[fic][dp] And All Roads Lead
Title: And All Roads Lead
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke )
Sliding Scale of Slash: Implied, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Rating: T (I know; shocking)
Beta Warning: Unbeta'd.
Fandoms: Life on Mars; Torchwood; Final Fantasy VIII; Final Fantasy XII, Pirates of the Caribbean
Summary: A rescue arrives, fashionably late.
In the unyielding darkness of the Trabian tundra, with the fact that Jack hadn't really slept in more than nods and spurts since the day before the Game Station, night and day in the Thorlgard lodge were determined almost entirely by Sam's sleep schedule. Jack's wrist device kept track of the literal time, but that lost its meaning when nothing about the outside world changed.
At least, nothing changed until a bright light and a fierce wind descended from the heavens in a way that would have had the Thorlgard claiming God.
Sam had been asleep sitting down, knees pulled up against his chest, back to the furnace. He snapped awake when the walls shook, turbulence and air pressure snuffing out the lamps. Jack was on his feet in a matter of seconds, heading to a covered position just inside the door.
Engines. He could identify that much - make and model were beyond him, though to be fair, there were only one or two ships he could identify by the sound they made when landing. He inched the door open, glancing out at the pattern of lights cast across the tundra, then opened the door enough to see if he could get a visual on the ship.
Unfamiliar design, though if this building were an indication of the level of technology, it couldn't be local. And it couldn't be the Centran's local holy disaster unless B-Garden's library had it entirely wrong or he'd really managed to fuck something up by teleporting here.
...it could have happened. Given the amount of flux the timeline had been in, it was possible some effect had travelled back far enough to jigger this part of the timestream, too. In which case they were both dead, Sam somewhat more permanently than him, and so he should probably find a way to avert that.
"I think we're being invaded," he said, crossing back to the furnace and grabbing the first thing handy - a heavy pelt - to throw over the low coals. "You know, that hell book really didn't mention anything about airships or spacecraft..."
"The fact that a book on hell is our only guide to living in this era," Sam began, and then Jack's hand was on his shoulder, steering him toward the far side of the furnace.
"Keep down," Jack said. "Stay quiet."
Sam shut his mouth. After a moment, he cast Jack a dark look. "Is hiding behind the furnace going to help?"
"Well, it'll give us a little advance warning if we need to teleport."
Sam mouthed "Ah," and shut up.
Nothing happened immediately. The noise from outside quieted, the light went down, and there was a stretch of silence before the first footsteps - loud only against the lodge's silence - could be heard. Jack shifted, trying to find a spot where he could watch the door without sticking too much of himself out of cover.
The door creaked open to admit their invasion force - which seemed to be one man, taking his time and idly complaining:
"...and really, I can appreciate the differences in variant suns, but once you've come to a point where the water turns to stone, I think there's no conclusion but to say that it's more than unreasonably cold."
A second figure drifted in through the door, taller but much quieter. Only soft taps announced their footsteps.
The first one sighed, closing the door and tying it shut. "Not the most hospitable of places, then, is this?" He turned, feet scuffing the ground. "And dark. Are we sure we've got the coordinates correct?"
"They are here," the second said, her voice lilting over a strange accent. The sounds had been softened to almost a purr, and there was something more animal than human about the rhythm. Still, the overall effect was one of pronounced intelligence; everything was clearly enunciated under the roll of the purr, and the tone was soft and considering. "I can hear them."
So much for stealth.
Jack stood, pressing his palm against Sam's shoulder. Stay down. He stepped around the furnace, trying to make out any details in the darkness. "I wasn't expecting visitors."
The male voice chuckled; even that was a cultured sound, carried more by tone than quantifiable markers. Aristocracy, Jack guessed. Not many people could pull off that sort of genial assumed superiority. What sort of aristocracy, and from where, he had no idea. "There we are. No, you wouldn't have been. Don't worry; we're friends." He shifted - Jack could hear the rustle of fabric. "Fran, it really is a bit dark to these eyes; if you could-"
There was a noise like a match being struck, and Jack winced away from the sudden globe of light which had materialized just above the woman's cupped palm. It only took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but...
But when they did, they raised a lot of questions.
The man was definitely foreign - whatever that meant, here - with a heavy fur cloak which revealed glimpses of gold inlay on whatever he was wearing beneath it; blonde, tanned and shorthaired with an impressive collection of small earrings in various shades of precious metal, but not, after that assessment, terribly interesting. It was the woman who caught Jack's attention, because not only was she at least half a head taller than he was at the crown of her head, not only was she holding a ball of flame which flared and spotted like a very small sun, not only was she dressed in the most weather-inappropriate (and dubiously-effective) partial platearmor he'd ever seen (with only a halfcloak tossed carelessly over one shoulder as a concession to the cold), not only did she have a bladed longbow almost as tall as she was fastened against her back, but she had what seemed to be the large upright ears of a blacktailed jackrabbit.
Right. Alien. No need to stare at the alien. Not the strangest morphology I've seen, though not something I was expecting...
Okay. Dun skin, with the sort of light diffusion which suggested fine, short hairs across the entire body. Dark claws. A slight split of the upper lip, a long fall of white hair down her back. Not a species he was familiar with, but definitely not an unattractive one. He pulled his attention back to the man, trying to ascertain what, if any, hierarchy existed between them.
"Much better." The man stepped forward, shrugging one side of the cloak back to expose his right arm - and an ornate blunderbuss hanging from his hip. Jack registered that as well as the fact that the gold glint from before seemed to be an inlaid breastplate, and the number of questions he had rocketed up. "Balthier," the man said, extending a hand. "Steward of the timeship Strahl, noble sky pirate and consummate leading man, at your service. This is my compatriot and fine mechanist, Fran."
Fran inclined her head.
That, Jack thought, was meant to answer a few of his questions. It failed.
This was a bad position to be in, unarmed and effectively cornered. Balthier was a walking anachronism, which pointed to one probable origin - and much as, long ago, he would have relished the chance to find a few Time Agents and corner them, con them, running into them now and with Sam in tow wasn't high on his list of good situations. "Are you Agency?"
Balthier raised an eyebrow, and withdrew his hand. "Not in the slightest. With all due respect to present company, what I've heard about the Time Agency leaves me unenthusiastic about the prospect of ever joining." He stepped toward the furnace, taking in the room by the light of Fran's flame. "You're welcome to call Mr. Tyler out of hiding, Captain. We are friends."
You'll forgive me if I'm not too eager to believe that.
"I'm sorry if I've just blanked on something," Jack said, "but I don't think I know you."
And the last time something had come up that he should have remembered but didn't, it went by the name John Thane.
"We had the fortune of meeting you some time ago," Balthier said, resting one hand on the butt of his blunderbuss. "In fact, it's thanks to you that our modest airship now finds herself fit for journeys through the very winds of time. You asked us to render assistance to a much younger and more transportationally disadvantaged version of yourself. Before you ask-" Balthier held up a hand. "You also provided us with material by which to prove this, our very unlikely story."
Jack shrugged. "I'd like to see it."
"Of course." Balthier reached just inside of his breastplate, opening what seemed to be a small pocket in his shirt and withdrawing a folded scrap of paper. He stepped forward, hand extended so as to make the transfer without pressing too close.
Jack stepped forward as well, taking the paper and watching Balthier's face - perpetually pleasant - for a reaction. There was none. He looked down at the paper, unfolded it, and...
...well, then.
He glanced back up to Balthier again before turning back to the center of the room. "Right. Sam, I can tell you that they're probably legit." He paused for a moment. "So."
It wasn't the most stirring recommendation, but it seemed to be enough. Sam nodded, mostly to himself, and tried to stand up with the dignity of a man who hadn't just been hiding behind a furnace. Jack walked back over to him, looking back to Fran and Balthier.
"I take it you don't need introductions?"
"Mr. Sam Tyler," Balthier said, dipping into a shallow bow. "I've heard wonderful stories, but I regret to say we've never met. It's a pleasure."
"Likewise," Sam said, taking his own stock of the situation and then looking to Jack for anything unspoken. Jack was still keeping his distance from the visitors, but a good deal of the wariness had dissolved. He was creasing the proof between his fingers in one hand, and Sam motioned to it, keeping his voice low. "What is it?"
"It's the shorthand equation for a stable loop paradox, signed with my initials, in my handwriting," Jack said, and then flipped it over. "On the back of-" His eyebrows raised. "Wow. A bar tab from the Can Cath that says I was having a really good night."
Sam took the paper when Jack offered it, trying to grasp the equation. He recognized an integral and what he thought was a constant or two, but a good number of the symbols didn't even derive from the Greek or Latin alphabets.
"That or I lost a really impressive number of bets," Jack muttered, turning back to Balthier. "Okay, shoot. ...please don't literally shoot me. I met you in my future and asked you to come here. You've got a timeship. Is it too much to ask to think you're taking us back to Earth?"
"We'll put you in the neighborhood," Balthier said. "There are a few problems with the ship's cloak, so I don't think you'll want us landing on top of the Hub."
"That would take some explaining," Jack agreed. "And you can tell me...?"
"Very little, unfortunately. Nothing you'd like to know. I can tell you that the Strahl is docked nearby, and it's quite a lot more comfortable than this place."
Jack raised his eyebrows. Balthier echoed the gesture. "Was that a very subtle prod to pack up and follow you?" Jack asked.
"It was. Please get your things."
Sam snorted. Jack turned, casting him an odd glance - like for a moment he wasn't certain he wasn't being conspired against.
Sam saw no reason to pretend innocence.
"Majority vote." Jack rested his hands on his hips for a moment, but it didn't last long. "Right. If you're expecting luggage..."
He picked up the knapsack they'd carried with him, glancing around the lodge. He'd left the globe light on the edge of the furnance, and picked that up; he pulled his coat on and tipped a cistern of icemelt into the pelt-smothered furnace, and aside from that, there wasn't much to consider.
"Always did travel light," Balthier remarked. He was already heading for the door, and he paused with one hand on it as though unwilling to let in the cold. "I never did decide whether that meant you were supremely resourceful or spectacularly underprepared."
"I like the first one," Jack said, jabbing the globe light in Balthier's direction.
Sam asked, "What, you never considered 'both'?"
That earned him another odd glance. Jack slung the knapsack over his shoulder and gestured for Sam to precede him; five seconds later, after Sam had had time to weigh the devil he knew against the devils he didn't, he stepped forward and tried to act as though the hesitation had never occurred.
Well, Jack thought, if Balthier had been under any illusions of meeting two people with their lives mostly together, that hadn't lasted long.
Balthier opened the door as Sam approached, and Sam flinched back from the first stab of frigid air. "Sorry," Balthier said. "I would have provided a coat if I'd known you wouldn't have any of your own." He shot a look back at Jack, who shrugged.
"Unplanned stop. We've been mostly keeping to-"
"I'm sure." Balthier stepped out after Sam, leaving Jack to catch the door on his own. "At least we're not parked far."
They weren't. Actually, they were parked at a theatrical distance - just far enough to give them an eyeful when they stepped outside.
"May I present," Balthier said, gesturing grandoisely, "the humble Strahl."
Whatever the Strahl was, Jack wasn't sure it was humble.
With backswept wings and two wide hoverpads casting a silverblue light on the tundra, it stretched back almost half the length of the Thorlgard hall, looking as though it had tumbled through the Art Nouveau movement on its way to being rendered by da Vinci. At rest it had something of the presence of a pipe organ, and something of the presence of a gun emplacement - a strange middle ground between elegance and function. Then, Jack thought, eyeing Balthier's breastplate and the intricate interlacing of Fran's armor, it was probably indicative of the culture.
Really, it had a sort of Victorian elegance in parts: engravings on the wings, etching on the boles which stretched from bow to body. For all that it was a solid presence keeping itself aloft before them, every effort had been made to make it appear light. Jack almost wished he wasn't heading on board, just so he could see it in flight.
"There's a ladder, if you can make it," Balthier was saying, and Jack looked back down. Sam was eying the ship, and his walking, while much improved since their arrival, was still noticeably unsure even before the shivering from the tundra air hit him. He swallowed and nodded.
Fran lengthened her stride, reaching the ladder and starting work on it. When they caught up with her Jack saw that she'd produced a set of ascenders from somewhere, affixing them to the outside of the ladder. It made sense, Jack supposed. Especially if they were from a culture where bows and blunderbuses were part of standard kit, assistance in getting into and out of the ship might be necessary.
"Here," Fran said, taking one of Sam's hands and placing it in a stirrup, then nudged another at his feet. "Hang on."
The rig was quite clever. Sam stepped into the stirrups and Fran stepped onto the ladder across from him, pullying him up with some mechanism Jack wasn't close enough to see. Sam glanced down as he ascended - at the tundra, at the Hall - but looked away when Balthier stepped onto the ladder. Jack followed.
Fran opened the hatch and helped Sam in. Balthier swung himself in without assistance, and Jack considered trying to follow suit. Then he glanced down at the tundra beneath them, and accepted Fran's hand. "Thanks."
The inside of the ship was only slightly more industrial. Most of the pipes and welds had still been embellished, and the halls were wider than those of some airships Jack had stepped in, though they did seem to follow the contours of the hull.
"Nice," he said, when he noticed Balthier looking at him. "I'm sure she's a lovely girl. Hover dock, time capabilities, and I'd love to see the engine-"
Jack had managed a third of a step before Fran's bladed bow was up, blocking the hall. "You are not permitted to touch the Strahl," she said, without any noticeable shift in tone. "You told us to disallow you."
Aha. Jack stopped. "Did I give any particular reason?"
"You said that it was what had happened," Fran said, "and what must happen. You bid us inform you that you would know in time, and we should not explain."
"Or it'd cause a paradox, right." Jack leaned against the wall, letting the hum of the engines shake through him. "You know, I hate ring phenomena. Oh, for the days when I thought temporal causality was still linearly dependent."
Balthier chuckled, pulling a pocketwatch from one trouser pocket and turning it over. Jack craned his neck on instinct to look for a stellar-orbit design. "Believe me," Balthier said, "you don't have the worst of it."
"Is it just me," Jack asked, "or is the engine canting up?"
Footsteps sounded from further down the hall, and Balthier waved Fran up with him. "It's not just you," he said, supremely unconcerned as he started for the bridge. His own footsteps overlapped with someone else's, someone approaching, and as he rounded the corner he called back to say "I think it's about time you met the third hand on our little time-schooner."
A moment later, the third hand rounded the corner Balthier had vanished around, though coming back their way.
Unlike Fran and Balthier, the prevailing fashion aesthetic for this one seemed to be "everything."
He was wearing, at least on an initial inspection, a coat, tunic, undershirt, sash; trousers, high boots, headscarf, tricorne; more jewelery than seemed likely for his person: rings, bracelets, beads and semiprecious stones braided into his hair, what might have been a fob watch tucked on a chain into a pocket. Distinguishing individual colors and styles might have been possible, but it would have required getting over the initial assault on the senses the entire ensemble comprised.
At least he seemed to carry it well. His approach was half a swagger and half a sashay, with a peculiar cant to his head that suggested a coyote curious as to new arrivals.
"Hello," the stranger said.
"Hello," Jack responded.
Each eyed the other in a less-than-subtle and very-nearly-lascivious way.
"So who might you be?" the other man said, sauntering forward in a way that most people didn't saunter when they had less than a meter to work with.
"If I'm crossing over the stream of events here," Jack said, "shouldn't you already know me?"
"Maybe," he said, giving Jack a smile that called to attention every last one of his teeth, "but I like this part." He put a hand forward, and it was unclear whether he intended to shake hands or admire the lapel on Jack's greatcoat. "Captain Jack Sparrow."
Jack took his hand by reflex. "Captain Jack-"
He trailed off.
"That part," Sparrow said, with a point and a grin.
"...Harkness," Jack finished. "Captain Jack Harkness."
"And your friend?" Sparrow asked, turning to Sam and running his eyes over every inch of his body in a way even Harkness found obvious. "He doesn't also share the best name in the universe, does he?"
"DI-or-DCI Sam Tyler," Jack said, putting a hand on Sam's shoulder and propelling him forward.
"Oh," Sparrow said, voice dropping. "Oh, I see." He glanced at Jack, leaning forward to whisper to, apparently, Sam's left cheekbone. His voice dropped another few decibels, becoming inexplicably grave. "I'm so sorry." He straightened up again, flicking a finger between them. "Both of you."
Jack blinked. That wasn't the most reassuring of tones, and he didn't think it was a reaction to the name. "...why?"
"Sparrow!" Further conversation was cut short as Balthier wrenched open a hatch on the ceiling, calling back down to them. Sam jumped. Jack almost did, despite himself. "You're not to tell them anything."
"Right. Copy. Anything." Sparrow brought one finger up, resting it lightly beneath his lower lip. "Mum's the word."
By now, Jack was getting more than a little unnerved. Captain Bad News Tone Of Voice was not helping.
"I'm going to cast us off," Balthier said. "Fran, if you could get our guests situated, and Sparrow, if you could do a visual check on the shutters..."
"Had my own ship once," Sparrow confided to, apparently, the world. A bit louder, he added "Aye-aye, Cap'n. Shutter check, straightaway."
And ambled off.
"We will have supper in the galley," Fran said. "Later. Until then, perhaps you would prefer to retire to your cabin."
"This is the sort of prefer that exists whether or not we'd like to see the ship, isn't it?" Jack asked. When Fran didn't so much as twitch an eyelid, he showed both hands in surrender. "I'd love to see our cabin."
"This way," Fran purred, and lead them off.
The cabin she led them to was small. Cozy, Jack would say, if he's had any illusions that the situation between himself and Sam had warmed to the point where coziness was possible. He stepped in, noting the porthole, the two hammocks, though one hung as though it had been installed as an afterthought. There was a shelf full of papers - odd, that, unless they had been vetted or contained some sort of encoded message from his future self. And one porthole.
Yeah. Cozy was probably the better alternative to cell-like.
Sam followed him in, inspecting the room with the same sort of numb half-interest he'd used to investigate chairs on Xracsis. Jack broke off to look out the porthole. Outside he could see the light on the tundra shifting; the Strahl was apparently beginning its ascent. He had to admit it was a smooth climb.
"Nice view," he said.
"The shutters will close to prevent observation of the Time Vortex," Fran said.
Jack took one last look out before turning back to her. "Good plan, but you're still on analog observer blocks? You've got to tell me to put you on quantum."
Fran didn't respond.
Jack glanced back to Sam. Sam was investigating a hammock. Jack glanced back to Fran again. "Or not."
"I trust you will be comfortable," Fran said, and her ear twitched back as the pitch of the engine changed. "I have matters to attend to in the engine room."
Of course you do. "Don't let us keep you," Jack said, but she was already on the way out, closing the door behind her. Well, I suppose that could have gone worse. He tested the door - still unlocked - and shut it again. At least we're not prisoners, inasmuch as two people stuck on a ship they can't step off can not be.
Sam took the chair, glancing out of the porthole. The ground was moving faster beneath them, the light cast from the Strahl fainter. Wouldn't be long until the shutters closed, Jack guessed.
Sam spoke. "Hospitable, aren't they?"
Jack shook his head, leaning back against the bulkhead as the first flickers of angrly blue slid across the porthole. He averted his eyes automatically, just as he heard the shutters grinding closed. "They're trying to prevent a paradox," he said. "Minimizing our contact with elements of their past timeline. Unfortunately, that can come off as being close-lipped and wanting nothing to do with us." He shrugged. "Of course, there's always the possibility that they're naturally close-lipped and want nothing to do with us, but I like my explanation better."
Sam snorted.
"It would be a concern," Jack said. "I can't honestly fault them, especially if they're relatively new to time travel. Plenty of precautions to take. ...and on that note, if you start getting cold, tell me."
Sam eyed him. "Why?"
Jack was inspecting the ceiling for something, tapping commands into his wrist device as he did. He glanced down at Sam's question, giving him a cursory smile that did nothing to reassure. "The list of things that can aggravate a case of temporal shock, even if there are no prior symptoms, is about as long as War and Peace, and I don't mean the twenty-third century re-envisioning. While I doubt I would have sent the message through if it would trigger something, you know how the best-laid plans..."
"Temporal shock," Sam said, catching the relevant part of the wayward sentence and tugging it back like a horse's bit.
Jack's reassuring look faltered for a second and snapped back to its original insincerity. "Tail effects. It takes a while to completely recover."
"And I haven't."
"Not quite." Jack looked him over, searching for signs of discomfort. "You're probably fine to travel. It's just that your timeline is still a bit... rough. You could aggravate paradoxes. If you're unlucky."
Sam shook his head. After the lodge, after Jack insisting Better safe than sorry, what logical process would have put them here? "Why did we come on board?"
"Because when your future self sends a message back in time telling you to do something, you do it," Jack said, walking to the window. With the external shutters up there was nothing to see, but he wasn't really looking for the outside world. He typed something into his wrist device, watching the screen. "At least, you do if you've gone through basic Agency Temporal Training. If you haven't, we discourage following any instructions from the future, as that, actually, that could be quite dangerous."
If this was a joke, Sam wasn't finding it funny. "Changing the past causes a paradox..."
"Got it in one." Jack turned back from the window, the lights on his wrist device flickering faster than Sam had ever seen them. "We're in a paradox right now. Are you all right?"
Sam froze.
He couldn't remember much of the Time Dog attack - not the one that put him in a fugue for however many weeks. Just noise and violence and pain and a long time spent trapped under his own unconsciousness, and then coming to as though he didn't know how the world worked any more. Had there been warning then? Had he been able to sense them coming?
"Sam," Jack said. "How do you feel."
Sam looked up. "Fine. For now."
"Stable loop paradox. Like I wrote myself on the back of a bar tab. There are two kinds of paradox," Jack said, watching Sam a bit too closely. "Stable and unstable. Almost all stable paradoxes are naturally-occurring: random structures which form themselves out of the chaos of naturally-progressing time. Oh, and, by the way, if you thought time was linear or even composed of strands, abandon that idea right now."
"Jelly," Sam said, taking the chair and pulling it away from the desk. Every time he thought he might understand as much of time travel as he'd need to, time travel and a growing headache proved him wrong.
Jack tilted his head to one side. "In Miadok's defense, it's not the worst metaphor I've heard. There's something called a loop paradox, in which two, at minimum, events at different points on the timeline create the environment the other needs to occur. A can't happen without B being realized fact, B can't happen without A being realized fact, and if you're the sort of person who obsesses over chicken eggs, you probably feel right at home about now." He exhaled, trying to sit back on the sill of the porthole. "Basically, you might see them as sequential, but if you turn them ninety degrees, you'll see they're simultaneous. A set of circumstance got slipped into the timestream sideways. Still all right?"
Sam brought a hand up to cradle his forehead. Jack grimaced.
"Sam?"
Sam shook his head. After a moment he pulled his palm away from his head and looked up, expression taut. "You know, I tried to change the past once."
Jack tilted his head, eyebrows raised and inquisitive-incredulous.
Sam eyed him. The least Jack could do was not look at him like he'd taken leave of his senses. That was one thing he hadn't missed in leaving the 1970s, along with paper filing systems, the food, and Gene's unique approach to period slang. "I didn't know it would unleash time dogs at the time," he said. "And, to be fair, I thought I was hallucinating the entire decade from a coma in 2006."
One of Jack's eyes squinted. "O...kay," he said, like something wasn't computing.
Sam stared back. He could count the number of times he'd seen Jack bewildered by something on one hand, and he was sure he hadn't said anything that unusual. "What?"
"If you thought you were in a coma," Jack said, "what good would - never mind." He looked back down at his wrist device, then looked up at Sam again. "How, exactly, did-?"
Sam looked away. This was the problem with smalltalk; the topics which were usually at the forefront of his mind were topics he didn't, on balance, want to discuss. "I tried - never mind."
He could practically hear Jack wondering whether to press.
"I tried to stop something that had happened when I was a child," Sam said, trying to make it sound casual. It didn't work, but when he looked at Jack, Jack looked less unconvinced and more on the verge of realizing something he didn't want to. "...what?"
"There's something really weird about your trip through time," Jack said.
Sam stared. He bit back an instinctive response that travelling through time was really weird in its own right; Jack likely wouldn't think so, and the way he phrased it made it seem like he was referring to something else entirely. Which Sam... still couldn't identify. "It wouldn't happen to be the fact that I was hit by a car in 2006 and ended up in 1973, would it?"
Jack opened his mouth, and it hung open for a moment. "...well, that's weird too," he conceded. "No; what I mean is, you spend a year living practically on top of your own past, you actually set out to change it on at least one high-impact occasion, and yet for all that year, not a hint of a paradox."
Sam reached for an explanation for that, shuffling through everything he'd learned about time travel. Loop paradoxes and unstable paradoxes and temporal cushions and safe periods and capsules - nothing explained it. Every time, every time he thought he knew enough to inform even his immediate circumstances, something in the universe proved him wrong.
If he ever met Stephen Hawking, the two of them were going to have a serious talk about things A Brief History of Time hadn't seen fit to mention.
"What does that mean?" he asked, fixing Jack in a look. Jack nodded - he'd picked up on the unspoken contract. Sam wanted to know, he'd teach.
"It means that your timeline was fixed," he said. "It was - well, it was a fact." He grimaced. "No possible way to change it. It happens sometimes; no rhyme or reason. Well, mostly. ...that we can tell. Usually it's high-impact events - Vesuvius burying Pompeii, the discovery of the Astropyle in Giza in 2013, the fall of the Peluchi in the Scarlet System. But sometimes it's bird smashing into a window or a star going nova earlier than you'd think or... something that doesn't have any obvious far-reaching effect. Something random."
A chill counted its way down Sam's vertebrae. "Or my timeline."
"Yeah, but I've never seen a fix that general," Jack said. "One or two events, a few hours between them, maybe a person's physical existence. Providing a paradox lock for an entire timeline, all the events within... that's statistically improbable." A lopsided grin formed and faded on his lips. "You all right? You look a little pale."
"I'm f-" Sam started, but didn't finish.
No. He wasn't fine. He was going tense, and trying not to shiver. He was waiting for a sound...
"I feel cold."
Alarm shot through Jack's face, vanishing in a moment into an expression Sam knew too well because he'd worn it too often. That was a hostage-situation look, a live-gun look, a look saying No one make any sudden movements and we might get out alive. He stood slowly, glancing down at his wrist device. "Right. Stay calm and think of something boring."
"Something boring!" Sam demanded. He was standing inside one paradox with, as far as he knew, another about to start in on him, with what he felt were legitimate questions about the nature of his own timeline, and Jack was saying-
And the temperature dropped again. He pulled in breath, a tremor running between his shoulderblades. All he remembered of time dogs was the cold, white fur or bone, teeth, and-
"Give me your wrist," Jack said.
Sam pulled his attention back. Why do you-? he thought, then thought it best not to waste time in thinking, and offered his wrist. Jack pulled the wrist device off and transferred it to Sam, and the edge to the air warmed away. Jack typed something in and flipped the cover down over its screen, giving Sam a fleeting, but reassuring, smile.
"I swear, if this keeps up I'm going to have to write you up a pamphlet," he said. "And I warn you, I'm not known for my pamphlet-writing skills."
Well, so long as it was a situation where Jack could still joke.
Sam closed his eyes, wrestled his breathing back down to normal. "I seem to remember this being a stopgap measure," he said, controlling the words and trying not to let his attention slip back to holding himself up against the side of a car on an empty street in Manchester, with a cold snap to the air and the howling of dogs in the distance. "How long?"
Jack put a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched away. Jack pulled his hands back, showing palms apologetically. "Paradoxes suffer the observer effect," he said. "Examining one set of temporal anomalies while standing in another one isn't a great idea."
That spiked up the rate of Sam's breath again. "You mean I can cause a paradox from what I'm thinking about?"
"We're on a timeship traversing the Time Vortex inside a loop paradox," Jack said. "Those are pretty big aggravating factors. We'd usually have nothing to worry about."
"But we do now," Sam snapped. He wasn't interested in platitudes and reassurances; he needed to know, in that moment, how much threat they were under. If they were racing time through time to outrun the time dogs, if that was another drop in temperature he felt creeping along his collar-
"Any ship like this would have certain safeguards," Jack started.
"Jack-!"
Jack stopped, with a look Sam didn't want to read. Grim. "Yes, we are in danger."
Sam closed his eyes.
Inhale. Exhale. Despite the fact that every new problem brought with it another thing he didn't know, he could handle this. It was just a matter of keeping his wits about him.
Exhale. "That was what I needed to know."
He looked again and Jack was smiling, though the expression was watered-down past the point where it could be considered genuine. "Don't worry about this. You'll get your sea-legs."
"I'm not sure I want them," Sam said, turning to find the chair he'd been sitting in. He was tired, suddenly; too tired to stand. "You know, I used to be fascinated by time travel as a concept."
Jack's expression fell. "...it's not all like this."
"Enough of it is." He sank down, looked back up at Jack. The wristband was still warm from Jack's skin, and he looked down at the leather face of its cover. He'd thought 1973 was mad. At least there- "-I don't know any of the rules," he said, turning over his wrist. "There's too much I don't understand. I can't just exist beholden to you."
There was a moment when neither one of them said anything, and Sam looked up to find Jack watching him. "I don't consider you beholden to me."
Sam leaned back, his expression acrid. "And it doesn't matter to you that I do?"
Jack's expression cooled.
After a moment he looked down, shaking his head. An awkward silence settled, and one of them might have even found it uncomfortable enough to say something except that a tremor went through the ship.
Sam swore Jack found a way to trigger these things.
"Okay, that's not good," Jack said, swinging toward the door. "And that's not just on you."
Sam stood. That was one thing to be said about adrenaline - it was doing a good job of chasing back the emotional exhaustion. "Jack?"
Jack shook his head, then grabbed the door's threshold as the ship shook again. "Now I feel it," he said, then looked back with a tight, fake smile. "Hang on. I need to talk to Balthier about the temperature control on his ship."
-
By the time Jack made it up to the bridge the quakes hitting the Strahl had grown so that they'd already thrown him from his feet once. A warning klaxon was droning in the hallways. "So, what's going on?"
"We're making an emergency stop." Balthier leaned across the console, fingers brushing across switches with what looked like too little force to toggle them. Still, the Strahl was responding; Jack could hear it in the cant of the engines, feel it in the shudder of the deckplates. "I take it you noticed that we're running into some turbulance-!"
The deck listed, and Jack pushed his hand against the wall to brace himself. "Yeah, this tends to happen when you're flying through a paradox. Should I make a note to tell you?"
"Well, we already know you haven't, so I'm not sure I see the point," Balthier said, hurrying to correct the roll of the craft. "I'm reading two likely worlds in this temporal neighborhood. Care to select one?"
Jack jumped forward, catching the back of the flight chair and reading the data off the screen. "Don't recognize either of them," he said. "Let's go with two."
Balthier made the selection. "Why two?"
"What, you'd prefer one?"
"I was curious as to whether you knew something I didn't. Sit down, will you?"
Jack held on through another tremor, then slipped toward the second chair. He dropped into it, putting his feet up against the console to brace himself. "We don't seem to have a relationship founded on the free exchange of information, do we?"
"With you?" Balthier scoffed. "Hardly even an option, is that?"
Jack went from insouciance to stung in almost exactly the time it took for the Strahl to buck, nearly throwing him from his perch. That was a problem; he rather liked the way he'd been posed.
"Hold on." Balthier keyed another sequence and the blinds on the viewport opened, revealing the last angry scraps of Time Vortex boiling out into a momentary deep navy which burned away into a turbulant flame-gold. What had been isolated bumps and shudders now seized the ship, tearing it down in a rising roar. "We're out of the crisis point. Now pray we survive entry into atmosphere."
Jack shot a sharp look. "This ship doesn't-"
"It's not built for it, no." He hit something, adjusting the pitch of descent, and the heat of the atmosphere yellowed. "Which would you prefer, Jack, lower friction and greater speed, or not crashing into the planet, but burning up instead?"
"...I'm going to take the controls now," Jack said.
Balthier gestured at the copilot console. "By all means."
Jack dropped his feet and leaned forward, scanning the controls and making an educated guess about how to dive in. Sure, it wasn't a chula ship, but so long as he could work out pitch, yaw, and roll, and maybe something really fancy like an air brake, Balthier would be free to handle everything more complex.
"Here's hoping we don't kill us all," Jack muttered, and the world reared up to meet them.
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke )
Sliding Scale of Slash: Implied, Jack Harkness/Sam Tyler
Rating: T (I know; shocking)
Beta Warning: Unbeta'd.
Fandoms: Life on Mars; Torchwood; Final Fantasy VIII; Final Fantasy XII, Pirates of the Caribbean
Summary: A rescue arrives, fashionably late.
In the unyielding darkness of the Trabian tundra, with the fact that Jack hadn't really slept in more than nods and spurts since the day before the Game Station, night and day in the Thorlgard lodge were determined almost entirely by Sam's sleep schedule. Jack's wrist device kept track of the literal time, but that lost its meaning when nothing about the outside world changed.
At least, nothing changed until a bright light and a fierce wind descended from the heavens in a way that would have had the Thorlgard claiming God.
Sam had been asleep sitting down, knees pulled up against his chest, back to the furnace. He snapped awake when the walls shook, turbulence and air pressure snuffing out the lamps. Jack was on his feet in a matter of seconds, heading to a covered position just inside the door.
Engines. He could identify that much - make and model were beyond him, though to be fair, there were only one or two ships he could identify by the sound they made when landing. He inched the door open, glancing out at the pattern of lights cast across the tundra, then opened the door enough to see if he could get a visual on the ship.
Unfamiliar design, though if this building were an indication of the level of technology, it couldn't be local. And it couldn't be the Centran's local holy disaster unless B-Garden's library had it entirely wrong or he'd really managed to fuck something up by teleporting here.
...it could have happened. Given the amount of flux the timeline had been in, it was possible some effect had travelled back far enough to jigger this part of the timestream, too. In which case they were both dead, Sam somewhat more permanently than him, and so he should probably find a way to avert that.
"I think we're being invaded," he said, crossing back to the furnace and grabbing the first thing handy - a heavy pelt - to throw over the low coals. "You know, that hell book really didn't mention anything about airships or spacecraft..."
"The fact that a book on hell is our only guide to living in this era," Sam began, and then Jack's hand was on his shoulder, steering him toward the far side of the furnace.
"Keep down," Jack said. "Stay quiet."
Sam shut his mouth. After a moment, he cast Jack a dark look. "Is hiding behind the furnace going to help?"
"Well, it'll give us a little advance warning if we need to teleport."
Sam mouthed "Ah," and shut up.
Nothing happened immediately. The noise from outside quieted, the light went down, and there was a stretch of silence before the first footsteps - loud only against the lodge's silence - could be heard. Jack shifted, trying to find a spot where he could watch the door without sticking too much of himself out of cover.
The door creaked open to admit their invasion force - which seemed to be one man, taking his time and idly complaining:
"...and really, I can appreciate the differences in variant suns, but once you've come to a point where the water turns to stone, I think there's no conclusion but to say that it's more than unreasonably cold."
A second figure drifted in through the door, taller but much quieter. Only soft taps announced their footsteps.
The first one sighed, closing the door and tying it shut. "Not the most hospitable of places, then, is this?" He turned, feet scuffing the ground. "And dark. Are we sure we've got the coordinates correct?"
"They are here," the second said, her voice lilting over a strange accent. The sounds had been softened to almost a purr, and there was something more animal than human about the rhythm. Still, the overall effect was one of pronounced intelligence; everything was clearly enunciated under the roll of the purr, and the tone was soft and considering. "I can hear them."
So much for stealth.
Jack stood, pressing his palm against Sam's shoulder. Stay down. He stepped around the furnace, trying to make out any details in the darkness. "I wasn't expecting visitors."
The male voice chuckled; even that was a cultured sound, carried more by tone than quantifiable markers. Aristocracy, Jack guessed. Not many people could pull off that sort of genial assumed superiority. What sort of aristocracy, and from where, he had no idea. "There we are. No, you wouldn't have been. Don't worry; we're friends." He shifted - Jack could hear the rustle of fabric. "Fran, it really is a bit dark to these eyes; if you could-"
There was a noise like a match being struck, and Jack winced away from the sudden globe of light which had materialized just above the woman's cupped palm. It only took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but...
But when they did, they raised a lot of questions.
The man was definitely foreign - whatever that meant, here - with a heavy fur cloak which revealed glimpses of gold inlay on whatever he was wearing beneath it; blonde, tanned and shorthaired with an impressive collection of small earrings in various shades of precious metal, but not, after that assessment, terribly interesting. It was the woman who caught Jack's attention, because not only was she at least half a head taller than he was at the crown of her head, not only was she holding a ball of flame which flared and spotted like a very small sun, not only was she dressed in the most weather-inappropriate (and dubiously-effective) partial platearmor he'd ever seen (with only a halfcloak tossed carelessly over one shoulder as a concession to the cold), not only did she have a bladed longbow almost as tall as she was fastened against her back, but she had what seemed to be the large upright ears of a blacktailed jackrabbit.
Right. Alien. No need to stare at the alien. Not the strangest morphology I've seen, though not something I was expecting...
Okay. Dun skin, with the sort of light diffusion which suggested fine, short hairs across the entire body. Dark claws. A slight split of the upper lip, a long fall of white hair down her back. Not a species he was familiar with, but definitely not an unattractive one. He pulled his attention back to the man, trying to ascertain what, if any, hierarchy existed between them.
"Much better." The man stepped forward, shrugging one side of the cloak back to expose his right arm - and an ornate blunderbuss hanging from his hip. Jack registered that as well as the fact that the gold glint from before seemed to be an inlaid breastplate, and the number of questions he had rocketed up. "Balthier," the man said, extending a hand. "Steward of the timeship Strahl, noble sky pirate and consummate leading man, at your service. This is my compatriot and fine mechanist, Fran."
Fran inclined her head.
That, Jack thought, was meant to answer a few of his questions. It failed.
This was a bad position to be in, unarmed and effectively cornered. Balthier was a walking anachronism, which pointed to one probable origin - and much as, long ago, he would have relished the chance to find a few Time Agents and corner them, con them, running into them now and with Sam in tow wasn't high on his list of good situations. "Are you Agency?"
Balthier raised an eyebrow, and withdrew his hand. "Not in the slightest. With all due respect to present company, what I've heard about the Time Agency leaves me unenthusiastic about the prospect of ever joining." He stepped toward the furnace, taking in the room by the light of Fran's flame. "You're welcome to call Mr. Tyler out of hiding, Captain. We are friends."
You'll forgive me if I'm not too eager to believe that.
"I'm sorry if I've just blanked on something," Jack said, "but I don't think I know you."
And the last time something had come up that he should have remembered but didn't, it went by the name John Thane.
"We had the fortune of meeting you some time ago," Balthier said, resting one hand on the butt of his blunderbuss. "In fact, it's thanks to you that our modest airship now finds herself fit for journeys through the very winds of time. You asked us to render assistance to a much younger and more transportationally disadvantaged version of yourself. Before you ask-" Balthier held up a hand. "You also provided us with material by which to prove this, our very unlikely story."
Jack shrugged. "I'd like to see it."
"Of course." Balthier reached just inside of his breastplate, opening what seemed to be a small pocket in his shirt and withdrawing a folded scrap of paper. He stepped forward, hand extended so as to make the transfer without pressing too close.
Jack stepped forward as well, taking the paper and watching Balthier's face - perpetually pleasant - for a reaction. There was none. He looked down at the paper, unfolded it, and...
...well, then.
He glanced back up to Balthier again before turning back to the center of the room. "Right. Sam, I can tell you that they're probably legit." He paused for a moment. "So."
It wasn't the most stirring recommendation, but it seemed to be enough. Sam nodded, mostly to himself, and tried to stand up with the dignity of a man who hadn't just been hiding behind a furnace. Jack walked back over to him, looking back to Fran and Balthier.
"I take it you don't need introductions?"
"Mr. Sam Tyler," Balthier said, dipping into a shallow bow. "I've heard wonderful stories, but I regret to say we've never met. It's a pleasure."
"Likewise," Sam said, taking his own stock of the situation and then looking to Jack for anything unspoken. Jack was still keeping his distance from the visitors, but a good deal of the wariness had dissolved. He was creasing the proof between his fingers in one hand, and Sam motioned to it, keeping his voice low. "What is it?"
"It's the shorthand equation for a stable loop paradox, signed with my initials, in my handwriting," Jack said, and then flipped it over. "On the back of-" His eyebrows raised. "Wow. A bar tab from the Can Cath that says I was having a really good night."
Sam took the paper when Jack offered it, trying to grasp the equation. He recognized an integral and what he thought was a constant or two, but a good number of the symbols didn't even derive from the Greek or Latin alphabets.
"That or I lost a really impressive number of bets," Jack muttered, turning back to Balthier. "Okay, shoot. ...please don't literally shoot me. I met you in my future and asked you to come here. You've got a timeship. Is it too much to ask to think you're taking us back to Earth?"
"We'll put you in the neighborhood," Balthier said. "There are a few problems with the ship's cloak, so I don't think you'll want us landing on top of the Hub."
"That would take some explaining," Jack agreed. "And you can tell me...?"
"Very little, unfortunately. Nothing you'd like to know. I can tell you that the Strahl is docked nearby, and it's quite a lot more comfortable than this place."
Jack raised his eyebrows. Balthier echoed the gesture. "Was that a very subtle prod to pack up and follow you?" Jack asked.
"It was. Please get your things."
Sam snorted. Jack turned, casting him an odd glance - like for a moment he wasn't certain he wasn't being conspired against.
Sam saw no reason to pretend innocence.
"Majority vote." Jack rested his hands on his hips for a moment, but it didn't last long. "Right. If you're expecting luggage..."
He picked up the knapsack they'd carried with him, glancing around the lodge. He'd left the globe light on the edge of the furnance, and picked that up; he pulled his coat on and tipped a cistern of icemelt into the pelt-smothered furnace, and aside from that, there wasn't much to consider.
"Always did travel light," Balthier remarked. He was already heading for the door, and he paused with one hand on it as though unwilling to let in the cold. "I never did decide whether that meant you were supremely resourceful or spectacularly underprepared."
"I like the first one," Jack said, jabbing the globe light in Balthier's direction.
Sam asked, "What, you never considered 'both'?"
That earned him another odd glance. Jack slung the knapsack over his shoulder and gestured for Sam to precede him; five seconds later, after Sam had had time to weigh the devil he knew against the devils he didn't, he stepped forward and tried to act as though the hesitation had never occurred.
Well, Jack thought, if Balthier had been under any illusions of meeting two people with their lives mostly together, that hadn't lasted long.
Balthier opened the door as Sam approached, and Sam flinched back from the first stab of frigid air. "Sorry," Balthier said. "I would have provided a coat if I'd known you wouldn't have any of your own." He shot a look back at Jack, who shrugged.
"Unplanned stop. We've been mostly keeping to-"
"I'm sure." Balthier stepped out after Sam, leaving Jack to catch the door on his own. "At least we're not parked far."
They weren't. Actually, they were parked at a theatrical distance - just far enough to give them an eyeful when they stepped outside.
"May I present," Balthier said, gesturing grandoisely, "the humble Strahl."
Whatever the Strahl was, Jack wasn't sure it was humble.
With backswept wings and two wide hoverpads casting a silverblue light on the tundra, it stretched back almost half the length of the Thorlgard hall, looking as though it had tumbled through the Art Nouveau movement on its way to being rendered by da Vinci. At rest it had something of the presence of a pipe organ, and something of the presence of a gun emplacement - a strange middle ground between elegance and function. Then, Jack thought, eyeing Balthier's breastplate and the intricate interlacing of Fran's armor, it was probably indicative of the culture.
Really, it had a sort of Victorian elegance in parts: engravings on the wings, etching on the boles which stretched from bow to body. For all that it was a solid presence keeping itself aloft before them, every effort had been made to make it appear light. Jack almost wished he wasn't heading on board, just so he could see it in flight.
"There's a ladder, if you can make it," Balthier was saying, and Jack looked back down. Sam was eying the ship, and his walking, while much improved since their arrival, was still noticeably unsure even before the shivering from the tundra air hit him. He swallowed and nodded.
Fran lengthened her stride, reaching the ladder and starting work on it. When they caught up with her Jack saw that she'd produced a set of ascenders from somewhere, affixing them to the outside of the ladder. It made sense, Jack supposed. Especially if they were from a culture where bows and blunderbuses were part of standard kit, assistance in getting into and out of the ship might be necessary.
"Here," Fran said, taking one of Sam's hands and placing it in a stirrup, then nudged another at his feet. "Hang on."
The rig was quite clever. Sam stepped into the stirrups and Fran stepped onto the ladder across from him, pullying him up with some mechanism Jack wasn't close enough to see. Sam glanced down as he ascended - at the tundra, at the Hall - but looked away when Balthier stepped onto the ladder. Jack followed.
Fran opened the hatch and helped Sam in. Balthier swung himself in without assistance, and Jack considered trying to follow suit. Then he glanced down at the tundra beneath them, and accepted Fran's hand. "Thanks."
The inside of the ship was only slightly more industrial. Most of the pipes and welds had still been embellished, and the halls were wider than those of some airships Jack had stepped in, though they did seem to follow the contours of the hull.
"Nice," he said, when he noticed Balthier looking at him. "I'm sure she's a lovely girl. Hover dock, time capabilities, and I'd love to see the engine-"
Jack had managed a third of a step before Fran's bladed bow was up, blocking the hall. "You are not permitted to touch the Strahl," she said, without any noticeable shift in tone. "You told us to disallow you."
Aha. Jack stopped. "Did I give any particular reason?"
"You said that it was what had happened," Fran said, "and what must happen. You bid us inform you that you would know in time, and we should not explain."
"Or it'd cause a paradox, right." Jack leaned against the wall, letting the hum of the engines shake through him. "You know, I hate ring phenomena. Oh, for the days when I thought temporal causality was still linearly dependent."
Balthier chuckled, pulling a pocketwatch from one trouser pocket and turning it over. Jack craned his neck on instinct to look for a stellar-orbit design. "Believe me," Balthier said, "you don't have the worst of it."
"Is it just me," Jack asked, "or is the engine canting up?"
Footsteps sounded from further down the hall, and Balthier waved Fran up with him. "It's not just you," he said, supremely unconcerned as he started for the bridge. His own footsteps overlapped with someone else's, someone approaching, and as he rounded the corner he called back to say "I think it's about time you met the third hand on our little time-schooner."
A moment later, the third hand rounded the corner Balthier had vanished around, though coming back their way.
Unlike Fran and Balthier, the prevailing fashion aesthetic for this one seemed to be "everything."
He was wearing, at least on an initial inspection, a coat, tunic, undershirt, sash; trousers, high boots, headscarf, tricorne; more jewelery than seemed likely for his person: rings, bracelets, beads and semiprecious stones braided into his hair, what might have been a fob watch tucked on a chain into a pocket. Distinguishing individual colors and styles might have been possible, but it would have required getting over the initial assault on the senses the entire ensemble comprised.
At least he seemed to carry it well. His approach was half a swagger and half a sashay, with a peculiar cant to his head that suggested a coyote curious as to new arrivals.
"Hello," the stranger said.
"Hello," Jack responded.
Each eyed the other in a less-than-subtle and very-nearly-lascivious way.
"So who might you be?" the other man said, sauntering forward in a way that most people didn't saunter when they had less than a meter to work with.
"If I'm crossing over the stream of events here," Jack said, "shouldn't you already know me?"
"Maybe," he said, giving Jack a smile that called to attention every last one of his teeth, "but I like this part." He put a hand forward, and it was unclear whether he intended to shake hands or admire the lapel on Jack's greatcoat. "Captain Jack Sparrow."
Jack took his hand by reflex. "Captain Jack-"
He trailed off.
"That part," Sparrow said, with a point and a grin.
"...Harkness," Jack finished. "Captain Jack Harkness."
"And your friend?" Sparrow asked, turning to Sam and running his eyes over every inch of his body in a way even Harkness found obvious. "He doesn't also share the best name in the universe, does he?"
"DI-or-DCI Sam Tyler," Jack said, putting a hand on Sam's shoulder and propelling him forward.
"Oh," Sparrow said, voice dropping. "Oh, I see." He glanced at Jack, leaning forward to whisper to, apparently, Sam's left cheekbone. His voice dropped another few decibels, becoming inexplicably grave. "I'm so sorry." He straightened up again, flicking a finger between them. "Both of you."
Jack blinked. That wasn't the most reassuring of tones, and he didn't think it was a reaction to the name. "...why?"
"Sparrow!" Further conversation was cut short as Balthier wrenched open a hatch on the ceiling, calling back down to them. Sam jumped. Jack almost did, despite himself. "You're not to tell them anything."
"Right. Copy. Anything." Sparrow brought one finger up, resting it lightly beneath his lower lip. "Mum's the word."
By now, Jack was getting more than a little unnerved. Captain Bad News Tone Of Voice was not helping.
"I'm going to cast us off," Balthier said. "Fran, if you could get our guests situated, and Sparrow, if you could do a visual check on the shutters..."
"Had my own ship once," Sparrow confided to, apparently, the world. A bit louder, he added "Aye-aye, Cap'n. Shutter check, straightaway."
And ambled off.
"We will have supper in the galley," Fran said. "Later. Until then, perhaps you would prefer to retire to your cabin."
"This is the sort of prefer that exists whether or not we'd like to see the ship, isn't it?" Jack asked. When Fran didn't so much as twitch an eyelid, he showed both hands in surrender. "I'd love to see our cabin."
"This way," Fran purred, and lead them off.
The cabin she led them to was small. Cozy, Jack would say, if he's had any illusions that the situation between himself and Sam had warmed to the point where coziness was possible. He stepped in, noting the porthole, the two hammocks, though one hung as though it had been installed as an afterthought. There was a shelf full of papers - odd, that, unless they had been vetted or contained some sort of encoded message from his future self. And one porthole.
Yeah. Cozy was probably the better alternative to cell-like.
Sam followed him in, inspecting the room with the same sort of numb half-interest he'd used to investigate chairs on Xracsis. Jack broke off to look out the porthole. Outside he could see the light on the tundra shifting; the Strahl was apparently beginning its ascent. He had to admit it was a smooth climb.
"Nice view," he said.
"The shutters will close to prevent observation of the Time Vortex," Fran said.
Jack took one last look out before turning back to her. "Good plan, but you're still on analog observer blocks? You've got to tell me to put you on quantum."
Fran didn't respond.
Jack glanced back to Sam. Sam was investigating a hammock. Jack glanced back to Fran again. "Or not."
"I trust you will be comfortable," Fran said, and her ear twitched back as the pitch of the engine changed. "I have matters to attend to in the engine room."
Of course you do. "Don't let us keep you," Jack said, but she was already on the way out, closing the door behind her. Well, I suppose that could have gone worse. He tested the door - still unlocked - and shut it again. At least we're not prisoners, inasmuch as two people stuck on a ship they can't step off can not be.
Sam took the chair, glancing out of the porthole. The ground was moving faster beneath them, the light cast from the Strahl fainter. Wouldn't be long until the shutters closed, Jack guessed.
Sam spoke. "Hospitable, aren't they?"
Jack shook his head, leaning back against the bulkhead as the first flickers of angrly blue slid across the porthole. He averted his eyes automatically, just as he heard the shutters grinding closed. "They're trying to prevent a paradox," he said. "Minimizing our contact with elements of their past timeline. Unfortunately, that can come off as being close-lipped and wanting nothing to do with us." He shrugged. "Of course, there's always the possibility that they're naturally close-lipped and want nothing to do with us, but I like my explanation better."
Sam snorted.
"It would be a concern," Jack said. "I can't honestly fault them, especially if they're relatively new to time travel. Plenty of precautions to take. ...and on that note, if you start getting cold, tell me."
Sam eyed him. "Why?"
Jack was inspecting the ceiling for something, tapping commands into his wrist device as he did. He glanced down at Sam's question, giving him a cursory smile that did nothing to reassure. "The list of things that can aggravate a case of temporal shock, even if there are no prior symptoms, is about as long as War and Peace, and I don't mean the twenty-third century re-envisioning. While I doubt I would have sent the message through if it would trigger something, you know how the best-laid plans..."
"Temporal shock," Sam said, catching the relevant part of the wayward sentence and tugging it back like a horse's bit.
Jack's reassuring look faltered for a second and snapped back to its original insincerity. "Tail effects. It takes a while to completely recover."
"And I haven't."
"Not quite." Jack looked him over, searching for signs of discomfort. "You're probably fine to travel. It's just that your timeline is still a bit... rough. You could aggravate paradoxes. If you're unlucky."
Sam shook his head. After the lodge, after Jack insisting Better safe than sorry, what logical process would have put them here? "Why did we come on board?"
"Because when your future self sends a message back in time telling you to do something, you do it," Jack said, walking to the window. With the external shutters up there was nothing to see, but he wasn't really looking for the outside world. He typed something into his wrist device, watching the screen. "At least, you do if you've gone through basic Agency Temporal Training. If you haven't, we discourage following any instructions from the future, as that, actually, that could be quite dangerous."
If this was a joke, Sam wasn't finding it funny. "Changing the past causes a paradox..."
"Got it in one." Jack turned back from the window, the lights on his wrist device flickering faster than Sam had ever seen them. "We're in a paradox right now. Are you all right?"
Sam froze.
He couldn't remember much of the Time Dog attack - not the one that put him in a fugue for however many weeks. Just noise and violence and pain and a long time spent trapped under his own unconsciousness, and then coming to as though he didn't know how the world worked any more. Had there been warning then? Had he been able to sense them coming?
"Sam," Jack said. "How do you feel."
Sam looked up. "Fine. For now."
"Stable loop paradox. Like I wrote myself on the back of a bar tab. There are two kinds of paradox," Jack said, watching Sam a bit too closely. "Stable and unstable. Almost all stable paradoxes are naturally-occurring: random structures which form themselves out of the chaos of naturally-progressing time. Oh, and, by the way, if you thought time was linear or even composed of strands, abandon that idea right now."
"Jelly," Sam said, taking the chair and pulling it away from the desk. Every time he thought he might understand as much of time travel as he'd need to, time travel and a growing headache proved him wrong.
Jack tilted his head to one side. "In Miadok's defense, it's not the worst metaphor I've heard. There's something called a loop paradox, in which two, at minimum, events at different points on the timeline create the environment the other needs to occur. A can't happen without B being realized fact, B can't happen without A being realized fact, and if you're the sort of person who obsesses over chicken eggs, you probably feel right at home about now." He exhaled, trying to sit back on the sill of the porthole. "Basically, you might see them as sequential, but if you turn them ninety degrees, you'll see they're simultaneous. A set of circumstance got slipped into the timestream sideways. Still all right?"
Sam brought a hand up to cradle his forehead. Jack grimaced.
"Sam?"
Sam shook his head. After a moment he pulled his palm away from his head and looked up, expression taut. "You know, I tried to change the past once."
Jack tilted his head, eyebrows raised and inquisitive-incredulous.
Sam eyed him. The least Jack could do was not look at him like he'd taken leave of his senses. That was one thing he hadn't missed in leaving the 1970s, along with paper filing systems, the food, and Gene's unique approach to period slang. "I didn't know it would unleash time dogs at the time," he said. "And, to be fair, I thought I was hallucinating the entire decade from a coma in 2006."
One of Jack's eyes squinted. "O...kay," he said, like something wasn't computing.
Sam stared back. He could count the number of times he'd seen Jack bewildered by something on one hand, and he was sure he hadn't said anything that unusual. "What?"
"If you thought you were in a coma," Jack said, "what good would - never mind." He looked back down at his wrist device, then looked up at Sam again. "How, exactly, did-?"
Sam looked away. This was the problem with smalltalk; the topics which were usually at the forefront of his mind were topics he didn't, on balance, want to discuss. "I tried - never mind."
He could practically hear Jack wondering whether to press.
"I tried to stop something that had happened when I was a child," Sam said, trying to make it sound casual. It didn't work, but when he looked at Jack, Jack looked less unconvinced and more on the verge of realizing something he didn't want to. "...what?"
"There's something really weird about your trip through time," Jack said.
Sam stared. He bit back an instinctive response that travelling through time was really weird in its own right; Jack likely wouldn't think so, and the way he phrased it made it seem like he was referring to something else entirely. Which Sam... still couldn't identify. "It wouldn't happen to be the fact that I was hit by a car in 2006 and ended up in 1973, would it?"
Jack opened his mouth, and it hung open for a moment. "...well, that's weird too," he conceded. "No; what I mean is, you spend a year living practically on top of your own past, you actually set out to change it on at least one high-impact occasion, and yet for all that year, not a hint of a paradox."
Sam reached for an explanation for that, shuffling through everything he'd learned about time travel. Loop paradoxes and unstable paradoxes and temporal cushions and safe periods and capsules - nothing explained it. Every time, every time he thought he knew enough to inform even his immediate circumstances, something in the universe proved him wrong.
If he ever met Stephen Hawking, the two of them were going to have a serious talk about things A Brief History of Time hadn't seen fit to mention.
"What does that mean?" he asked, fixing Jack in a look. Jack nodded - he'd picked up on the unspoken contract. Sam wanted to know, he'd teach.
"It means that your timeline was fixed," he said. "It was - well, it was a fact." He grimaced. "No possible way to change it. It happens sometimes; no rhyme or reason. Well, mostly. ...that we can tell. Usually it's high-impact events - Vesuvius burying Pompeii, the discovery of the Astropyle in Giza in 2013, the fall of the Peluchi in the Scarlet System. But sometimes it's bird smashing into a window or a star going nova earlier than you'd think or... something that doesn't have any obvious far-reaching effect. Something random."
A chill counted its way down Sam's vertebrae. "Or my timeline."
"Yeah, but I've never seen a fix that general," Jack said. "One or two events, a few hours between them, maybe a person's physical existence. Providing a paradox lock for an entire timeline, all the events within... that's statistically improbable." A lopsided grin formed and faded on his lips. "You all right? You look a little pale."
"I'm f-" Sam started, but didn't finish.
No. He wasn't fine. He was going tense, and trying not to shiver. He was waiting for a sound...
"I feel cold."
Alarm shot through Jack's face, vanishing in a moment into an expression Sam knew too well because he'd worn it too often. That was a hostage-situation look, a live-gun look, a look saying No one make any sudden movements and we might get out alive. He stood slowly, glancing down at his wrist device. "Right. Stay calm and think of something boring."
"Something boring!" Sam demanded. He was standing inside one paradox with, as far as he knew, another about to start in on him, with what he felt were legitimate questions about the nature of his own timeline, and Jack was saying-
And the temperature dropped again. He pulled in breath, a tremor running between his shoulderblades. All he remembered of time dogs was the cold, white fur or bone, teeth, and-
"Give me your wrist," Jack said.
Sam pulled his attention back. Why do you-? he thought, then thought it best not to waste time in thinking, and offered his wrist. Jack pulled the wrist device off and transferred it to Sam, and the edge to the air warmed away. Jack typed something in and flipped the cover down over its screen, giving Sam a fleeting, but reassuring, smile.
"I swear, if this keeps up I'm going to have to write you up a pamphlet," he said. "And I warn you, I'm not known for my pamphlet-writing skills."
Well, so long as it was a situation where Jack could still joke.
Sam closed his eyes, wrestled his breathing back down to normal. "I seem to remember this being a stopgap measure," he said, controlling the words and trying not to let his attention slip back to holding himself up against the side of a car on an empty street in Manchester, with a cold snap to the air and the howling of dogs in the distance. "How long?"
Jack put a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched away. Jack pulled his hands back, showing palms apologetically. "Paradoxes suffer the observer effect," he said. "Examining one set of temporal anomalies while standing in another one isn't a great idea."
That spiked up the rate of Sam's breath again. "You mean I can cause a paradox from what I'm thinking about?"
"We're on a timeship traversing the Time Vortex inside a loop paradox," Jack said. "Those are pretty big aggravating factors. We'd usually have nothing to worry about."
"But we do now," Sam snapped. He wasn't interested in platitudes and reassurances; he needed to know, in that moment, how much threat they were under. If they were racing time through time to outrun the time dogs, if that was another drop in temperature he felt creeping along his collar-
"Any ship like this would have certain safeguards," Jack started.
"Jack-!"
Jack stopped, with a look Sam didn't want to read. Grim. "Yes, we are in danger."
Sam closed his eyes.
Inhale. Exhale. Despite the fact that every new problem brought with it another thing he didn't know, he could handle this. It was just a matter of keeping his wits about him.
Exhale. "That was what I needed to know."
He looked again and Jack was smiling, though the expression was watered-down past the point where it could be considered genuine. "Don't worry about this. You'll get your sea-legs."
"I'm not sure I want them," Sam said, turning to find the chair he'd been sitting in. He was tired, suddenly; too tired to stand. "You know, I used to be fascinated by time travel as a concept."
Jack's expression fell. "...it's not all like this."
"Enough of it is." He sank down, looked back up at Jack. The wristband was still warm from Jack's skin, and he looked down at the leather face of its cover. He'd thought 1973 was mad. At least there- "-I don't know any of the rules," he said, turning over his wrist. "There's too much I don't understand. I can't just exist beholden to you."
There was a moment when neither one of them said anything, and Sam looked up to find Jack watching him. "I don't consider you beholden to me."
Sam leaned back, his expression acrid. "And it doesn't matter to you that I do?"
Jack's expression cooled.
After a moment he looked down, shaking his head. An awkward silence settled, and one of them might have even found it uncomfortable enough to say something except that a tremor went through the ship.
Sam swore Jack found a way to trigger these things.
"Okay, that's not good," Jack said, swinging toward the door. "And that's not just on you."
Sam stood. That was one thing to be said about adrenaline - it was doing a good job of chasing back the emotional exhaustion. "Jack?"
Jack shook his head, then grabbed the door's threshold as the ship shook again. "Now I feel it," he said, then looked back with a tight, fake smile. "Hang on. I need to talk to Balthier about the temperature control on his ship."
-
By the time Jack made it up to the bridge the quakes hitting the Strahl had grown so that they'd already thrown him from his feet once. A warning klaxon was droning in the hallways. "So, what's going on?"
"We're making an emergency stop." Balthier leaned across the console, fingers brushing across switches with what looked like too little force to toggle them. Still, the Strahl was responding; Jack could hear it in the cant of the engines, feel it in the shudder of the deckplates. "I take it you noticed that we're running into some turbulance-!"
The deck listed, and Jack pushed his hand against the wall to brace himself. "Yeah, this tends to happen when you're flying through a paradox. Should I make a note to tell you?"
"Well, we already know you haven't, so I'm not sure I see the point," Balthier said, hurrying to correct the roll of the craft. "I'm reading two likely worlds in this temporal neighborhood. Care to select one?"
Jack jumped forward, catching the back of the flight chair and reading the data off the screen. "Don't recognize either of them," he said. "Let's go with two."
Balthier made the selection. "Why two?"
"What, you'd prefer one?"
"I was curious as to whether you knew something I didn't. Sit down, will you?"
Jack held on through another tremor, then slipped toward the second chair. He dropped into it, putting his feet up against the console to brace himself. "We don't seem to have a relationship founded on the free exchange of information, do we?"
"With you?" Balthier scoffed. "Hardly even an option, is that?"
Jack went from insouciance to stung in almost exactly the time it took for the Strahl to buck, nearly throwing him from his perch. That was a problem; he rather liked the way he'd been posed.
"Hold on." Balthier keyed another sequence and the blinds on the viewport opened, revealing the last angry scraps of Time Vortex boiling out into a momentary deep navy which burned away into a turbulant flame-gold. What had been isolated bumps and shudders now seized the ship, tearing it down in a rising roar. "We're out of the crisis point. Now pray we survive entry into atmosphere."
Jack shot a sharp look. "This ship doesn't-"
"It's not built for it, no." He hit something, adjusting the pitch of descent, and the heat of the atmosphere yellowed. "Which would you prefer, Jack, lower friction and greater speed, or not crashing into the planet, but burning up instead?"
"...I'm going to take the controls now," Jack said.
Balthier gestured at the copilot console. "By all means."
Jack dropped his feet and leaned forward, scanning the controls and making an educated guess about how to dive in. Sure, it wasn't a chula ship, but so long as he could work out pitch, yaw, and roll, and maybe something really fancy like an air brake, Balthier would be free to handle everything more complex.
"Here's hoping we don't kill us all," Jack muttered, and the world reared up to meet them.