GIFT FOR OUR PINCH HITTERS: Reverberations (Jack/Ten) [G]
Title: Reverberations
Author: wojelah
Recipient: Our three wonderful Gift Exchange Pinch Hitters
Rating: G
Pairing(s): Jack/Ten
Spoilers/warnings: None.
Summary: “Close your eyes,” she orders, and her word is law and death. Her Court obeys. Jack’s baffled. And then he feels a stony hand on his neck and the world explodes.
Author’s Note: A thank you gift for our awesome pinch hitters, who went above and beyond. A combination of the prompts, “A story where Jack’s feelings for the Doctor can’t be ignored;” “purposely or accidentally participating in a historical event;” “I will find you. I will always find you;” and “Jack is the only person who has been taken by the Weeping Angels and has survived. He tells the Doctor his story.”
He’s in Tonzhouskyra when it happens.
It’s a quiet, golden afternoon in midsummer, and the city gardens are in full flower. Reds and blues and purples and yellows glow along every path, in every tree box, hot and vibrant among the cool green vegetation and the white synthstone walls. The fragrance in the air is so heady it could make a man dizzy.
At least, it could if that man hadn’t carefully ingested microfilters eight hours earlier.
He might be in Tonzhouskyra, but he has a job to do. Somewhere in this hothouse of flowers and stone is the person that kidnapped Ianto and Gwen. Not the actual kidnappers. They’ve already been dealt with. Priorities are priorities, after all: Jack’s got his team back, and they’ll be fine, eventually. Jack doesn’t know that he can say the same about the Thief Queen of Darsil when he finds her.
She’d paid for the kidnapping, after all. Apparently, she hadn’t liked that they’d disrupted her smuggling activities along the Rift.
Jack hadn’t liked rescuing her couriers when things went wrong. Better to call it retrieval. Most had gone mad from exposure by the time Torchwood had them in custody. Jack likes her attack on his team even less. It’s time to make his point clear.
Ianto had told him not to. Gwen too. But Tosh and Owen are too-recent memories, and this, at least, he can put a stop to.
When he finds the house -- when he pulls the silk door-cloth aside and stares down Iftys, she flinches at the look on his face, even with all her Court gathered close. She flinches, but then her eyes narrow and the smile on her face is pure satisfaction.
“Close your eyes,” she orders, and her word is law and death. Her Court obeys. Jack’s baffled.
And then he feels a stony hand on his neck and the world explodes.
---
He falls.
The sky flashes above him, flickering white and blue and yellow and lurid red.
He burns. He freezes.
He falls, and it feels like forever.
---
Jack.
His mind is full of noise and color. The shout of battles and snatches of song, flashes of images moving too fast to process, and through and over it all, a tumbling, torrential multitude of voices, speaking in tongues familiar and foreign, raking at him, pounding at him.
He can’t move to block it out. Can’t cover his ears, can’t close his eyes.
Jack, he hears again -- or feels, or tastes, or smells -- he doesn’t know one sense from another. But this cuts through the pandemonium like ozone, leaves a still fragment of time in its wake.
He struggles to breathe and finds that he can, just enough, before the chaos returns.
---
He’s losing self. He has enough awareness to know it still -- to feel himself crumbling away under the onslaught. Someone is looking for him, he knows. Someone is trying, he thinks. He can feel them, like a spotlight in the dark as they pass, but he can’t hold on to the brief moments of clarity long enough to act.
He could try stripping his psychic shields.
He’s had them since -- he can’t remember. He’s lost that to the maelstrom. He’s had them long and long. He thinks maybe they’d been practically drilled into him. That they were ingrained habit. A necessary protection. He can’t remember. But right now, they stand between him and total erosion.
And between him and whomever’s out there looking.
He’s going to lose himself anyway.
Let go, Jack Harkness tells what’s left of his mind, and feels that last fragile shell crack and dissipate.
In the heartbeat before the chaos descends, he shouts, mind and heart and voice together. I’m here, he calls. Oh god, I’m here.
---
Found you.
The storm goes quiet, and the sudden absence is nearly as brutal. He cries out, and feels comfort blanket him.
Got you, the other person says, and with it comes images of leather and blue eyes and long coats and brown eyes. Old eyes, dark eyes, no matter the color.
Doctor, Jack thinks, and he can’t help it, it carries everything. Too much and all at once, everything he’s never said and ached for, underlaid with simple joy.
Jack, the Doctor says, and it is kind and wry and gentle. Sleep’s the best thing for it now.
He fights it -- fights losing himself again, even temporarily. He’s been so lost.
Let go., the Doctor coaxes. I’ll find you.
Quiet and darkness press in.
He sleeps.
---
He wakes up in a bedroom that looks exactly the way he left it.
Jack considers the existence of his own body a small miracle. To wake up and feel a bed beneath him is such an onslaught of actual identifiable sensory input that it makes him shudder.
“None of that,” the Doctor says, and as Jack looks over at the armchair, shifts his feet off the bed and sits up. “Any more seizures, and I’ll have to tie you down.”
It’s said lightly, but the Doctor’s watching him carefully.
“Promise?” he asks, because it’s expected. He knows what he gave away. He’d had no barriers left. He’d had no choice. He’s thankful the walls are back up now.
The Doctor doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t actually respond. “Jack. What happened?”
He sits up slowly, trying to remember. Tries to focus on the last clear sensation. When it crystallizes, he curses aloud. “It was an Angel.” He swallows and shoves his hands into his hair, grounding himself in the feeling of the strands against his fingers, tugging at his scalp. “I went after Iftys.”
“The Thief Queen?” The Doctor raises an eyebrow.
“She hurt Ianto. Hurt Gwen.” Jack looks away. The Doctor says nothing. Jack laughs bitterly. “And she has an Angel as a bodyguard. She’s safe as houses.”
The Doctor stirs, and Jack glances at him. He’s too at sea to read the expression in the eyes that meet his. “I wouldn’t say that,” the Doctor offers at last. “
“No?”
“Let’s just say,” the Doctor says, “that you’re an awfully big meal for one Angel.”
His brain is still moving so slowly. “But he caught me. I fell.”
“You did,” the Doctor agrees. “And you bounced in 1908, in the middle of Russia, not far from Lake Baikal, thereby confounding scientists for hundreds of thousands of millennia, until someone clever figured out what a time richochet looked like.”
“I bounced,” Jack echoes slowly. “But I never stopped.”
“You never would have.” The Doctor’s voice is quiet. “A single Angel is no match for a Fact, Jack. But he’d taken you out of Time. Dissolved your anchor.”
“I couldn’t hold on,” Jack murmurs to himself.
“The Thief Queen couldn’t either. You may have bounced in Tunguska in 1908, but the first explosion happened forty millennia later.”
“Tonzhouskyra.”
The Doctor nods. “Normal linguistic corruption combined with cultural shifts, continental drift, and climate change. The first time -- or rather, the second time, when you bounced, hundreds of thousands of years earlier, there was a great deal less in the area to obliterate.” Jack looks up, alarmed, but the Doctor holds up a hand. “Fortunately, the damage in the Seventeenth Dynasty was limited to Iftys’s immediate lodgings. Which is why,” he says evenly, “I don’t think you need to worry all that much.”
This time, Jack meets his eyes. There isn’t judgment there. Just a bone-deep understanding.
Jack wonders who the Doctor’s lost recently, but doesn’t know how to ask. And then he sets it aside for a more immediate concern. “And the Angel? Should I be worried they’re going to try to swarm me?”
“Unlikely,” the Doctor says, getting to his feet. “The only two people who know what caused it are sitting in this room.”
Relief makes him sway, suddenly light-headed. A cool hand presses him back to the bed.
“Easy. You’re going to need a bit,” the Doctor says quietly. The room is spinning. Jack has to close his eyes. “I felt it happen. Knew it was you, knew you’d come loose. It took a very long time to find you, even so. I’m so sorry, Jack.”
He can feel sleep creeping back in. “Sorry?” he slurs.
“That I didn’t find you faster.”
“You found me,” he mumbles. “No one else could’ve.”
“Still.”
He’s losing the battle to stay awake -- his eyes won’t open and his tongue is like lead. “You found me,” is all he can manage. “Knew y’would.”
Just as he slides over the edge, he feels the Doctor say, I promise. It’s warm and firm and Jack reaches for it in his mind. He tips into sleep in the strength of that grasp, knowing he’ll be safe till morning.
Author: wojelah
Recipient: Our three wonderful Gift Exchange Pinch Hitters
Rating: G
Pairing(s): Jack/Ten
Spoilers/warnings: None.
Summary: “Close your eyes,” she orders, and her word is law and death. Her Court obeys. Jack’s baffled. And then he feels a stony hand on his neck and the world explodes.
Author’s Note: A thank you gift for our awesome pinch hitters, who went above and beyond. A combination of the prompts, “A story where Jack’s feelings for the Doctor can’t be ignored;” “purposely or accidentally participating in a historical event;” “I will find you. I will always find you;” and “Jack is the only person who has been taken by the Weeping Angels and has survived. He tells the Doctor his story.”
He’s in Tonzhouskyra when it happens.
It’s a quiet, golden afternoon in midsummer, and the city gardens are in full flower. Reds and blues and purples and yellows glow along every path, in every tree box, hot and vibrant among the cool green vegetation and the white synthstone walls. The fragrance in the air is so heady it could make a man dizzy.
At least, it could if that man hadn’t carefully ingested microfilters eight hours earlier.
He might be in Tonzhouskyra, but he has a job to do. Somewhere in this hothouse of flowers and stone is the person that kidnapped Ianto and Gwen. Not the actual kidnappers. They’ve already been dealt with. Priorities are priorities, after all: Jack’s got his team back, and they’ll be fine, eventually. Jack doesn’t know that he can say the same about the Thief Queen of Darsil when he finds her.
She’d paid for the kidnapping, after all. Apparently, she hadn’t liked that they’d disrupted her smuggling activities along the Rift.
Jack hadn’t liked rescuing her couriers when things went wrong. Better to call it retrieval. Most had gone mad from exposure by the time Torchwood had them in custody. Jack likes her attack on his team even less. It’s time to make his point clear.
Ianto had told him not to. Gwen too. But Tosh and Owen are too-recent memories, and this, at least, he can put a stop to.
When he finds the house -- when he pulls the silk door-cloth aside and stares down Iftys, she flinches at the look on his face, even with all her Court gathered close. She flinches, but then her eyes narrow and the smile on her face is pure satisfaction.
“Close your eyes,” she orders, and her word is law and death. Her Court obeys. Jack’s baffled.
And then he feels a stony hand on his neck and the world explodes.
---
He falls.
The sky flashes above him, flickering white and blue and yellow and lurid red.
He burns. He freezes.
He falls, and it feels like forever.
---
Jack.
His mind is full of noise and color. The shout of battles and snatches of song, flashes of images moving too fast to process, and through and over it all, a tumbling, torrential multitude of voices, speaking in tongues familiar and foreign, raking at him, pounding at him.
He can’t move to block it out. Can’t cover his ears, can’t close his eyes.
Jack, he hears again -- or feels, or tastes, or smells -- he doesn’t know one sense from another. But this cuts through the pandemonium like ozone, leaves a still fragment of time in its wake.
He struggles to breathe and finds that he can, just enough, before the chaos returns.
---
He’s losing self. He has enough awareness to know it still -- to feel himself crumbling away under the onslaught. Someone is looking for him, he knows. Someone is trying, he thinks. He can feel them, like a spotlight in the dark as they pass, but he can’t hold on to the brief moments of clarity long enough to act.
He could try stripping his psychic shields.
He’s had them since -- he can’t remember. He’s lost that to the maelstrom. He’s had them long and long. He thinks maybe they’d been practically drilled into him. That they were ingrained habit. A necessary protection. He can’t remember. But right now, they stand between him and total erosion.
And between him and whomever’s out there looking.
He’s going to lose himself anyway.
Let go, Jack Harkness tells what’s left of his mind, and feels that last fragile shell crack and dissipate.
In the heartbeat before the chaos descends, he shouts, mind and heart and voice together. I’m here, he calls. Oh god, I’m here.
---
Found you.
The storm goes quiet, and the sudden absence is nearly as brutal. He cries out, and feels comfort blanket him.
Got you, the other person says, and with it comes images of leather and blue eyes and long coats and brown eyes. Old eyes, dark eyes, no matter the color.
Doctor, Jack thinks, and he can’t help it, it carries everything. Too much and all at once, everything he’s never said and ached for, underlaid with simple joy.
Jack, the Doctor says, and it is kind and wry and gentle. Sleep’s the best thing for it now.
He fights it -- fights losing himself again, even temporarily. He’s been so lost.
Let go., the Doctor coaxes. I’ll find you.
Quiet and darkness press in.
He sleeps.
---
He wakes up in a bedroom that looks exactly the way he left it.
Jack considers the existence of his own body a small miracle. To wake up and feel a bed beneath him is such an onslaught of actual identifiable sensory input that it makes him shudder.
“None of that,” the Doctor says, and as Jack looks over at the armchair, shifts his feet off the bed and sits up. “Any more seizures, and I’ll have to tie you down.”
It’s said lightly, but the Doctor’s watching him carefully.
“Promise?” he asks, because it’s expected. He knows what he gave away. He’d had no barriers left. He’d had no choice. He’s thankful the walls are back up now.
The Doctor doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t actually respond. “Jack. What happened?”
He sits up slowly, trying to remember. Tries to focus on the last clear sensation. When it crystallizes, he curses aloud. “It was an Angel.” He swallows and shoves his hands into his hair, grounding himself in the feeling of the strands against his fingers, tugging at his scalp. “I went after Iftys.”
“The Thief Queen?” The Doctor raises an eyebrow.
“She hurt Ianto. Hurt Gwen.” Jack looks away. The Doctor says nothing. Jack laughs bitterly. “And she has an Angel as a bodyguard. She’s safe as houses.”
The Doctor stirs, and Jack glances at him. He’s too at sea to read the expression in the eyes that meet his. “I wouldn’t say that,” the Doctor offers at last. “
“No?”
“Let’s just say,” the Doctor says, “that you’re an awfully big meal for one Angel.”
His brain is still moving so slowly. “But he caught me. I fell.”
“You did,” the Doctor agrees. “And you bounced in 1908, in the middle of Russia, not far from Lake Baikal, thereby confounding scientists for hundreds of thousands of millennia, until someone clever figured out what a time richochet looked like.”
“I bounced,” Jack echoes slowly. “But I never stopped.”
“You never would have.” The Doctor’s voice is quiet. “A single Angel is no match for a Fact, Jack. But he’d taken you out of Time. Dissolved your anchor.”
“I couldn’t hold on,” Jack murmurs to himself.
“The Thief Queen couldn’t either. You may have bounced in Tunguska in 1908, but the first explosion happened forty millennia later.”
“Tonzhouskyra.”
The Doctor nods. “Normal linguistic corruption combined with cultural shifts, continental drift, and climate change. The first time -- or rather, the second time, when you bounced, hundreds of thousands of years earlier, there was a great deal less in the area to obliterate.” Jack looks up, alarmed, but the Doctor holds up a hand. “Fortunately, the damage in the Seventeenth Dynasty was limited to Iftys’s immediate lodgings. Which is why,” he says evenly, “I don’t think you need to worry all that much.”
This time, Jack meets his eyes. There isn’t judgment there. Just a bone-deep understanding.
Jack wonders who the Doctor’s lost recently, but doesn’t know how to ask. And then he sets it aside for a more immediate concern. “And the Angel? Should I be worried they’re going to try to swarm me?”
“Unlikely,” the Doctor says, getting to his feet. “The only two people who know what caused it are sitting in this room.”
Relief makes him sway, suddenly light-headed. A cool hand presses him back to the bed.
“Easy. You’re going to need a bit,” the Doctor says quietly. The room is spinning. Jack has to close his eyes. “I felt it happen. Knew it was you, knew you’d come loose. It took a very long time to find you, even so. I’m so sorry, Jack.”
He can feel sleep creeping back in. “Sorry?” he slurs.
“That I didn’t find you faster.”
“You found me,” he mumbles. “No one else could’ve.”
“Still.”
He’s losing the battle to stay awake -- his eyes won’t open and his tongue is like lead. “You found me,” is all he can manage. “Knew y’would.”
Just as he slides over the edge, he feels the Doctor say, I promise. It’s warm and firm and Jack reaches for it in his mind. He tips into sleep in the strength of that grasp, knowing he’ll be safe till morning.