Five things the Face of Boe has forgotten (and one he hasn’t)
Title/Series Info: Five things the Face of Boe has forgotten (and one he hasn't)
Pairing: As in show
Rating/Warning: Spoilers up to the end of TW COE and DW S2. Passing references to sex and violence. Charater death.
Summary: The Face of Boe endures, memories of the life of Jack Harkness do not.
Disclaimer: I own none of these characters.
Waiting here, in the dead senate of a dead city it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the Face of Boe remembers more of the things he has forgotten than has happened in a long time. Part of it is Novice Hame. She stayed and she serves him and that makes her his in some unavoidable way. He knows this, deeper than memory. He would call it muscle memory, were the term not so wholly inappropriate. He knows that it means he must protect her, must support her and in the end must let her go to fall, or stand (then fall) alone. And in this tomb what he must protect is her sanity. His own is long since gone and the solitude makes no difference but she was never meant, despite the habit and the penitence, to be an anchorite. So he talks to her, tells her stories, listens. They talk of incurable plague and loss and if he feels an itch, a phantom message from a lost memory he has learnt to ignore the feeling.
There are four kinds of promises. The first is obviously those made and kept. The second is those made unmeant and broken. It took him a while and the loss of a brother to find the third, those promises that are made and meant and still broken. The fourth he found later still, on the battlefields and in the trenches of too many wars - it’ll be okay, stay still the bleeding isn’t so bad, we’ll get through this. They aren’t true promises, for all that he wants them to be real. They are lies. As he kneels on the cold marble, cradling Ianto’s head, he wishes he could make himself believe that this promise is the first type. He knows it isn’t.
Spent Bliss patches still litter the Senate. Occasionally Hame will try and sweep them all into a corner where they will be unseen. They always reappear but he knows this is part of her penance so he doesn’t interfere. Only once does she find an active patch. Not Bliss, one of the weaker forerunners, Content or Complacent, something like that. She doesn’t touch it, leaves it on the ground but she returns to it, day after day. He sees and waits and one evening, as she sits by him, she asks.
“Why did they do it?”
He smiles and is able to give an honest answer. “I do not know.”
They talk of other things and in the morning the patch is gone.
He thinks that there is a 70/30 chance that Gwen will punch him when she finds out what he’s done so while the Eurphorate is pumping round the main chamber of the Hub, conveniently locked-down while he was working out a kink in the system, he stays in his office with the door shut. He’ll probably get a slight buzz but not enough to slow his thinking or more importantly his ducking. And if it feels a bit like punishment, standing looking down at Gwen and Ianto curled around each other on the sofa laughing so be it. Because he knows he loved Owen and Tosh as much as anyone, knows that he saw them at their most broken and saw something worth saving and gathered them to him and made them part of his team and his family and patched them up as best he could. He knows he would have saved them if he could. But he also knows that if he had to chose who lived and who died, if he had to pick as he has before and will again, this is what he would have chosen
So when Ianto, grinning in a way he’s never seen before, appears in the office doorway Jack smiles and reminds himself that this was his choice. The spray to his face comes as a surprise. Ianto is still grinning as he grabs Jack’s hand and pulls him down the stairs. “Taking airborne alien drugs from the archives then locking down the Hub, sir? Not very difficult to work out what you were planning.” Jack can feel an answering grin on his own face. All three of them lie on the sofa in a knot of arms and legs waiting for daybreak and sobriety untie them.
In the morning Gwen will shout and threaten to shoot him and make him promise not to drug them ever again. Ianto will kiss him once then go to rearrange the archives and start keeping psychoactive substances under lock and key. Jack will still think that he didn’t deserve an evening of respite. He doesn’t regret any of it though.
He thinks, sometimes, that he should concern himself with the physical well-being of the novice. He does, vaguely, remember that it is one of the things people concern themselves with. He does try to ask if, cat-like, she is capable of seeing to her own hygiene needs but the questions embarrass her and he stops. He thinks that he will notice if she seems to be suffering serious hardship. He wonders if he was so squeamish when he still had a body.
Hart kisses him and punches him and he can feel the blood rushing around his head, and maybe some other places too. He grins and punches back. This is what he’s missed. Not Hart himself, he’d have been happy never to see that smirk again but this. Those two weeks, over and over again, and they needed to anchor themselves somehow if they didn’t want to fall apart and all they’d had was themselves. Before that time he’d been happy to fall into and out of various beds, feel smooth flesh against his. Those two weeks taught him to revel in all of it, all the things he’d turned away from before, between the end of the war and these endless days. He’d spent the first year learning the scents of the world around him, not only fresh washed skin and rain and all the things he’d loved before but the smell of stale sweat and unwashed bodies and decay. After that it was sight and sound and taste. For the last two years it was touch and the difference between the scrape of teeth on his neck and the scratch of a blade along his leg and the impact of a fist in his side. He welcomed them as much as the slide of silk around his wrists or the warmth of a mouth around his nipple or the soft pressure of hands spreading his legs. He knows he’s tying himself to Hart, making something that only the two of them can understand and that he will have to pay the price for it sometime.
Jack knows, once they’re free, that he should try and forget what he learnt, that it has no place in the real world. He’s starting to manage it when the Time Agency steal two years and he vows to hold on to all his remaining memories, no matter what.
He can feel the time drawing close. He knows that he must pass a message to the Doctor before he dies. Sometimes he tells Novice Hame what it is, just in case. But when she asks what it means he has no answer. He must have known once but the memory has faded. And if he sometimes feels a sense of dread when the words come to his mind, if he sometimes wonders whether they formed part of a warning, it makes no difference. He knows he must pass on the message. He knows that whatever he dreads, it must happen. He suspects it has already happened.
Jack can’t scream anymore. He really can’t. The Master has removed his vocal cords. They’ll come back the next time he dies but for now he is silenced. The first month he cursed the Master. He hasn’t stopped doing that but he has added to it. The second month he curses himself as well. He knows that he is drawing the Master’s violence with his grin and his words and he attitude. He hopes the Doctor appreciates the respite. By the third month he is cursing the Doctor. He tries to do it quietly but he thinks the Doctor must have heard his shouts occasionally. He’s not proud of himself. Even less so the next month when he curses Martha for escaping, for being to one the Doctor chose. He tries so very hard not to spend the fifth month cursing his team. He abandoned them and he knows if he can ever get out of here he will do whatever he can to make it up to them but when he feels his flesh tearing apart, the healing almost as bad as the breaking he can’t help but blame them for being somewhere else when he needed them. After half a year he is cursing Rose for what she’s done to him. He’s long since accepted that immortality is a pretty bum deal but he knows that she wanted to save him, that she wasn’t trying to hurt him. He’s wished what she did undone but he’s never blamed her, not until now.
Because the Master hates him, hates him the way the Doctor used to hate him, hates him worse because by hating Jack’s wrongness he can hate his own, as well. So Jack is paying for the Paradox Machine and the future of the Earth returned to destroy its past. It’s not fair and the pain is everything and he wishes that it could end and he wishes that he wouldn’t have to carry this memory to the end of the world.
He tells her when the Doctor is close. He knows she has a gun and they’ve talked about what she must do if the Doctor ends up in the Lower City. He thinks everything has already been made ready but it hasn’t quite. In the days before the Doctor arrives Novice Hame tries to hide the dead as best she can. She tries to clear a space between the bones for the living. She sees him looking and drops the femur she is holding.
“I just thought it would be better, if they were less obvious.” She smiles sadly. “Most people don’t like being reminded of death, don’t you think?”
He nods because he knows that is what she’s waiting for but he doesn’t understand. Not really. He should, he thinks, with his death creeping closer. That’s why people fear death, because it reminds them of their own mortality. But it’s been so long, longer than he can remember, since he thought of himself as mortal. He has forgotten how to fear death.
When he wakes up on the satellite, surrounded by bodies, he knows they’re gone and he’s pissed. And when he makes it back to Earth in the 19th Century he’s pissed. He’s off by over 100 years and unless he’s really lucky and finds the Doctor he’s going to die here, back before history even begins. So when he wakes up from death the second time he’s delighted. The perfect get out of jail free card. He grins, thinking of all the things he can do now he has nothing to fear.
By the time Torchwood find him he has realised it’s not a blessing after all but it’s not until 1914 and mud and rats and blood that he realises what a curse it is. Torchwood’s royal patronage turns out to be good for something, he manages to skip the 28-eight weeks training and Captain Jack Harkness ships out with 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards. He wonders if it’s Carter’s idea of a joke to send him to a battalion nicknamed The Dandies.
Ypres is hell. He though nothing could be worse than the war of his adolescence but this is, because he knows now that it will never end. He sends those beautiful, doomed boys to die, day after day. And sometimes when it gets too much, when his hands are sticky with offal and his head is buzzing with last words, he takes a private’s uniform and joins the rest of the ballast and fights with them and dies with them. Then he crawls back to the trenches and puts on the captain’s uniform that he’s never earned and starts all over again.
He has never forgotten the Doctor. The faces have faded over time but the idea of him is one of the few constants the Face of Boe has. He wonders if the Doctor is proud of him for using the last of his long, long, life to save this world. He thinks so. That’s not why he did it but even the Doctor, especially the Doctor, can’t understand what it’s like to live without death. In those last few minutes the Face of Boe remembers what it means to be alive.
Pairing: As in show
Rating/Warning: Spoilers up to the end of TW COE and DW S2. Passing references to sex and violence. Charater death.
Summary: The Face of Boe endures, memories of the life of Jack Harkness do not.
Disclaimer: I own none of these characters.
Waiting here, in the dead senate of a dead city it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the Face of Boe remembers more of the things he has forgotten than has happened in a long time. Part of it is Novice Hame. She stayed and she serves him and that makes her his in some unavoidable way. He knows this, deeper than memory. He would call it muscle memory, were the term not so wholly inappropriate. He knows that it means he must protect her, must support her and in the end must let her go to fall, or stand (then fall) alone. And in this tomb what he must protect is her sanity. His own is long since gone and the solitude makes no difference but she was never meant, despite the habit and the penitence, to be an anchorite. So he talks to her, tells her stories, listens. They talk of incurable plague and loss and if he feels an itch, a phantom message from a lost memory he has learnt to ignore the feeling.
There are four kinds of promises. The first is obviously those made and kept. The second is those made unmeant and broken. It took him a while and the loss of a brother to find the third, those promises that are made and meant and still broken. The fourth he found later still, on the battlefields and in the trenches of too many wars - it’ll be okay, stay still the bleeding isn’t so bad, we’ll get through this. They aren’t true promises, for all that he wants them to be real. They are lies. As he kneels on the cold marble, cradling Ianto’s head, he wishes he could make himself believe that this promise is the first type. He knows it isn’t.
Spent Bliss patches still litter the Senate. Occasionally Hame will try and sweep them all into a corner where they will be unseen. They always reappear but he knows this is part of her penance so he doesn’t interfere. Only once does she find an active patch. Not Bliss, one of the weaker forerunners, Content or Complacent, something like that. She doesn’t touch it, leaves it on the ground but she returns to it, day after day. He sees and waits and one evening, as she sits by him, she asks.
“Why did they do it?”
He smiles and is able to give an honest answer. “I do not know.”
They talk of other things and in the morning the patch is gone.
He thinks that there is a 70/30 chance that Gwen will punch him when she finds out what he’s done so while the Eurphorate is pumping round the main chamber of the Hub, conveniently locked-down while he was working out a kink in the system, he stays in his office with the door shut. He’ll probably get a slight buzz but not enough to slow his thinking or more importantly his ducking. And if it feels a bit like punishment, standing looking down at Gwen and Ianto curled around each other on the sofa laughing so be it. Because he knows he loved Owen and Tosh as much as anyone, knows that he saw them at their most broken and saw something worth saving and gathered them to him and made them part of his team and his family and patched them up as best he could. He knows he would have saved them if he could. But he also knows that if he had to chose who lived and who died, if he had to pick as he has before and will again, this is what he would have chosen
So when Ianto, grinning in a way he’s never seen before, appears in the office doorway Jack smiles and reminds himself that this was his choice. The spray to his face comes as a surprise. Ianto is still grinning as he grabs Jack’s hand and pulls him down the stairs. “Taking airborne alien drugs from the archives then locking down the Hub, sir? Not very difficult to work out what you were planning.” Jack can feel an answering grin on his own face. All three of them lie on the sofa in a knot of arms and legs waiting for daybreak and sobriety untie them.
In the morning Gwen will shout and threaten to shoot him and make him promise not to drug them ever again. Ianto will kiss him once then go to rearrange the archives and start keeping psychoactive substances under lock and key. Jack will still think that he didn’t deserve an evening of respite. He doesn’t regret any of it though.
He thinks, sometimes, that he should concern himself with the physical well-being of the novice. He does, vaguely, remember that it is one of the things people concern themselves with. He does try to ask if, cat-like, she is capable of seeing to her own hygiene needs but the questions embarrass her and he stops. He thinks that he will notice if she seems to be suffering serious hardship. He wonders if he was so squeamish when he still had a body.
Hart kisses him and punches him and he can feel the blood rushing around his head, and maybe some other places too. He grins and punches back. This is what he’s missed. Not Hart himself, he’d have been happy never to see that smirk again but this. Those two weeks, over and over again, and they needed to anchor themselves somehow if they didn’t want to fall apart and all they’d had was themselves. Before that time he’d been happy to fall into and out of various beds, feel smooth flesh against his. Those two weeks taught him to revel in all of it, all the things he’d turned away from before, between the end of the war and these endless days. He’d spent the first year learning the scents of the world around him, not only fresh washed skin and rain and all the things he’d loved before but the smell of stale sweat and unwashed bodies and decay. After that it was sight and sound and taste. For the last two years it was touch and the difference between the scrape of teeth on his neck and the scratch of a blade along his leg and the impact of a fist in his side. He welcomed them as much as the slide of silk around his wrists or the warmth of a mouth around his nipple or the soft pressure of hands spreading his legs. He knows he’s tying himself to Hart, making something that only the two of them can understand and that he will have to pay the price for it sometime.
Jack knows, once they’re free, that he should try and forget what he learnt, that it has no place in the real world. He’s starting to manage it when the Time Agency steal two years and he vows to hold on to all his remaining memories, no matter what.
He can feel the time drawing close. He knows that he must pass a message to the Doctor before he dies. Sometimes he tells Novice Hame what it is, just in case. But when she asks what it means he has no answer. He must have known once but the memory has faded. And if he sometimes feels a sense of dread when the words come to his mind, if he sometimes wonders whether they formed part of a warning, it makes no difference. He knows he must pass on the message. He knows that whatever he dreads, it must happen. He suspects it has already happened.
Jack can’t scream anymore. He really can’t. The Master has removed his vocal cords. They’ll come back the next time he dies but for now he is silenced. The first month he cursed the Master. He hasn’t stopped doing that but he has added to it. The second month he curses himself as well. He knows that he is drawing the Master’s violence with his grin and his words and he attitude. He hopes the Doctor appreciates the respite. By the third month he is cursing the Doctor. He tries to do it quietly but he thinks the Doctor must have heard his shouts occasionally. He’s not proud of himself. Even less so the next month when he curses Martha for escaping, for being to one the Doctor chose. He tries so very hard not to spend the fifth month cursing his team. He abandoned them and he knows if he can ever get out of here he will do whatever he can to make it up to them but when he feels his flesh tearing apart, the healing almost as bad as the breaking he can’t help but blame them for being somewhere else when he needed them. After half a year he is cursing Rose for what she’s done to him. He’s long since accepted that immortality is a pretty bum deal but he knows that she wanted to save him, that she wasn’t trying to hurt him. He’s wished what she did undone but he’s never blamed her, not until now.
Because the Master hates him, hates him the way the Doctor used to hate him, hates him worse because by hating Jack’s wrongness he can hate his own, as well. So Jack is paying for the Paradox Machine and the future of the Earth returned to destroy its past. It’s not fair and the pain is everything and he wishes that it could end and he wishes that he wouldn’t have to carry this memory to the end of the world.
He tells her when the Doctor is close. He knows she has a gun and they’ve talked about what she must do if the Doctor ends up in the Lower City. He thinks everything has already been made ready but it hasn’t quite. In the days before the Doctor arrives Novice Hame tries to hide the dead as best she can. She tries to clear a space between the bones for the living. She sees him looking and drops the femur she is holding.
“I just thought it would be better, if they were less obvious.” She smiles sadly. “Most people don’t like being reminded of death, don’t you think?”
He nods because he knows that is what she’s waiting for but he doesn’t understand. Not really. He should, he thinks, with his death creeping closer. That’s why people fear death, because it reminds them of their own mortality. But it’s been so long, longer than he can remember, since he thought of himself as mortal. He has forgotten how to fear death.
When he wakes up on the satellite, surrounded by bodies, he knows they’re gone and he’s pissed. And when he makes it back to Earth in the 19th Century he’s pissed. He’s off by over 100 years and unless he’s really lucky and finds the Doctor he’s going to die here, back before history even begins. So when he wakes up from death the second time he’s delighted. The perfect get out of jail free card. He grins, thinking of all the things he can do now he has nothing to fear.
By the time Torchwood find him he has realised it’s not a blessing after all but it’s not until 1914 and mud and rats and blood that he realises what a curse it is. Torchwood’s royal patronage turns out to be good for something, he manages to skip the 28-eight weeks training and Captain Jack Harkness ships out with 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards. He wonders if it’s Carter’s idea of a joke to send him to a battalion nicknamed The Dandies.
Ypres is hell. He though nothing could be worse than the war of his adolescence but this is, because he knows now that it will never end. He sends those beautiful, doomed boys to die, day after day. And sometimes when it gets too much, when his hands are sticky with offal and his head is buzzing with last words, he takes a private’s uniform and joins the rest of the ballast and fights with them and dies with them. Then he crawls back to the trenches and puts on the captain’s uniform that he’s never earned and starts all over again.
He has never forgotten the Doctor. The faces have faded over time but the idea of him is one of the few constants the Face of Boe has. He wonders if the Doctor is proud of him for using the last of his long, long, life to save this world. He thinks so. That’s not why he did it but even the Doctor, especially the Doctor, can’t understand what it’s like to live without death. In those last few minutes the Face of Boe remembers what it means to be alive.