dameruth: The Weak Intent (Jack/Ten) [PG] (SUMMER HOLIDAYS, PROMPT 7)
Title: The Weak Intent
Author: dameruth
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Rating: PG (swearing)
Spoilers/warnings: The very ending of "Something Borrowed" in TW S2. Part of "Flowers"
Challenge: Summer Holidays
Prompt group: 7: love - family - memento - trace
Summary: After a bad day at Torchwood, Jack confronts the Doctor . . . and some uncomfortable truths about immortality.
AN: Slight (but minor) references to previous stories in my "Flowers" series, "More Than True", "The Man Who Makes People Better", and "My Winter Rose." The unattributed line Jack quotes to himself is also by John Greenleaf Whittier.
Jack was in a fine, towering rage by the time he returned to the Hub. It had not been a good day.
People had died who shouldn't have, thanks to the stubborn pride of Cardiff's Vench family-in-exile, the Ak-ahan. A rival trading faction, the Kor'ech, had tracked the Ak-ahan'te down to their hiding place on this backward little world and thought they'd had a free hand in pursuing their centuries-old vendetta; in particular, they saw no need to be careful with any human bystanders who got in their way.
Bad enough to have an alien gang war erupting in the city, but the Ak-ahan Elder had covered up what was really going on, feeling it was a private matter of the Vencha'te. Poor repayment, in Jack's opinion, for the asylum he'd granted her and her people, but in the end he couldn't hate her for it. Vencha'te ritual executions involved blades and blades only. What he saw at the crime scene where they finally found her took all the fun out of hating someone.
The suddenly-promoted Second Elder, deciding he liked his skin whole and where it belonged, had been the one to give Torchwood the vital information leading them to the assassins. The Kor'ech'te had gone down fighting, but proved the truth of the old adage about bringing knives to a gunfight. Torchwood's superior firepower won the day, the only serious injury being Ianto, who took a bad cut to the side. His quick reflexes saved him from a gutting, but it was close. Too goddamned close, as far as Jack was concerned.
Jack himself had been killed, but had the grim satisfaction of dropping his opponent with a clean head-shot before blood loss dropped him. Even better, that particular Vench was the one with the neural-camera implant transmitting vids of the kills back to his family's ship in orbit. He received, and passed along, an eyeful of Jack taking an artery-severing slash across the throat and simply grinning before raising his revolver and firing.
That played to Jack's advantage when he came back to life, fished the remnants of the camera from the remnants of the assassin's skull and plugged it straight into the vidscreen communicator in the SUV. Even Owen, already stitching Ianto back together with meticulous skill, had flinched and gone a little green at that point, but Jack hadn't given a damn what anyone thought. He had an abandoned building with eight dead bodies in it (six Vencha'te and one Ak-ahan human employee whose loyalty had proven fatal), four more dead in the Torchwood morgue, and one of his own people injured. The time for niceties was long past.
The Vencha'te on the ship sure as hell hadn't been expecting a call from a human they'd seen take a fatal blow and Jack took the offensive immediately, combining threats of the Shadow Proclamation, the Destroyer of Worlds ("he's a good friend of mine"), and his own avowed personal, eternal vengeance to warn the Kor'ech'te off of setting foot in his city - or on his world - ever again.
He honestly couldn't remember all of what he'd said, but the Kor'ech ship had broken orbit a bare two minutes after Jack had finished transmitting.
Now, the cleanup was done and Ianto was put to bed in his flat with a dose of painkillers and orders to take at least forty-eight hours off. Owen had already volunteered to check in on him periodocally. Owen might not be a model citizen, but he was a dead serious doctor and a skilled one; Jack trusted him to look after his patient. Much as Jack had wanted to park at Ianto's bedside, he knew his presence would hardly be restful, given his present mood, so he'd left with a kiss and a promise of grapes later. Ianto was already half-asleep by then, and hadn't protested.
So far as Jack knew, he was alone in the Hub, which suited him fine. It was late, Tosh had finished up the last of the electronic cleanup and gone home, and Gwen was no doubt taking comfort from Rhys after delivering the bad news to the last human victim's family. Jack knew she took the unfair brunt of that particular task, but she was the best at it and he didn't have enough people to avoid deploying those he had as efficiently as possible. Still, the guilt of it gnawed at him, one of a thousand things fueling his anger now.
Fuming, he rounded the corner heading to his office and found out he wasn't alone.
The Doctor was sitting cross-legged on Jack's desk. Jack caught a split-second view of the Time Lord staring down at an old photograph in his hands, wearing an expression of stunned shock. The instant he became aware of Jack's presence, he jumped, looking up over the rims of his spectacles with wide, guilty, little-boy eyes. The open tin box sitting on the desk next to him left little doubt in Jack's mind about which photo had caught the Doctor's attention.
Jack could guess the Doctor had been waiting for a while now, and, being bored, had taken the opportunity to rifle through Jack's desk and papers. Other peoples' belongings were always fair game for his curiosity, as far as the Doctor was concerned, and no lock the sonic screwdriver could open had any meaning. It was part and parcel of his nature, and it was something Jack had learned to accept from his first, long-ago days aboard the TARDIS.
Today, though, Jack was in absolutely no mood to tolerate the more irritating aspects of Time Lord behavior: the arrogance, the lack of respect for others' boundaries, the certainty that whenever he chose to make an unannounced appearance he would be greeted with adoration - it all put Jack's teeth on edge.
He realized he'd been glaring at the Doctor for a few seconds, knew he should probably say something, but he also knew that if he opened his mouth now whatever came out would not be at all pretty. The same rigid control that had been keeping him from putting his fists through walls and screaming obscenities throughout the ugly, fucked-up, stupid mess that had been his day kept his jaw clamped shut now.
In icy silence he broke eye contact with the Doctor, shrugged off his coat and moved to the shelf holding the decanter.
He automatically registered the level of amber liquid in relation to the pattern of the cut glass. Owen had been there again. They'd reached an equilibrium of late: if the whiskey level didn't drop by more than an inch a week above and beyond what Jack took for himself, Jack pretended not to notice. He also kept the genuinely good stuff to himself, in his quarters, where even Owen didn't dare go.
"Jack . . .?" The Doctor's voice was small, tentative. He very rarely sounded that way.
Jack didn't respond, didn't turn around, just sloshed whiskey carelessly into a glass. Motion at the edge of his peripheral vision made him glance up and he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the polished surface of a darkened monitor. No expression at all, a stranger's face, eyes fierce and pale.
He took a deep breath, let it seep out through his nostrils and drank from his glass, the burn in his throat complementing the one in his chest. The Doctor kept completely silent, but Jack could feel his presence. He took another breath, tried to steady his seething emotions, and turned around.
The Doctor was still sitting on Jack's desk, but quickly pushed off and landed lightly on his feet, plimsolls making no sound. He swallowed visibly, meeting Jack's eyes again. "Jack? Should I go . . .?" he asked, voice still uncertain. He wanted to go, that much was obvious. Every line of his body was yearning to flee, as the Doctor always fled from the things that truly frightened him: not invasion fleets, not monsters, not certain death, but rather emotional pain, difficult relationships - hell, relationships at all - consequences . . . For all that he was standing still, there was a faint tremor running through him, and his eyes behind his spectacles were too wide, like a skittish horse's, a ring of white showing all the way around the brown.
Jack's anger took a little pleasure from the Doctor's clear awareness of his own misstep (about fucking time you realized there are lines you shouldn't cross, you arrogant bastard), but mostly it flared up again, raging, seeking a target. Jack wanted to answer in the affirmative, to yell at the Doctor to just go ahead and run, the way he always ran, the way he'd run from Jack once before when he hadn't been able to deal with what his friend had become . . .
Gods. I thought I was over that, Jack thought as he wrestled with himself and the things that were surfacing in his mind, old raw wounds bleeding afresh.
Out of sheer habit, his right hand, the one not holding his glass, moved to his left wrist and the time-polished leather band there, fingertips tracing the seams and lines, an old calming gesture. His fingers stopped when they reached the small, round bump that marked a carved crystal rose. Rather than bothering to have it set in a piece of jewelry he'd never wear, Jack had eventually just slipped the rose into an inner pocket of the wristband for safekeeping. He touched it a lot, enough for the texture of the carving to already begin impressing itself on the leather from the inside.
Someday, in all likelihood, that rose would still be there long after the man who had given it to him was gone. It would be just another memento, like a faded photograph. There would be a day when he looked back on this moment, remembered this very instant when the living Doctor stood before him, holding his ground by sheer force of will, waiting for whatever Jack might say to him, fighting against his basic nature, his rawest species instincts out of . . . out of . . .
Love, gods help them both.
How that memory ended was his to decide, right here, right now.
Jack was treated to a dizzying moment of insight as his anger began to drain away. He remembered a time, long ago now (though only a drop in the bucket of Eternity) when a much younger ex-Time Agent had stood his terrified ground, met an icy-blue gaze leveled in judgment, and waited to be rejected by someone old and frightening and terrible, but hoping against all hope that he would be accepted instead.
When did we trade places? Jack thought, looking at the Doctor and seeing, for the first time, what he truly was: just a man. Still not human, still old and powerful and dangerous . . . but as fragile, fallible and mortal as any other man, in the end.
He didn't want that understanding, tried to push it out of his head as soon as it formed, but it was like an optical illusion that, once seen, cannot be unseen.
The last of his rage evaporated and revealed the pain it had been hiding, a protective cushion like a blister over a burn.
Stifling a groan, Jack closed his eyes and remembered.
A certain wedding, recorded in sepia but vivid with color in his mind's eye; Estelle; Rose; a whole host of names and faces. So many lost already, and Jack's life barely begun. So many lost today, Ianto almost among them, a reminder of what was, inevitably, to come.
He had enough regrets to take with him into the final darkness at Time's end already, and there would no doubt be more. He didn't need to go actively adding to that tally, not when he could see clearly enough to choose otherwise.
For all sad words of tongue and pen, / The saddest are these . . .
"' . . . It might have been,'" Jack murmured aloud, and reopened his eyes, dropping his right hand from the hidden crystal rose.
The Doctor blinked, obviously trying to puzzle out the intended meaning of Jack's response. He was still tense, still ready to flee, but also still waiting.
Most likely he thought Jack's response had been entirely about the photograph. While they might know more about each other than anyone else probably did, there were still vast swathes of the past left unknown and unspoken between them. Family was one of the biggest taboos of all; Jack knew that the Doctor lost his family in the War, and the Doctor knew the story of Gray, but those were rare, isolated facts, freely offered and never asked after in greater detail. In going through the photographs without permission, the Doctor had broken one of their unspoken agreements - inadvertently, perhaps, but broken all the same.
Jack did have the right to be angry, from that fact alone. And, just for once, someone needed to call the Doctor on his behavior . . . but calling didn't preclude forgiving, as Jack knew very well. It was an ideal he treasured, in his better moments. Sometimes he even managed to live up to it.
"Stay," Jack told him, voice rough. "Just . . . be quiet and let me finish my drink, see how I feel after that. It wasn't a good day. But it's not fair to take it out on you." He walked to his chair and sat down in it with a tired sigh. "Though I wish you'd realize someday that humans lock up personal things for a reason."
"I . . . yes. All right," the Doctor said. Jack was impressed by his brevity. The Time Lord hopped back up to resume his seat on Jack's desk (this time facing Jack), gathering up the scattered photos into a neat stack and replacing them in their box without sorting through them further, closing the lid with a decisive snap before sliding the box across the desktop towards Jack. His expression was relieved and grateful.
"Thank you," Jack said, leaning back into his chair before raising his glass and letting the alcohol trace a line of fire down his throat, even as the passage of Time burnt itself into memory.
---
"Clothe with life the weak intent, let me be the thing I meant." - John Greenleaf Whittier
Author: dameruth
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Rating: PG (swearing)
Spoilers/warnings: The very ending of "Something Borrowed" in TW S2. Part of "Flowers"
Challenge: Summer Holidays
Prompt group: 7: love - family - memento - trace
Summary: After a bad day at Torchwood, Jack confronts the Doctor . . . and some uncomfortable truths about immortality.
AN: Slight (but minor) references to previous stories in my "Flowers" series, "More Than True", "The Man Who Makes People Better", and "My Winter Rose." The unattributed line Jack quotes to himself is also by John Greenleaf Whittier.
Jack was in a fine, towering rage by the time he returned to the Hub. It had not been a good day.
People had died who shouldn't have, thanks to the stubborn pride of Cardiff's Vench family-in-exile, the Ak-ahan. A rival trading faction, the Kor'ech, had tracked the Ak-ahan'te down to their hiding place on this backward little world and thought they'd had a free hand in pursuing their centuries-old vendetta; in particular, they saw no need to be careful with any human bystanders who got in their way.
Bad enough to have an alien gang war erupting in the city, but the Ak-ahan Elder had covered up what was really going on, feeling it was a private matter of the Vencha'te. Poor repayment, in Jack's opinion, for the asylum he'd granted her and her people, but in the end he couldn't hate her for it. Vencha'te ritual executions involved blades and blades only. What he saw at the crime scene where they finally found her took all the fun out of hating someone.
The suddenly-promoted Second Elder, deciding he liked his skin whole and where it belonged, had been the one to give Torchwood the vital information leading them to the assassins. The Kor'ech'te had gone down fighting, but proved the truth of the old adage about bringing knives to a gunfight. Torchwood's superior firepower won the day, the only serious injury being Ianto, who took a bad cut to the side. His quick reflexes saved him from a gutting, but it was close. Too goddamned close, as far as Jack was concerned.
Jack himself had been killed, but had the grim satisfaction of dropping his opponent with a clean head-shot before blood loss dropped him. Even better, that particular Vench was the one with the neural-camera implant transmitting vids of the kills back to his family's ship in orbit. He received, and passed along, an eyeful of Jack taking an artery-severing slash across the throat and simply grinning before raising his revolver and firing.
That played to Jack's advantage when he came back to life, fished the remnants of the camera from the remnants of the assassin's skull and plugged it straight into the vidscreen communicator in the SUV. Even Owen, already stitching Ianto back together with meticulous skill, had flinched and gone a little green at that point, but Jack hadn't given a damn what anyone thought. He had an abandoned building with eight dead bodies in it (six Vencha'te and one Ak-ahan human employee whose loyalty had proven fatal), four more dead in the Torchwood morgue, and one of his own people injured. The time for niceties was long past.
The Vencha'te on the ship sure as hell hadn't been expecting a call from a human they'd seen take a fatal blow and Jack took the offensive immediately, combining threats of the Shadow Proclamation, the Destroyer of Worlds ("he's a good friend of mine"), and his own avowed personal, eternal vengeance to warn the Kor'ech'te off of setting foot in his city - or on his world - ever again.
He honestly couldn't remember all of what he'd said, but the Kor'ech ship had broken orbit a bare two minutes after Jack had finished transmitting.
Now, the cleanup was done and Ianto was put to bed in his flat with a dose of painkillers and orders to take at least forty-eight hours off. Owen had already volunteered to check in on him periodocally. Owen might not be a model citizen, but he was a dead serious doctor and a skilled one; Jack trusted him to look after his patient. Much as Jack had wanted to park at Ianto's bedside, he knew his presence would hardly be restful, given his present mood, so he'd left with a kiss and a promise of grapes later. Ianto was already half-asleep by then, and hadn't protested.
So far as Jack knew, he was alone in the Hub, which suited him fine. It was late, Tosh had finished up the last of the electronic cleanup and gone home, and Gwen was no doubt taking comfort from Rhys after delivering the bad news to the last human victim's family. Jack knew she took the unfair brunt of that particular task, but she was the best at it and he didn't have enough people to avoid deploying those he had as efficiently as possible. Still, the guilt of it gnawed at him, one of a thousand things fueling his anger now.
Fuming, he rounded the corner heading to his office and found out he wasn't alone.
The Doctor was sitting cross-legged on Jack's desk. Jack caught a split-second view of the Time Lord staring down at an old photograph in his hands, wearing an expression of stunned shock. The instant he became aware of Jack's presence, he jumped, looking up over the rims of his spectacles with wide, guilty, little-boy eyes. The open tin box sitting on the desk next to him left little doubt in Jack's mind about which photo had caught the Doctor's attention.
Jack could guess the Doctor had been waiting for a while now, and, being bored, had taken the opportunity to rifle through Jack's desk and papers. Other peoples' belongings were always fair game for his curiosity, as far as the Doctor was concerned, and no lock the sonic screwdriver could open had any meaning. It was part and parcel of his nature, and it was something Jack had learned to accept from his first, long-ago days aboard the TARDIS.
Today, though, Jack was in absolutely no mood to tolerate the more irritating aspects of Time Lord behavior: the arrogance, the lack of respect for others' boundaries, the certainty that whenever he chose to make an unannounced appearance he would be greeted with adoration - it all put Jack's teeth on edge.
He realized he'd been glaring at the Doctor for a few seconds, knew he should probably say something, but he also knew that if he opened his mouth now whatever came out would not be at all pretty. The same rigid control that had been keeping him from putting his fists through walls and screaming obscenities throughout the ugly, fucked-up, stupid mess that had been his day kept his jaw clamped shut now.
In icy silence he broke eye contact with the Doctor, shrugged off his coat and moved to the shelf holding the decanter.
He automatically registered the level of amber liquid in relation to the pattern of the cut glass. Owen had been there again. They'd reached an equilibrium of late: if the whiskey level didn't drop by more than an inch a week above and beyond what Jack took for himself, Jack pretended not to notice. He also kept the genuinely good stuff to himself, in his quarters, where even Owen didn't dare go.
"Jack . . .?" The Doctor's voice was small, tentative. He very rarely sounded that way.
Jack didn't respond, didn't turn around, just sloshed whiskey carelessly into a glass. Motion at the edge of his peripheral vision made him glance up and he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the polished surface of a darkened monitor. No expression at all, a stranger's face, eyes fierce and pale.
He took a deep breath, let it seep out through his nostrils and drank from his glass, the burn in his throat complementing the one in his chest. The Doctor kept completely silent, but Jack could feel his presence. He took another breath, tried to steady his seething emotions, and turned around.
The Doctor was still sitting on Jack's desk, but quickly pushed off and landed lightly on his feet, plimsolls making no sound. He swallowed visibly, meeting Jack's eyes again. "Jack? Should I go . . .?" he asked, voice still uncertain. He wanted to go, that much was obvious. Every line of his body was yearning to flee, as the Doctor always fled from the things that truly frightened him: not invasion fleets, not monsters, not certain death, but rather emotional pain, difficult relationships - hell, relationships at all - consequences . . . For all that he was standing still, there was a faint tremor running through him, and his eyes behind his spectacles were too wide, like a skittish horse's, a ring of white showing all the way around the brown.
Jack's anger took a little pleasure from the Doctor's clear awareness of his own misstep (about fucking time you realized there are lines you shouldn't cross, you arrogant bastard), but mostly it flared up again, raging, seeking a target. Jack wanted to answer in the affirmative, to yell at the Doctor to just go ahead and run, the way he always ran, the way he'd run from Jack once before when he hadn't been able to deal with what his friend had become . . .
Gods. I thought I was over that, Jack thought as he wrestled with himself and the things that were surfacing in his mind, old raw wounds bleeding afresh.
Out of sheer habit, his right hand, the one not holding his glass, moved to his left wrist and the time-polished leather band there, fingertips tracing the seams and lines, an old calming gesture. His fingers stopped when they reached the small, round bump that marked a carved crystal rose. Rather than bothering to have it set in a piece of jewelry he'd never wear, Jack had eventually just slipped the rose into an inner pocket of the wristband for safekeeping. He touched it a lot, enough for the texture of the carving to already begin impressing itself on the leather from the inside.
Someday, in all likelihood, that rose would still be there long after the man who had given it to him was gone. It would be just another memento, like a faded photograph. There would be a day when he looked back on this moment, remembered this very instant when the living Doctor stood before him, holding his ground by sheer force of will, waiting for whatever Jack might say to him, fighting against his basic nature, his rawest species instincts out of . . . out of . . .
Love, gods help them both.
How that memory ended was his to decide, right here, right now.
Jack was treated to a dizzying moment of insight as his anger began to drain away. He remembered a time, long ago now (though only a drop in the bucket of Eternity) when a much younger ex-Time Agent had stood his terrified ground, met an icy-blue gaze leveled in judgment, and waited to be rejected by someone old and frightening and terrible, but hoping against all hope that he would be accepted instead.
When did we trade places? Jack thought, looking at the Doctor and seeing, for the first time, what he truly was: just a man. Still not human, still old and powerful and dangerous . . . but as fragile, fallible and mortal as any other man, in the end.
He didn't want that understanding, tried to push it out of his head as soon as it formed, but it was like an optical illusion that, once seen, cannot be unseen.
The last of his rage evaporated and revealed the pain it had been hiding, a protective cushion like a blister over a burn.
Stifling a groan, Jack closed his eyes and remembered.
A certain wedding, recorded in sepia but vivid with color in his mind's eye; Estelle; Rose; a whole host of names and faces. So many lost already, and Jack's life barely begun. So many lost today, Ianto almost among them, a reminder of what was, inevitably, to come.
He had enough regrets to take with him into the final darkness at Time's end already, and there would no doubt be more. He didn't need to go actively adding to that tally, not when he could see clearly enough to choose otherwise.
For all sad words of tongue and pen, / The saddest are these . . .
"' . . . It might have been,'" Jack murmured aloud, and reopened his eyes, dropping his right hand from the hidden crystal rose.
The Doctor blinked, obviously trying to puzzle out the intended meaning of Jack's response. He was still tense, still ready to flee, but also still waiting.
Most likely he thought Jack's response had been entirely about the photograph. While they might know more about each other than anyone else probably did, there were still vast swathes of the past left unknown and unspoken between them. Family was one of the biggest taboos of all; Jack knew that the Doctor lost his family in the War, and the Doctor knew the story of Gray, but those were rare, isolated facts, freely offered and never asked after in greater detail. In going through the photographs without permission, the Doctor had broken one of their unspoken agreements - inadvertently, perhaps, but broken all the same.
Jack did have the right to be angry, from that fact alone. And, just for once, someone needed to call the Doctor on his behavior . . . but calling didn't preclude forgiving, as Jack knew very well. It was an ideal he treasured, in his better moments. Sometimes he even managed to live up to it.
"Stay," Jack told him, voice rough. "Just . . . be quiet and let me finish my drink, see how I feel after that. It wasn't a good day. But it's not fair to take it out on you." He walked to his chair and sat down in it with a tired sigh. "Though I wish you'd realize someday that humans lock up personal things for a reason."
"I . . . yes. All right," the Doctor said. Jack was impressed by his brevity. The Time Lord hopped back up to resume his seat on Jack's desk (this time facing Jack), gathering up the scattered photos into a neat stack and replacing them in their box without sorting through them further, closing the lid with a decisive snap before sliding the box across the desktop towards Jack. His expression was relieved and grateful.
"Thank you," Jack said, leaning back into his chair before raising his glass and letting the alcohol trace a line of fire down his throat, even as the passage of Time burnt itself into memory.
---
"Clothe with life the weak intent, let me be the thing I meant." - John Greenleaf Whittier