces of himself he can find into some semblance of normalcy. It begins with a smile he can't feel.
"Sorry I'm not...in the greatest condition." He gestures to himself with a charming grin. Her dark eyes remain serious for a moment, but the grin works, like it always does, and she relents into a gentle smile.
"It happens to the best of us, Captain."
He decides not to bring up the fact that he's certainly not the best of us. He decides not to ask her how she got here, where "here" is, and what she's been up to for the last...however long. Instead, his immortal body continues to react in a very human way to prolonged lack of solid food and continuous alcohol poisoning: his eyes roll back and he swoons against the sofa. Diane darts forward to catch him and his head is pillowed on her chest, her fingers reflexively stroking his sweaty hair, and it all feels so familiar that tears sting his eyes and roll down his numb cheeks.
He should feel mortified, but that feeling, along with many others, it seems, has disappeared from his emotional lexicon. He shivers and curls on her lap like a child, and she, surprised and distressed, murmurs to him that it will be all right, and at last, when her words can't bring him comfort, leans down and kisses his hair tenderly, her arms wrapped firmly around his shoulders.
~~~
"Have you fallen through time, too?" She asks him the next day as she's trying to coax him into eating solid food. "Come on, just try the toast."
He does, to please her. She doesn't smoke anymore, but tends to chew pens and hold them like cigarettes in homage to her curtailed addiction. Cigarettes are harder to find than real leather these days.
It's the 23rd century. They are on Arbros, one of Earth's first and most successful colonies.
"Fallen, been thrown, jumped..." he says with the ghost of a smile, scratching his finger across her plastic table cloth. It's covered with Hello Kitties. ("Dreadfully silly," she calls it. "I inherited it from the old lady who lived in the place before. She says it's an antique.")
"Captain, there's so much I want to ask you," she says, her excitement muted only by the truly wretched state he's in. At least he's showered and shaved, thanks to her. "How did you get here? Where are the others, you know...Gwen and Toshiko, and...and Owen. And oh, what's that nice boy's name...?"
The look in his eyes stops her. She knows right away, and he can barely stand the expression of horror, pain, and sympathy that slowly suffuses her face. He looks back down at the offering of toast and they are both silent for several moments.
"How did it happen?" She asks quietly.
He just shakes his head.
~~~
The main reason that Jack doesn't like to talk about his past is because he hates to see those expressions. He's run out of ways to respond to all of the "I'm sorrys" and the "whys" and the "how did it happens."
He used to think there was only one person who would understand, one person whose expression might carry with it the shared weight of knowing.
He last saw that face some time ago, before he ran away from Earth for possibly the last time. Before he left Gwen, pregnant and crying, on a hillside in Wales.
"Hello Jack," the voice said, and Jack felt a sudden swell of hatred, intense yet ambiguous. Did he hate the Doctor, or himself? Or was it just everything, the whole rotten orchestration of history, the orbits of the doomed planets, the spinning of the wretched galaxies that had brought them to this point?
He was knee-deep in mud, digging it out from around little huts with his bare hands, part of a line of mud-covered, expressionless, weary human beings trying to put their version of civilization back to rights after the Earth had randomly ravaged them with an enormous hurricane.
It was actually Rift spikes, more frequent in this last month, that had caused the hurricane, but Jack didn't care. He wasn't a hero; he was a volunteer. Covered in the same mud and shit as everyone else, hiding himself in this tableau of misery and hope.
"What are you doing here?" he asked flatly, even though he knew the question was stupid. The Doctor could be anywhere, at any time, and it had nothing to do with him. That two people should meet, fall in love, or become enemies, or lose each other, or meet again, were only mathematical probabilities, events in an infinite equation created by forces unending and vast and simple. It was only the narrowness of human subjectivity that lent those events any importance whatever.
"The hurricane. I'm guessing you know that the Rift was being manipulated by a race from the far edge of the galaxy, which is probably why you're here. Particularly nasty lot, called the 456, I gather. Turns out they were responding to an attack on one of their expeditionary forces to this planet, a few months ago. Something destroyed the envoy and the whole expeditionary fleet. Thought you might have had something to do with that, so I came to take a look, and of course, well...save the world from being ripped apart by the Lambda Wave that the 456 were using to jam Rift frequencies. I stopped them and all Earth suffered was a nastier than usual hurricane season."
It was to the Doctor's credit that he spoke that last sentence with an aware sense of irony, and that his grin wasn't as self-satisfied as usual, as he looked around at the devastation. Jack straightened up slowly, laughing. The grin faded entirely.
"What?"
"The Rift-quakes. Yeah. Right."
"I beg your pardon?" The Doctor sounded confused; he hated being confused when it came to Jack, and so he also sounded offended. There was a slight tension to the supposedly casual way he held his long body, hands in pockets.
"That's not why I'm here."
The Doctor was silent for a second longer than usual. "Well, I assumed that Torchwood--"
"Torchwood doesn't exist anymore, Doctor." Jack abruptly bent down and began digging again. He realized the shape he'd been uncovering was a child's toy riding car. "You got your wish."
This time the silence was palpable, full of the prickling of the Doctor's expectant stare on his shoulder blades. He assumed that Jack would spill it all, tell him what had happened. Doctor Confessor. But Jack didn't, only kept scooping away handfuls of mud, moving on to a new patch. His shirt sleeves, sodden, kept falling down around his wrists, and he pushed them up again, smearing his bare arms. It reminded him somehow of a grief ritual. Paint the face and tear the shirt.
"What...what do you mean?"
"They're dead, Doctor. Gwen's the only one left, and I had to let her go before it killed her, too. There is no more Torchwood."
He made the mistake of turning to look, to see that expression of helpless sympathy, almost pity rise up in the Doctor's dark eyes. It was a look Jack had been longing to see directed at him for so long, and now he no longer cared. He laughed flatly, harshly, at the Doctor's face.
"Oh well. Life goes on."
"Jack, I'm--"
"Don't." A fervent, angry panic rose in him like the need to be sick. "Don't. Say. It." He wiped the back of his muddy forearm quickly across his face.
"Just go."
~~~
When Diane flew through the Rift, she nearly died. Unable to navigate by instruments in the Time storm that buffeted and tore at her plane, she pressed the crucifix around her neck to her lips and gave herself up for lost. Thank God, she tells him with a wry smile, she opened her eyes one last time or she never would have seen it.
Through the crackling strands of Space-Time, the indistinct, but suddenly unmistakable form of another aircraft. She panicked, throttling up so she wouldn't lose sight of it, trying desperately to get anything but screaming static on the radio, but the other aircraft flew straight and steady, hanging back. Waiting for her.
"They called them Shepherds, back in the War," she says, chewing on a pen again. Jack smiles slowly, nodding with memory. "Men who would go up again after their missions and lead badly damaged bombers back home. Injured planes and crew, flying without radio, without radar or compasses. They'd fly with them to the nearest airfields. Lead them in." Her voice shakes a little as she tells him this, and she takes another gulp of coffee.
Diane still flies, though it's not her de Havilland Dragon Rapide anymore, except on weekends, when she shows it off for the delight of the locals. She's a ferry pilot on the transport routes between Arbros and its several moons--carrying mostly items of great value or those too dangerous to risk to MDT--Molecular Dissolution Transposition.
"I never imagined I'd be flying in outer space," she says, and the way her eyes light up reminds Jack of Gwen. Young, excited, passionate.
He can smell it in her, too--all that hot blood, all that life and vigor. All the fliers he's known have smelled like that, and so when he presses his nose and lips to her collarbone at night, it's like some kind of bittersweet homecoming, in a way.
She's a skillful lover, strong and self-assured. She warms him up, and even though she doesn't reignite the spark he's lost, she keeps him just this side of sanity.
They don't discuss it much, that gaping blackness in his life that's like the elephant in the room, but she knows it's there. She's not a caretaker like Gwen, but she's gentle with him in her own way. She'll bring him leftovers from the restaurant she visits for lunch sometimes, or search through the channels on the holovision for programs she thinks he'll like. Jack licks his wounds, gains back the weight he's lost, and occasionally vaguely contemplates moving on. He doesn't really realize how strong Diane is until she tells him the story of her Shepherd.
He realizes it as he watches tears form in her brown eyes, and watches her shake her head with a smile and blink them quickly away.
"I haven't really believed in anything I couldn't touch since I was thirteen years old," she says, "but I still don't know....I'm still not sure..."
He just holds his coffee cup in both hands and watches her, caught up momentarily in someone else's drama, almost seeing the terrifying pitch and roll of her plane as it fights against an atmosphere that doesn't make sense, seeing her staring out her windscreen, sweat in her eyes, gaze fixed desperately on the small dark figure of the mysterious aircraft ahead.
"I don't suppose you think there's any such thing as angels, do you, Jack?" Her smile is a little bit teasing. She suddenly reminds him not of Gwen, but of Estelle, and it hits him hard in the diaphragm, taking his breath. He lowers his eyes.
"Not," he finally manages, "not like the kind you read about in books."
"I try to find a logical explanation," she says, and her voice is raw now. He puts out a hand and covers hers, cupping it. "Like maybe that I imagined the whole thing...but the truth is, I steered for that airplane and didn't think of anything else, and when I came out of the storm, I was on this world. It was sunny. And there...there was a landing strip ahead. I saw it....I saw him wave his wings, you know, telling me to go ahead and land. And then he disappeared...the light was so bright. I just couldn't see him anymore."
She is gazing into the distance over his shoulder, and he can see in the lines of her face the toll that her journey must have taken. How certain she'd been that she was going to die. How she wrestled the de Havilland through the storm of the Void. And ever since, how she has wrestled with this new world, this new concept of herself and her universe. It's a hard thing, Jack knows, to lose yourself like that.
He squeezes her hand and his eyes sting a little, too.
"Just don't put too much stock in guardian angels," he tells her, though he's smiling. "You were brilliant, you know."
~~~
Jack ended up telling the Doctor what happened, but it's a point of pride that he had to be locked up in the TARDIS for days before he would do so.
Any other time, and it would have been gratifying, to have the Doctor chasing after him for once, suddenly obsessed with him when before he'd left him to die again and again, alone and afraid. But Jack was too empty of anything to find it charming, or amusing. Just bitterly ironic.
"Come with me," the Doctor said again, when he'd told him everything. Jack could hear the age, then, in the Doctor's young voice. All those nine hundred years suddenly weighing very heavily. He'd actually held out his hand to Jack, as though Jack were still the scared young man he'd been when he was first left on the Game Station. Jack wondered for a moment if this was some kind of crazy Time Lord gauntlet--if he'd finally achieved enough suffering for the Doctor to consider him a true Companion. He stood and stared, arms at his sides, shoulders slumped, and all he could think of was the Doctor running to the Master's side, cradling the dying Time Lord in his arms while Jack stood by, riddled with bullet holes, covered in a year's worth of grime and filth and shame.
"I really think we're past that," was all he said. And he turned and left the TARDIS for the last time.
~~~
"You have that look," Diane tells him as she sits in bed, looking down at him through the pinkish glow of her bedroom lamp. Her dark curls, gloriously tousled, cascade over her face and neck, glowing like a mane. She really does need a cigarette to complete the picture, Jack thinks, and realizes he was thinking of Estelle again.
Names and faces, all mixed up.
"What look is that?" He asks with a smile. He's on his side, half-curled. It's a sleeping position he's found he's adopted since Earth. Diane's fingers lift a strand of his hair from his forehead.
"The faraway look. The look like you're going to fly this coop soon enough."
She's trying, he notices, not to sound disappointed, and he props himself up on one elbow, watching her face, seeing her loneliness. She's alone here like he was in Victorian Cardiff--vaguely recognizing cultures and languages, but forever out of place, out of time. She bears up well, but it can't be easy. It wasn't for him.
"Diane--"
"Oh no, oh don't--" she groans exaggeratedly, covering her face with her hands and laughing. "Not that conversation. When you say my name, I know it's serious." She drops her hands, looks him in the eye.
He nods, and lets himself sink back down, scooting into her a bit and kissing her on the ribs, below the breast. She strokes his head idly, silent for a long time. He takes comfort in the rhythm of her breathing, forcing himself to think of nothing else, to exist nowhere but in this small circle of warmth, just for now.
"Ianto."
Jack's skin jolts as though he's received a mild electric shock, and he is assaulted by the vertigo of memory, fists tightening on the bedsheets as he closes his eyes. Her voice is soft and musing and sad.
"Ianto Jones...I remember now. That was his name. That sweet Welsh boy on your staff."
"Yeah," Jack says hoarsely. "That was his name."
She looks down and sees the tears shining on his lashes, and she murmurs something low and apologetic and gathers him up in an embrace, but he can scarcely feel it. The past has him tightly in its grip again and he is watching Ianto Jones die in his arms, his body grow so still and cold, blue eyes shut, soft wary smile gone forever.
"Just tell me what happened, Jack...you can't keep it locked up in there forever."
"You wouldn't want that," he tells her in a voice barely above a whisper, but he's holding to her, and he realizes that she has a right to know. She has a right to know because of her involvement with him, because she met Ianto once, because she slept with Owen, and when you're traveling, alone, such acquaintances become as important as friendships. Jack knows this. It's why he fights so hard to remember them all, despite the pain of decades passing.
So he tells her.
Confessions aren't easy for him; they almost always signal the end of something, rather than the beginning. By the time he gets to the part about Stephen, about how and why he left Earth in the 21st century, he is standing at her window, alone in the dark, staring out. She is still sitting on the bed, but she's pulled on her dressing gown and sits with her knees drawn up, as though trying to protect herself from his awful truth.
"I should go," he says, his voice dead in the silence, and he picks up his trousers and starts pulling them on.
"No, Jack. Please." Diane's voice is wavering with unshed tears. She looks up from her knees, and her eyes are large and bright, her face a bit puffy and red. "Please don't."
"You must think...I'm such a monster."
"I don't think that." She gets up. "I think you've had to make choices that no one should have to make. I think..." She brushes the mass of her hair back from her face, pulling in shaking breaths.
"I think I'm going to want some coffee. Join me?"
He stares at her, not trusting himself to smile. He nods.
~~~
Jack stays with her because he doesn't know who he is anymore. Every time he thinks of leaving, he opens a vast Pandora's Box of doubt and sorrow and shame. Where will he go? What will he do?
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind...
He's good at patterns of behavior. Keep doing the same thing the same way long enough and it becomes truly thoughtless, just a part of the routine, like breathing, that lets him accept the fact that he has no choice. Still, it's not coming so easily to him this time, as though the events back on Earth have finally stripped vital layers away from him, protective skin that kept every nerve from being flayed alive by the terrible process of living. He's forgotten all of the tricks he used to have to keep that process at bay.
He takes up cleaning. It's somehow easier than going out anywhere, and it makes him feel faintly useful. Diane owns few dishes, but most of them are in the kitchen sink at any given moment. When she's out, he'll almost obsessively wash them and put them away. His fingers plunging into the scalding water, scraping away the hardened remnants of their breakfasts and teas, he feels like he's in limbo, stuck between two events, two people: Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood, and whoever he is going to become. Servant, steward. He laughs a little at the thought, but it sounds strange and hollow in the empty apartment.
~~~
"Now what's a gorgeous thing like you doing in a place like this?"
A smooth voice too close to his shoulder nearly makes Jack jump. Used to be that no one could get the advantage of him. No one could case a room like Jack; it's part of why he made such a good operative. Now, however, he was lost in his own mind again, sitting in a nearly empty bar in the middle of the day. He's been out looking for work, and though he's qualified for nearly everything, nothing seems right, or even possible. Soldier, spy, conman, captain...he's done it all, and right now he can't see the point in doing any of it again. He's losing something, some kind of fighter instinct he once had.
But he can still spot a Time Agent a mile away. It's the attitude, mostly.
The man is not quite as tall as Jack is, and he has narrow features, not unattractive, but what they'd probably call exotic around these parts. Large slanted eyes and a mottling of bluish color around his cheeks and throat that mark him as one of a race of human hybrids from the Inner Ring. Or what will one day be the Inner Ring. Jack hasn't studied his Galactic History in a while, but he's pretty sure that in the 23rd century, it's all just a bunch of tribal warfare.
The Time Agent is leaning against the bar giving Jack a very obvious once-over, something that at one time would have had him flirting right back, easy grin and loose body language that hid a very fast trigger finger.
Now Jack is wary. He doesn't know what a Time Agent is doing here on this relatively peaceful colony in the early 23rd century, but instinct tells him it can't be something good. I should shoot him, he thinks, reflexively, and in the same thought, I should fuck him.
It turns out that Agent Lincoln is here tracking down pirates. Or so he says. Jack knows that towards the end of the Agency's existence, corruption was so rampant that Agents could have anyone they wanted branded as a pirate, and half the time, the actual Agency organization would never know.
Lincoln has actually pegged Jack as an Agent himself, and Jack plays along, wondering if he could ever take up this life again. They fuck, and Lincoln brings Jack along when he and his partner bag their pirate. When he sees the captive, all of Jack's worst fears rise to the surface. There's no way this boy is a time pirate--wide-eyed, stumbling, terrified and quiet, he reminds Jack of Ianto. The way the blue eyes plead up at him through the boy's silence.
"Go ahead," Lincoln's partner says. "Have a crack at him. You look like the right kind of guy."
The right kind of guy. Agency slang for a torturer. Jack stands there with the prod in his hand, staring at the shaking youth, and wonders if this is what he is, underneath, when Time has worn all of his higher pretensions away. When the stars go out, will it be him with the animal eyes and hungry teeth, tearing at the last frantic pieces of humanity with mindless rage? He can hear, echoing out of the past, Ianto's voice, calling him a monster.
Begging him to remember him in a thousand years.
All of their voices.
He lets the prod drop to the warehouse floor with a mighty clang. "Yeah. Well. You're wrong." He says blankly, and ignoring the terrified, gagged yelps of their captive, most likely clamoring for his aid, he turns and leaves. He doesn't even flinch when Lincoln shoots him in the back.
~~~
He doesn't tell Diane anything about the Time Agents when he turns up in the drunk tank days later. She is furious. She is worried. He just sits there in his bloody shirt, looking up at her with an expression so emptily helpless that she closes her eyes, grits her teeth.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." He mumbles, as she puts her arm around his waist to help him to the cab. She's staring at the blood on his shirt, and her face has gone white. He tries to smile. "It's someone else's."
"I'm not sure that's very reassuring at all, Captain."
She keeps her arm around him, though, on the ride back to her apartment, and he feels a nearly painful gratitude towards her, his hand tightening on hers until the knuckles are white.
~~~
He keeps expecting her to get tired of him, tired of the pain she can never share, and kick him out. But she doesn't, because, he has to remember, she is lonely, too. She has found friends and colleagues here, but she sticks with Jack because he's a link, however convoluted, to her past. The first person she saw outside of 1953.
She feeds him, shelters him, and comforts him when she can. He learns how to comfort her back, not as a leader, but as a companion. It's a strange sensation, sometimes, but it somehow helps him scrub away who he was. He floats here, suspended like one of the star lights from her ceiling, in his own tiny universe. Not forgetting, but not letting himself fully remember, either. Trying not to move too much.
~~~
"There's an exhibition at the Air and Space Museum I think you'd really like to see."
Diane is in the bathroom, half-dressed after showering. The warm foggy air pouring from the open door smells strongly of baby powder and shampoo. She's dabbing perfume on her neck under the waves of her hair.
"Oh yeah?" Jack calls back. He's half-dressed too, but not in preparation for anything. He's reading the news on her computer, an antiquated way of getting information, but he likes it better than the seizure-inducing stimuli of the holovid feeds. He crams another biscuit into his mouth. Should probably start working out, a superficial part of his mind idly suggests.
"Yes," she says, coming to lean saucily in the doorway, eyebrow arched at him. "Because I'm in it." He looks up at her. "Well, not me, but Sky Gypsy is!" She grins girlishly; it makes her look incredibly young, and Jack smiles softly. "I loaned her to be part of the exhibit. A History of Manned Flight."
He grins back. "How can I resist?" He says quietly.
He dolls up and they go together, arm in arm. He's even brushed off the coat, and they look like part of the exhibit themselves, he knows, she with her dresses still cut fashionably along 1950's lines. She doesn't go in for the wire filaments or the LED lighting, the sculpture or the holograms. She likes it classic. Reminiscent. He has to agree.
He catches sight of himself in the stories-high tinted windows of the Museum as they enter, and is momentarily surprised. He looks like someone else, he thinks. A character out of a holobook, something like that. Inside, he feels patched together, gaps of darkness stitched with loss and uncertainty, bearable moments suspended with wires of frail happiness. But on the outside, he looks like a real person. Tall, straight-backed, young, handsome, athletic--well, maybe except for that little belly--and with the coat, he still looks like someone who means something, though for the life of him, Jack can't figure out what that something is.
The de Havilland looks a little strange, too, when they come to it, shined up and sitting in the center of the vast glass and titanium building like a movie star at a signing. It takes Jack a moment, as he watches Diane gush over her baby to friends and passersby, to realize that it's because it doesn't look old. It looks like it rolled off the assembly line only a few years ago--used but not aged. He runs a gentle hand over the skin of the plane. The doors are open, letting awestruck tourists inside to have a look. And why not? It's not like the de Havilland is an antique. He almost laughs, thinking about that, suddenly filled with the closest thing to joy he's felt in a long, long time.
Diane tugs on him to show him the inside, after they've toured the rest of the museum, Jack tagging along after her as she zig-zagged between classic internal-combustion machines and the sleek nuclear-powered craft of her new future. It's nearly closing time when she pulls him up after her into the cockpit of the de Havilland, both of them a little tired after walking around all day. She kicks off her pumps and leans back in her seat, instantly, wonderfully at home. Jack sits in the co-pilot seat and leans his chin on his hand, smiling at her. Something inside of him aches.
"I've been thinking about everything you told me," she says, slowly, after a silence.
"I have, too," he says with a sigh. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to...I don't want you to have to think about that."
She shrugs. "Don't be silly. That's the way things go. You have to tell someone, or what's the use of having friends and lovers? I mean, I've been thinking about you."
He tenses a little, not certain where this is leading. He keeps quiet, inclining his head with careful curiosity.
"You seem even more out of place here than I do, Jack," she continues, looking briefly up at him, her thin red lips drawn firm. "And I know from what you've said that that can't be true. It's like you're lost. And not just out of time."
He's not certain how to deal with these words coming from her. So he laughs, just a gust of breath, looking down at his hands linked between his knees.
"Yeah, well. It's hard when you've been one thing for over a hundred years, and that was the only thing you had to hang onto. That's over now, and it's been over. But it still seems more real to me--"
He trails off. He can tell by the look on her face that she can imagine--or thinks she can imagine--the horror of living forever. "I don't know what to do," he says, his voice crushed and desolate.
She leans back against the window of the cockpit now. She has one elbow up, rested on the narrow window frame, and the late afternoon sun is filtering through all that glass and glowing in her hair, sparkling in his eyes from between her fingers.
"I know you don't believe in guardian angels, Jack," she begins, and he smiles. "But in a way, that's what you are."
He chokes a little and gives her a look, but she laughs and presses on.
"I don't mean it like that. Not like it's somehow your responsibility to protect everyone, to make sure everything goes right. But when that plane I saw--when that Shepherd--led me here, it wasn't a guarantee that everything was going to be all right. He just led me into my future, whatever it's going to be. No promises. He just showed me where to land."
For a moment, he thinks she's gone religious on him, but the expression on her face is not the peaceful one of the convert. It's mystified, uncertain, and her eyes look into his with the shared knowledge of that uncertainty. Suddenly, like a trick of the light, her words turn, and he sees them clearly.
He might live forever. Jack knows this, even though, as long as he's already lived, "forever" is something he still can't imagine. Something that is too big for terror, too big for sorrow. He's never been able to imagine a purpose that could withstand the enormity of "forever." Torchwood was always impermanent, he knew that, even as dreadful as it was to face the end. As dreadful as it always is.
He knows of course, watching the sun turn to darker gold in Diane's hair, there in the still, timeless air of the de Havilland's cockpit, that he's going to see her die, too. That he's going to be around when even this charmed, young-old airplane crumbles to rust. The endless line of faces he's known and will know, the people he has loved, will love, and bury, seem to stretch out into eternity; it's as though he can see them there, in the eye-dazzling light of the sun's dying rays.
Before his eyes, that line becomes so long, the numbers so vast, that suddenly, they take on another meaning. They become not humans, but humanity, not individuals only, but histories unwritten: a vast web of histories that he will usher into being. For a second, an odd bright pain stabs his chest.
The Doctor once called him a fixed point in Time, something unnatural. Wrong. That, at the end of the Universe itself, when all the stars in the sky had burned out, and Nature was knitting up the raveled sleeve of care, settling into her final sleep. In the same day, the Doctor had gushed about the indomitable spirit of humanity. Beaming, he smiled worshipfully at the throngs of stinking refugees whose single greatest human achievement was to be merely alive in huddled masses, hoping dumbly for a rocket ship to take them beyond the end of all things. They were survivors. And Jack was a survivor. Battered, hurting, afraid, and hopeful. He had already lived for over a hundred years then, but it had never occurred to him to think of his immortality as something that could be used for good.
It's a bit like the first time he woke up after death. Sitting in the co-pilot seat of the de Havilland, Jack breathes tentatively. He's stuck taking the long way around, a way that he used to despise and fear. Maybe he will never not fear it--the unbounded sea of linear Time spread out before him, uncharted, and waiting. But in this moment, he finally feels that it is his.
It is monumental, this feeling, and it takes his breath away and makes his chest hurt. But something in him is unfurling with a newness that is cautious and raw, tingling in his stomach.
The edges of the light blur and distort as he looks back at Diane, and he blinks to clear his vision and dry his eyes. She is looking at him with a sorrowful kind of wonder, and when he catches her eye, she smiles, happy and sad at the same time, and touches his hand.
Overhead, the PA system announces that the museum will be closing in ten minutes, and thanks all museum-goers for their attendance. Diane shifts in her seat a little, but neither of them make a move to leave just yet.
"Thanks, Miss Holmes," Jack says with a little smile. She tips her head at him and her lips twitch in amusement. He touches the instrument panel very gently. "Maybe you're my Shepherd." She laughs in a surprised puff of breath and shakes her head slightly.
"Oh God, no. I'm just...your friend." She says the last word with a hesitant tenderness that makes him avert his eyes a little.
He smiles.
"You know..." he muses. "It is an incredible story. I mean, how did you know to follow the other airplane? I just keep thinking of all those stories about sailors being led to their deaths on the rocks, pilots following strange lights and crashing...all that...." His tone is light, but the images in his mind are strangely compelling and newly frightening, for some reason. "Did you just figure it was better than nothing?"
Diane twirls a few strands of her hair, something she's always doing, something recognizable and unique to her. He likes it.
"No...I knew I would be all right if I only could keep it in sight."
"Just a feeling?"
"Actually, no," she says with a wondering grin, leaning forward towards him. "I recognized the plane. I'd flown a few of them myself back in the war, when I was ferrying them from depots to air stations. I remember when they first came out with that model, back in the early years. So, I would have known it anywhere. That's how I knew." She shakes her head, in awe, and Jack knows she's seeing that moment again in her mind's eye.
He tilts his head. The light is bright gold now, and fading, washing the cockpit with the last amber highlights of the afternoon.
"What plane?" He asks, quietly.
"It was a mark five Spitfire."
He stares at her in wonder, and for a moment he can see it, too: the small, elegant fighter from another era, flashing its wings in the light and then disappearing into the shining strands of Time.
~~~
Someday, Jack will know the names of all the stars in the sky, and he will have memories for each one.
Someday, he, too, will see all of Time in his mind, but it will no longer be painful, or terrifying. It will just be.
He will be able to see the fragmented, glittering moments of it, and pick them out, occasionally, sifting through an ancient and comforting pattern of names and faces. People he has loved, moments he has lived through, breathless with wonder or pain or joy. Families he has had, people he has shepherded into, and out of, existence.
And in the end--for all things end--he will call the names of the stars, like a friendly salute, as they, and he, fade away.
That day is not today, though.
Today, he walks home with Diane Holmes in the fading light of summer in the southern hemisphere of Arbros, a planet millions and millions of miles from Earth, yet sharing the same thread of life. They are in no hurry; they take a detour to watch the sun go down over the bay, and the first stars come out, soft as faraway lanterns, in the darkening heavens.
Author: Shane Mayhem
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Jack/Diane
Spoilers: Post-CoE.
Notes: Apologies to Frederick Forsyth. I really didn't mean it. But hey, ripping off ideas from published authors' stories is how fanfic happens. If you like this story, you have the incredible beta skills of neifile7 to thank. She's amazing.
Summary: Some time after the end of Jack's world, he realizes that things just keep going.
Someday, he will know all their names.
Someday, he will speak those names as they all burn out before him, one by one.
That day is not today, though. The stars are still mysteries, most of them, though he's visited the systems of more of them than he cares to remember. Today--although he knows from personal experience that one day all of the stars and the currents between them, the winds of the vacuum of space and the gravitational pull of black holes and nebulae, will be mapped and named like the streams and currents of Earth's oceans-- today he can still feel a desolate ache when he looks at the vastness of space. Like a limitless horizon, it calls to him. Old sailor.
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die
Jack grins humorlessly to himself, tracing the bottom of his glass in uncertain circles on the titanium top of the bar. Light stains the shining metal--red and orange and green--washed up in pools of liquid sweated or spilled from liquor glasses throughout the night. Many of those empty glasses are his. He's actually quite, depressingly drunk. He has been for...
Well. What's time when you've got an eternity of it spread out before you? Maybe he's been here for days, maybe weeks. He's stopped caring about the passage of time, which is a good thing, since he probably couldn't be reliably called upon to remember how a clock works at this point, let alone what time it is, what day it is, what year, or what century. It all runs together in his head. Sometimes he sort of sobers up and finds himself thinking that he really should get back to the Hub. Sometimes he thinks he's still waiting for the Doctor, that it's sometime in the middle of nineteenth century.
Sometimes, even more disconcertingly, he'll suddenly be certain that he's in London, that the War is still in full swing, and that the air raid sirens are about to go off any minute. In those moments, he feels a kind of guilt-ridden panic so intense that he has to close his eyes and lower his head until Time goes away again.
But right now he's thinking about the stars. Trying to pick one he hasn't heard of off the revolving star chart on the wall above the bar. It's just for show, not accurate and not meant to be, and so it's a pretty fruitless endeavor. Besides, his wristband is a smoldering piece of junk now, having been used and abused beyond its original design until, after this last jump, it gave up the ghost for good. Maybe he'll just hop another shipping transport tomorrow. Maybe, with any luck, they'll be bound for the Outer Systems, stop over on some backwater planet like an island in the Pacific, as empty as he is. Maybe he'll jump ship there, strand himself. Forever.
The lights of the display sparkle in the table top, and Jack realizes he's been staring at it from an ever-narrowing distance for quite a while now, eyes half-closed. He pulls himself into a more upright position, almost falls off his chair completely, and taps his glass on the bar, signalling the bartender. The poker-faced young man refills Jack's glass without comment. Jack mutters his thanks and tips it down his throat, a brief sting of warmth, something that his tongue doesn't even taste.
A few seconds after he's swallowed, Jack's stomach informs him that it's had too much, and that he's going to vomit right now. Pushing away from the bar with a groan, he somehow makes it out the side door before everything comes up. And keeps coming up. Jack's on his knees against the side of the building, hands braced on the wall, coughing and gasping for breaths as his belly convulses and vomit stings in the back of his nose and throat.
Been around the bend, have you, old boy? Not too good by the looks of it.
Voices from the past, faces that flicker behind his tightly-shut eyes. Names he can't always remember, or ones that come a few seconds too late to his churning mind, ending up mismatched with the wrong face. He's not sure how long it lasts. Hours, days. He gradually comes around to an awareness of his fingers pressed so hard against the wall they feel rubbed raw, his head hung, spitting weakly as his stomach lurches to a shaky stop. A flush of heat on the back of his neck has cooled to icy sweat. His head won't stop spinning, and so he doesn't move yet, trying to take deep breaths. It's been a while since he's been so poorly, but it's nothing he hasn't done before. Breathe.
"I say...are you alright?"
Another voice. Jack makes a barely-audible whimper as he shuts his eyes tighter, trying to push it out of his mind. But the voice is insistent in the way it threads through his vague consciousness and slowly he realizes that he's actually hearing it, the words spoken aloud, somewhere above him. A human voice. Female, soft, hesitant.
"Hello? Are you going to live, there?"
Jack nods his head, very carefully. The motion makes his gut churn again, and he gags, but there's nothing left in him this time and he only coughs out gluey saliva and thin bile. There's something familiar about the voice the next time it sounds, closer to his ear this time, as the voice's owner crouches beside him.
"Well, you're sure not getting home in this state. Do you want me to get you a ride?"
Jack wants to laugh; there is a universe of complication that this kind woman doesn't understand, an abyss of pointlessness of which she's innocently unaware. "I'll be fine," he croaks miserably, hands starting to slip down the wall as he loses consciousness. He feels her grab onto his upper arm and jerk him backward to keep him from passing out face-first in his own vomit, and from a long way away he hears her gasp.
~~~
Stars dangle from the ceiling in the darkness, soft glowing balls of light that bear no resemblance to the reality they're supposed to represent. Jack has looked into the vacuum of space often enough to know that the light of the stars is hard and sharp.
His head is throbbing. He can barely open his eyes. His back aches and he feels like he's been punched repeatedly in the gut. But he's not lying in the street--instead he's stretched out on a sofa with his coat over him. His boots have been removed. So has his gun belt, and a mindless impulse to move suddenly makes him flail a bit until his fingers contact the smooth holster of the ancient Webley, on the floor. He lies back until he can open his eyes fully without stabbing pain, and then works on gradually pulling his wracked body into a sitting position. This results in further waves of nausea and he has to draw his knees up so that he can rest his head on them, smothering the feeling in the rhythm of his own breathing.
"You're awake."
She's there in the doorway of the darkened room. She sounds subdued, tired. He looks up and sees her silhouetted, long curls loose around her shoulders, tall and curvy, her antiquated flight jacket open and sliding down her arms. She's leaning there with her hip cocked, a glass of something in her hand.
His brain slowly assembles the puzzle pieces, and disorientation shatters the scene again--he shuts his eyes, sucks in a hitching breath.
"Diane...Diane Holmes?"
"The very one. I certainly never thought I'd see you again, Captain Jack Harkness."
She crosses to him, bends down beside him until her hair tickles the top of his head. She's pressing the cold cup into his limp hand. Water. He swallows thickly, but suddenly he's overcome with a powerful thirst, and gulps it down. His stomach protests only weakly, and he finds that if he leans back and rubs it a little, he'll be alright.
He looks up at her as memory comes flooding back and he reorganizes the pieces of himself he can find into some semblance of normalcy. It begins with a smile he can't feel.
"Sorry I'm not...in the greatest condition." He gestures to himself with a charming grin. Her dark eyes remain serious for a moment, but the grin works, like it always does, and she relents into a gentle smile.
"It happens to the best of us, Captain."
He decides not to bring up the fact that he's certainly not the best of us. He decides not to ask her how she got here, where "here" is, and what she's been up to for the last...however long. Instead, his immortal body continues to react in a very human way to prolonged lack of solid food and continuous alcohol poisoning: his eyes roll back and he swoons against the sofa. Diane darts forward to catch him and his head is pillowed on her chest, her fingers reflexively stroking his sweaty hair, and it all feels so familiar that tears sting his eyes and roll down his numb cheeks.
He should feel mortified, but that feeling, along with many others, it seems, has disappeared from his emotional lexicon. He shivers and curls on her lap like a child, and she, surprised and distressed, murmurs to him that it will be all right, and at last, when her words can't bring him comfort, leans down and kisses his hair tenderly, her arms wrapped firmly around his shoulders.
~~~
"Have you fallen through time, too?" She asks him the next day as she's trying to coax him into eating solid food. "Come on, just try the toast."
He does, to please her. She doesn't smoke anymore, but tends to chew pens and hold them like cigarettes in homage to her curtailed addiction. Cigarettes are harder to find than real leather these days.
It's the 23rd century. They are on Arbros, one of Earth's first and most successful colonies.
"Fallen, been thrown, jumped..." he says with the ghost of a smile, scratching his finger across her plastic table cloth. It's covered with Hello Kitties. ("Dreadfully silly," she calls it. "I inherited it from the old lady who lived in the place before. She says it's an antique.")
"Captain, there's so much I want to ask you," she says, her excitement muted only by the truly wretched state he's in. At least he's showered and shaved, thanks to her. "How did you get here? Where are the others, you know...Gwen and Toshiko, and...and Owen. And oh, what's that nice boy's name...?"
The look in his eyes stops her. She knows right away, and he can barely stand the expression of horror, pain, and sympathy that slowly suffuses her face. He looks back down at the offering of toast and they are both silent for several moments.
"How did it happen?" She asks quietly.
He just shakes his head.
~~~
The main reason that Jack doesn't like to talk about his past is because he hates to see those expressions. He's run out of ways to respond to all of the "I'm sorrys" and the "whys" and the "how did it happens."
He used to think there was only one person who would understand, one person whose expression might carry with it the shared weight of knowing.
He last saw that face some time ago, before he ran away from Earth for possibly the last time. Before he left Gwen, pregnant and crying, on a hillside in Wales.
"Hello Jack," the voice said, and Jack felt a sudden swell of hatred, intense yet ambiguous. Did he hate the Doctor, or himself? Or was it just everything, the whole rotten orchestration of history, the orbits of the doomed planets, the spinning of the wretched galaxies that had brought them to this point?
He was knee-deep in mud, digging it out from around little huts with his bare hands, part of a line of mud-covered, expressionless, weary human beings trying to put their version of civilization back to rights after the Earth had randomly ravaged them with an enormous hurricane.
It was actually Rift spikes, more frequent in this last month, that had caused the hurricane, but Jack didn't care. He wasn't a hero; he was a volunteer. Covered in the same mud and shit as everyone else, hiding himself in this tableau of misery and hope.
"What are you doing here?" he asked flatly, even though he knew the question was stupid. The Doctor could be anywhere, at any time, and it had nothing to do with him. That two people should meet, fall in love, or become enemies, or lose each other, or meet again, were only mathematical probabilities, events in an infinite equation created by forces unending and vast and simple. It was only the narrowness of human subjectivity that lent those events any importance whatever.
"The hurricane. I'm guessing you know that the Rift was being manipulated by a race from the far edge of the galaxy, which is probably why you're here. Particularly nasty lot, called the 456, I gather. Turns out they were responding to an attack on one of their expeditionary forces to this planet, a few months ago. Something destroyed the envoy and the whole expeditionary fleet. Thought you might have had something to do with that, so I came to take a look, and of course, well...save the world from being ripped apart by the Lambda Wave that the 456 were using to jam Rift frequencies. I stopped them and all Earth suffered was a nastier than usual hurricane season."
It was to the Doctor's credit that he spoke that last sentence with an aware sense of irony, and that his grin wasn't as self-satisfied as usual, as he looked around at the devastation. Jack straightened up slowly, laughing. The grin faded entirely.
"What?"
"The Rift-quakes. Yeah. Right."
"I beg your pardon?" The Doctor sounded confused; he hated being confused when it came to Jack, and so he also sounded offended. There was a slight tension to the supposedly casual way he held his long body, hands in pockets.
"That's not why I'm here."
The Doctor was silent for a second longer than usual. "Well, I assumed that Torchwood--"
"Torchwood doesn't exist anymore, Doctor." Jack abruptly bent down and began digging again. He realized the shape he'd been uncovering was a child's toy riding car. "You got your wish."
This time the silence was palpable, full of the prickling of the Doctor's expectant stare on his shoulder blades. He assumed that Jack would spill it all, tell him what had happened. Doctor Confessor. But Jack didn't, only kept scooping away handfuls of mud, moving on to a new patch. His shirt sleeves, sodden, kept falling down around his wrists, and he pushed them up again, smearing his bare arms. It reminded him somehow of a grief ritual. Paint the face and tear the shirt.
"What...what do you mean?"
"They're dead, Doctor. Gwen's the only one left, and I had to let her go before it killed her, too. There is no more Torchwood."
He made the mistake of turning to look, to see that expression of helpless sympathy, almost pity rise up in the Doctor's dark eyes. It was a look Jack had been longing to see directed at him for so long, and now he no longer cared. He laughed flatly, harshly, at the Doctor's face.
"Oh well. Life goes on."
"Jack, I'm--"
"Don't." A fervent, angry panic rose in him like the need to be sick. "Don't. Say. It." He wiped the back of his muddy forearm quickly across his face.
"Just go."
~~~
When Diane flew through the Rift, she nearly died. Unable to navigate by instruments in the Time storm that buffeted and tore at her plane, she pressed the crucifix around her neck to her lips and gave herself up for lost. Thank God, she tells him with a wry smile, she opened her eyes one last time or she never would have seen it.
Through the crackling strands of Space-Time, the indistinct, but suddenly unmistakable form of another aircraft. She panicked, throttling up so she wouldn't lose sight of it, trying desperately to get anything but screaming static on the radio, but the other aircraft flew straight and steady, hanging back. Waiting for her.
"They called them Shepherds, back in the War," she says, chewing on a pen again. Jack smiles slowly, nodding with memory. "Men who would go up again after their missions and lead badly damaged bombers back home. Injured planes and crew, flying without radio, without radar or compasses. They'd fly with them to the nearest airfields. Lead them in." Her voice shakes a little as she tells him this, and she takes another gulp of coffee.
Diane still flies, though it's not her de Havilland Dragon Rapide anymore, except on weekends, when she shows it off for the delight of the locals. She's a ferry pilot on the transport routes between Arbros and its several moons--carrying mostly items of great value or those too dangerous to risk to MDT--Molecular Dissolution Transposition.
"I never imagined I'd be flying in outer space," she says, and the way her eyes light up reminds Jack of Gwen. Young, excited, passionate.
He can smell it in her, too--all that hot blood, all that life and vigor. All the fliers he's known have smelled like that, and so when he presses his nose and lips to her collarbone at night, it's like some kind of bittersweet homecoming, in a way.
She's a skillful lover, strong and self-assured. She warms him up, and even though she doesn't reignite the spark he's lost, she keeps him just this side of sanity.
They don't discuss it much, that gaping blackness in his life that's like the elephant in the room, but she knows it's there. She's not a caretaker like Gwen, but she's gentle with him in her own way. She'll bring him leftovers from the restaurant she visits for lunch sometimes, or search through the channels on the holovision for programs she thinks he'll like. Jack licks his wounds, gains back the weight he's lost, and occasionally vaguely contemplates moving on. He doesn't really realize how strong Diane is until she tells him the story of her Shepherd.
He realizes it as he watches tears form in her brown eyes, and watches her shake her head with a smile and blink them quickly away.
"I haven't really believed in anything I couldn't touch since I was thirteen years old," she says, "but I still don't know....I'm still not sure..."
He just holds his coffee cup in both hands and watches her, caught up momentarily in someone else's drama, almost seeing the terrifying pitch and roll of her plane as it fights against an atmosphere that doesn't make sense, seeing her staring out her windscreen, sweat in her eyes, gaze fixed desperately on the small dark figure of the mysterious aircraft ahead.
"I don't suppose you think there's any such thing as angels, do you, Jack?" Her smile is a little bit teasing. She suddenly reminds him not of Gwen, but of Estelle, and it hits him hard in the diaphragm, taking his breath. He lowers his eyes.
"Not," he finally manages, "not like the kind you read about in books."
"I try to find a logical explanation," she says, and her voice is raw now. He puts out a hand and covers hers, cupping it. "Like maybe that I imagined the whole thing...but the truth is, I steered for that airplane and didn't think of anything else, and when I came out of the storm, I was on this world. It was sunny. And there...there was a landing strip ahead. I saw it....I saw him wave his wings, you know, telling me to go ahead and land. And then he disappeared...the light was so bright. I just couldn't see him anymore."
She is gazing into the distance over his shoulder, and he can see in the lines of her face the toll that her journey must have taken. How certain she'd been that she was going to die. How she wrestled the de Havilland through the storm of the Void. And ever since, how she has wrestled with this new world, this new concept of herself and her universe. It's a hard thing, Jack knows, to lose yourself like that.
He squeezes her hand and his eyes sting a little, too.
"Just don't put too much stock in guardian angels," he tells her, though he's smiling. "You were brilliant, you know."
~~~
Jack ended up telling the Doctor what happened, but it's a point of pride that he had to be locked up in the TARDIS for days before he would do so.
Any other time, and it would have been gratifying, to have the Doctor chasing after him for once, suddenly obsessed with him when before he'd left him to die again and again, alone and afraid. But Jack was too empty of anything to find it charming, or amusing. Just bitterly ironic.
"Come with me," the Doctor said again, when he'd told him everything. Jack could hear the age, then, in the Doctor's young voice. All those nine hundred years suddenly weighing very heavily. He'd actually held out his hand to Jack, as though Jack were still the scared young man he'd been when he was first left on the Game Station. Jack wondered for a moment if this was some kind of crazy Time Lord gauntlet--if he'd finally achieved enough suffering for the Doctor to consider him a true Companion. He stood and stared, arms at his sides, shoulders slumped, and all he could think of was the Doctor running to the Master's side, cradling the dying Time Lord in his arms while Jack stood by, riddled with bullet holes, covered in a year's worth of grime and filth and shame.
"I really think we're past that," was all he said. And he turned and left the TARDIS for the last time.
~~~
"You have that look," Diane tells him as she sits in bed, looking down at him through the pinkish glow of her bedroom lamp. Her dark curls, gloriously tousled, cascade over her face and neck, glowing like a mane. She really does need a cigarette to complete the picture, Jack thinks, and realizes he was thinking of Estelle again.
Names and faces, all mixed up.
"What look is that?" He asks with a smile. He's on his side, half-curled. It's a sleeping position he's found he's adopted since Earth. Diane's fingers lift a strand of his hair from his forehead.
"The faraway look. The look like you're going to fly this coop soon enough."
She's trying, he notices, not to sound disappointed, and he props himself up on one elbow, watching her face, seeing her loneliness. She's alone here like he was in Victorian Cardiff--vaguely recognizing cultures and languages, but forever out of place, out of time. She bears up well, but it can't be easy. It wasn't for him.
"Diane--"
"Oh no, oh don't--" she groans exaggeratedly, covering her face with her hands and laughing. "Not that conversation. When you say my name, I know it's serious." She drops her hands, looks him in the eye.
He nods, and lets himself sink back down, scooting into her a bit and kissing her on the ribs, below the breast. She strokes his head idly, silent for a long time. He takes comfort in the rhythm of her breathing, forcing himself to think of nothing else, to exist nowhere but in this small circle of warmth, just for now.
"Ianto."
Jack's skin jolts as though he's received a mild electric shock, and he is assaulted by the vertigo of memory, fists tightening on the bedsheets as he closes his eyes. Her voice is soft and musing and sad.
"Ianto Jones...I remember now. That was his name. That sweet Welsh boy on your staff."
"Yeah," Jack says hoarsely. "That was his name."
She looks down and sees the tears shining on his lashes, and she murmurs something low and apologetic and gathers him up in an embrace, but he can scarcely feel it. The past has him tightly in its grip again and he is watching Ianto Jones die in his arms, his body grow so still and cold, blue eyes shut, soft wary smile gone forever.
"Just tell me what happened, Jack...you can't keep it locked up in there forever."
"You wouldn't want that," he tells her in a voice barely above a whisper, but he's holding to her, and he realizes that she has a right to know. She has a right to know because of her involvement with him, because she met Ianto once, because she slept with Owen, and when you're traveling, alone, such acquaintances become as important as friendships. Jack knows this. It's why he fights so hard to remember them all, despite the pain of decades passing.
So he tells her.
Confessions aren't easy for him; they almost always signal the end of something, rather than the beginning. By the time he gets to the part about Stephen, about how and why he left Earth in the 21st century, he is standing at her window, alone in the dark, staring out. She is still sitting on the bed, but she's pulled on her dressing gown and sits with her knees drawn up, as though trying to protect herself from his awful truth.
"I should go," he says, his voice dead in the silence, and he picks up his trousers and starts pulling them on.
"No, Jack. Please." Diane's voice is wavering with unshed tears. She looks up from her knees, and her eyes are large and bright, her face a bit puffy and red. "Please don't."
"You must think...I'm such a monster."
"I don't think that." She gets up. "I think you've had to make choices that no one should have to make. I think..." She brushes the mass of her hair back from her face, pulling in shaking breaths.
"I think I'm going to want some coffee. Join me?"
He stares at her, not trusting himself to smile. He nods.
~~~
Jack stays with her because he doesn't know who he is anymore. Every time he thinks of leaving, he opens a vast Pandora's Box of doubt and sorrow and shame. Where will he go? What will he do?
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind...
He's good at patterns of behavior. Keep doing the same thing the same way long enough and it becomes truly thoughtless, just a part of the routine, like breathing, that lets him accept the fact that he has no choice. Still, it's not coming so easily to him this time, as though the events back on Earth have finally stripped vital layers away from him, protective skin that kept every nerve from being flayed alive by the terrible process of living. He's forgotten all of the tricks he used to have to keep that process at bay.
He takes up cleaning. It's somehow easier than going out anywhere, and it makes him feel faintly useful. Diane owns few dishes, but most of them are in the kitchen sink at any given moment. When she's out, he'll almost obsessively wash them and put them away. His fingers plunging into the scalding water, scraping away the hardened remnants of their breakfasts and teas, he feels like he's in limbo, stuck between two events, two people: Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood, and whoever he is going to become. Servant, steward. He laughs a little at the thought, but it sounds strange and hollow in the empty apartment.
~~~
"Now what's a gorgeous thing like you doing in a place like this?"
A smooth voice too close to his shoulder nearly makes Jack jump. Used to be that no one could get the advantage of him. No one could case a room like Jack; it's part of why he made such a good operative. Now, however, he was lost in his own mind again, sitting in a nearly empty bar in the middle of the day. He's been out looking for work, and though he's qualified for nearly everything, nothing seems right, or even possible. Soldier, spy, conman, captain...he's done it all, and right now he can't see the point in doing any of it again. He's losing something, some kind of fighter instinct he once had.
But he can still spot a Time Agent a mile away. It's the attitude, mostly.
The man is not quite as tall as Jack is, and he has narrow features, not unattractive, but what they'd probably call exotic around these parts. Large slanted eyes and a mottling of bluish color around his cheeks and throat that mark him as one of a race of human hybrids from the Inner Ring. Or what will one day be the Inner Ring. Jack hasn't studied his Galactic History in a while, but he's pretty sure that in the 23rd century, it's all just a bunch of tribal warfare.
The Time Agent is leaning against the bar giving Jack a very obvious once-over, something that at one time would have had him flirting right back, easy grin and loose body language that hid a very fast trigger finger.
Now Jack is wary. He doesn't know what a Time Agent is doing here on this relatively peaceful colony in the early 23rd century, but instinct tells him it can't be something good. I should shoot him, he thinks, reflexively, and in the same thought, I should fuck him.
It turns out that Agent Lincoln is here tracking down pirates. Or so he says. Jack knows that towards the end of the Agency's existence, corruption was so rampant that Agents could have anyone they wanted branded as a pirate, and half the time, the actual Agency organization would never know.
Lincoln has actually pegged Jack as an Agent himself, and Jack plays along, wondering if he could ever take up this life again. They fuck, and Lincoln brings Jack along when he and his partner bag their pirate. When he sees the captive, all of Jack's worst fears rise to the surface. There's no way this boy is a time pirate--wide-eyed, stumbling, terrified and quiet, he reminds Jack of Ianto. The way the blue eyes plead up at him through the boy's silence.
"Go ahead," Lincoln's partner says. "Have a crack at him. You look like the right kind of guy."
The right kind of guy. Agency slang for a torturer. Jack stands there with the prod in his hand, staring at the shaking youth, and wonders if this is what he is, underneath, when Time has worn all of his higher pretensions away. When the stars go out, will it be him with the animal eyes and hungry teeth, tearing at the last frantic pieces of humanity with mindless rage? He can hear, echoing out of the past, Ianto's voice, calling him a monster.
Begging him to remember him in a thousand years.
All of their voices.
He lets the prod drop to the warehouse floor with a mighty clang. "Yeah. Well. You're wrong." He says blankly, and ignoring the terrified, gagged yelps of their captive, most likely clamoring for his aid, he turns and leaves. He doesn't even flinch when Lincoln shoots him in the back.
~~~
He doesn't tell Diane anything about the Time Agents when he turns up in the drunk tank days later. She is furious. She is worried. He just sits there in his bloody shirt, looking up at her with an expression so emptily helpless that she closes her eyes, grits her teeth.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." He mumbles, as she puts her arm around his waist to help him to the cab. She's staring at the blood on his shirt, and her face has gone white. He tries to smile. "It's someone else's."
"I'm not sure that's very reassuring at all, Captain."
She keeps her arm around him, though, on the ride back to her apartment, and he feels a nearly painful gratitude towards her, his hand tightening on hers until the knuckles are white.
~~~
He keeps expecting her to get tired of him, tired of the pain she can never share, and kick him out. But she doesn't, because, he has to remember, she is lonely, too. She has found friends and colleagues here, but she sticks with Jack because he's a link, however convoluted, to her past. The first person she saw outside of 1953.
She feeds him, shelters him, and comforts him when she can. He learns how to comfort her back, not as a leader, but as a companion. It's a strange sensation, sometimes, but it somehow helps him scrub away who he was. He floats here, suspended like one of the star lights from her ceiling, in his own tiny universe. Not forgetting, but not letting himself fully remember, either. Trying not to move too much.
~~~
"There's an exhibition at the Air and Space Museum I think you'd really like to see."
Diane is in the bathroom, half-dressed after showering. The warm foggy air pouring from the open door smells strongly of baby powder and shampoo. She's dabbing perfume on her neck under the waves of her hair.
"Oh yeah?" Jack calls back. He's half-dressed too, but not in preparation for anything. He's reading the news on her computer, an antiquated way of getting information, but he likes it better than the seizure-inducing stimuli of the holovid feeds. He crams another biscuit into his mouth. Should probably start working out, a superficial part of his mind idly suggests.
"Yes," she says, coming to lean saucily in the doorway, eyebrow arched at him. "Because I'm in it." He looks up at her. "Well, not me, but Sky Gypsy is!" She grins girlishly; it makes her look incredibly young, and Jack smiles softly. "I loaned her to be part of the exhibit. A History of Manned Flight."
He grins back. "How can I resist?" He says quietly.
He dolls up and they go together, arm in arm. He's even brushed off the coat, and they look like part of the exhibit themselves, he knows, she with her dresses still cut fashionably along 1950's lines. She doesn't go in for the wire filaments or the LED lighting, the sculpture or the holograms. She likes it classic. Reminiscent. He has to agree.
He catches sight of himself in the stories-high tinted windows of the Museum as they enter, and is momentarily surprised. He looks like someone else, he thinks. A character out of a holobook, something like that. Inside, he feels patched together, gaps of darkness stitched with loss and uncertainty, bearable moments suspended with wires of frail happiness. But on the outside, he looks like a real person. Tall, straight-backed, young, handsome, athletic--well, maybe except for that little belly--and with the coat, he still looks like someone who means something, though for the life of him, Jack can't figure out what that something is.
The de Havilland looks a little strange, too, when they come to it, shined up and sitting in the center of the vast glass and titanium building like a movie star at a signing. It takes Jack a moment, as he watches Diane gush over her baby to friends and passersby, to realize that it's because it doesn't look old. It looks like it rolled off the assembly line only a few years ago--used but not aged. He runs a gentle hand over the skin of the plane. The doors are open, letting awestruck tourists inside to have a look. And why not? It's not like the de Havilland is an antique. He almost laughs, thinking about that, suddenly filled with the closest thing to joy he's felt in a long, long time.
Diane tugs on him to show him the inside, after they've toured the rest of the museum, Jack tagging along after her as she zig-zagged between classic internal-combustion machines and the sleek nuclear-powered craft of her new future. It's nearly closing time when she pulls him up after her into the cockpit of the de Havilland, both of them a little tired after walking around all day. She kicks off her pumps and leans back in her seat, instantly, wonderfully at home. Jack sits in the co-pilot seat and leans his chin on his hand, smiling at her. Something inside of him aches.
"I've been thinking about everything you told me," she says, slowly, after a silence.
"I have, too," he says with a sigh. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to...I don't want you to have to think about that."
She shrugs. "Don't be silly. That's the way things go. You have to tell someone, or what's the use of having friends and lovers? I mean, I've been thinking about you."
He tenses a little, not certain where this is leading. He keeps quiet, inclining his head with careful curiosity.
"You seem even more out of place here than I do, Jack," she continues, looking briefly up at him, her thin red lips drawn firm. "And I know from what you've said that that can't be true. It's like you're lost. And not just out of time."
He's not certain how to deal with these words coming from her. So he laughs, just a gust of breath, looking down at his hands linked between his knees.
"Yeah, well. It's hard when you've been one thing for over a hundred years, and that was the only thing you had to hang onto. That's over now, and it's been over. But it still seems more real to me--"
He trails off. He can tell by the look on her face that she can imagine--or thinks she can imagine--the horror of living forever. "I don't know what to do," he says, his voice crushed and desolate.
She leans back against the window of the cockpit now. She has one elbow up, rested on the narrow window frame, and the late afternoon sun is filtering through all that glass and glowing in her hair, sparkling in his eyes from between her fingers.
"I know you don't believe in guardian angels, Jack," she begins, and he smiles. "But in a way, that's what you are."
He chokes a little and gives her a look, but she laughs and presses on.
"I don't mean it like that. Not like it's somehow your responsibility to protect everyone, to make sure everything goes right. But when that plane I saw--when that Shepherd--led me here, it wasn't a guarantee that everything was going to be all right. He just led me into my future, whatever it's going to be. No promises. He just showed me where to land."
For a moment, he thinks she's gone religious on him, but the expression on her face is not the peaceful one of the convert. It's mystified, uncertain, and her eyes look into his with the shared knowledge of that uncertainty. Suddenly, like a trick of the light, her words turn, and he sees them clearly.
He might live forever. Jack knows this, even though, as long as he's already lived, "forever" is something he still can't imagine. Something that is too big for terror, too big for sorrow. He's never been able to imagine a purpose that could withstand the enormity of "forever." Torchwood was always impermanent, he knew that, even as dreadful as it was to face the end. As dreadful as it always is.
He knows of course, watching the sun turn to darker gold in Diane's hair, there in the still, timeless air of the de Havilland's cockpit, that he's going to see her die, too. That he's going to be around when even this charmed, young-old airplane crumbles to rust. The endless line of faces he's known and will know, the people he has loved, will love, and bury, seem to stretch out into eternity; it's as though he can see them there, in the eye-dazzling light of the sun's dying rays.
Before his eyes, that line becomes so long, the numbers so vast, that suddenly, they take on another meaning. They become not humans, but humanity, not individuals only, but histories unwritten: a vast web of histories that he will usher into being. For a second, an odd bright pain stabs his chest.
The Doctor once called him a fixed point in Time, something unnatural. Wrong. That, at the end of the Universe itself, when all the stars in the sky had burned out, and Nature was knitting up the raveled sleeve of care, settling into her final sleep. In the same day, the Doctor had gushed about the indomitable spirit of humanity. Beaming, he smiled worshipfully at the throngs of stinking refugees whose single greatest human achievement was to be merely alive in huddled masses, hoping dumbly for a rocket ship to take them beyond the end of all things. They were survivors. And Jack was a survivor. Battered, hurting, afraid, and hopeful. He had already lived for over a hundred years then, but it had never occurred to him to think of his immortality as something that could be used for good.
It's a bit like the first time he woke up after death. Sitting in the co-pilot seat of the de Havilland, Jack breathes tentatively. He's stuck taking the long way around, a way that he used to despise and fear. Maybe he will never not fear it--the unbounded sea of linear Time spread out before him, uncharted, and waiting. But in this moment, he finally feels that it is his.
It is monumental, this feeling, and it takes his breath away and makes his chest hurt. But something in him is unfurling with a newness that is cautious and raw, tingling in his stomach.
The edges of the light blur and distort as he looks back at Diane, and he blinks to clear his vision and dry his eyes. She is looking at him with a sorrowful kind of wonder, and when he catches her eye, she smiles, happy and sad at the same time, and touches his hand.
Overhead, the PA system announces that the museum will be closing in ten minutes, and thanks all museum-goers for their attendance. Diane shifts in her seat a little, but neither of them make a move to leave just yet.
"Thanks, Miss Holmes," Jack says with a little smile. She tips her head at him and her lips twitch in amusement. He touches the instrument panel very gently. "Maybe you're my Shepherd." She laughs in a surprised puff of breath and shakes her head slightly.
"Oh God, no. I'm just...your friend." She says the last word with a hesitant tenderness that makes him avert his eyes a little.
He smiles.
"You know..." he muses. "It is an incredible story. I mean, how did you know to follow the other airplane? I just keep thinking of all those stories about sailors being led to their deaths on the rocks, pilots following strange lights and crashing...all that...." His tone is light, but the images in his mind are strangely compelling and newly frightening, for some reason. "Did you just figure it was better than nothing?"
Diane twirls a few strands of her hair, something she's always doing, something recognizable and unique to her. He likes it.
"No...I knew I would be all right if I only could keep it in sight."
"Just a feeling?"
"Actually, no," she says with a wondering grin, leaning forward towards him. "I recognized the plane. I'd flown a few of them myself back in the war, when I was ferrying them from depots to air stations. I remember when they first came out with that model, back in the early years. So, I would have known it anywhere. That's how I knew." She shakes her head, in awe, and Jack knows she's seeing that moment again in her mind's eye.
He tilts his head. The light is bright gold now, and fading, washing the cockpit with the last amber highlights of the afternoon.
"What plane?" He asks, quietly.
"It was a mark five Spitfire."
He stares at her in wonder, and for a moment he can see it, too: the small, elegant fighter from another era, flashing its wings in the light and then disappearing into the shining strands of Time.
~~~
Someday, Jack will know the names of all the stars in the sky, and he will have memories for each one.
Someday, he, too, will see all of Time in his mind, but it will no longer be painful, or terrifying. It will just be.
He will be able to see the fragmented, glittering moments of it, and pick them out, occasionally, sifting through an ancient and comforting pattern of names and faces. People he has loved, moments he has lived through, breathless with wonder or pain or joy. Families he has had, people he has shepherded into, and out of, existence.
And in the end--for all things end--he will call the names of the stars, like a friendly salute, as they, and he, fade away.
That day is not today, though.
Today, he walks home with Diane Holmes in the fading light of summer in the southern hemisphere of Arbros, a planet millions and millions of miles from Earth, yet sharing the same thread of life. They are in no hurry; they take a detour to watch the sun go down over the bay, and the first stars come out, soft as faraway lanterns, in the darkening heavens.