Fic: The Fate of the Earth Depends On It, Probably (Black Books/Doctor Who)
Title: The Fate of the Earth Depends On It, Probably
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Black Books/Doctor Who (2005) (more properly, Torchwood...)
Pairing: One-sided Fran/Jack and Manny/Jack.
Rating: PG
Notes: For the Jack Harkness Crossover Ficathon. A bit crackficcy. (I should add that at the time this was written Torchwood was some way from airing, so some things Jack says - like the implication he's only just arrived in this time period - have since been Jossed.)
Summary: A moment of madness on a certain internet auction site leads Torchwood to Manny’s door. Bernard is even less happy than usual.
There were questions that kept people up at night, haunting psychological teasers that crept into the human psyche at four in the morning and left one staring up at the dark ceiling (or tent, or whatever space the human the psyche was attached to happened to be occupying) unable to sleep. Questions like: Is there a God? What is my place in the universe? What’s it all about, really? And the pettier but still sleep-crushing concerns: Should I just leave him? Will my boss find out about the off-shore accounts?
Manny Bianco, awake and feverishly tapping away at his laptop at a time when even the drug dealers had gone home for a kip, had a far more pressing worry: did he, when all was said and done, need a pair of Elvis-themed novelty nail scissors from eBay? Sweat beaded on his forehead as he hovered over the ‘bid’ button and the seconds ticked down.
He cracked with twenty seconds to go. Well, he thought, scissors were always useful. He could use them to trim his beard. And these ones played Heartbreak Hotel! That was practically a pinnacle of human achievement!
It was a slippery slope. Just one more, he kept telling himself. One more auction, then I can get a few hours sleep before I have to open up the shop and feed Bernard. But he had crossed a threshold, his very own scissors-related Rubicon, and it made it so much easier to bid on other useless tat for the sheer thrill of winning it. Crocheted cushion cover of the Pope? His! 1978 issue of Amateur Photographer, slight creasing at the corners? Showed you, cameraboy63! Every win, however small, however ultimately useless, was a tiny rush of power. Manny, whose last taste of that particular drug had been during his one week as milk monitor in Mrs Pembleton’s Primary 1 class, couldn’t get enough. He stuffed some more cheesy Wotsits in his mouth, listened out for any change in the buzzsaw snoring from Bernard’s room, and bid on.
The very last thing he won - before he slumped over his keyboard, unconscious, with a faint smile of triumph on his face and a coating of Wotsit dust over most of his room - was something labelled GENUINE ALIEN ARTIFACT!!! 100% REAL!!!! Manny didn’t even read the description. All that mattered was that it was ending in the next minute, and someone called twoodinst wanted it. Cresting a wave of sheer bidders’ euphoria, he kept pushing the price up. A hundred quid. Two hundred. Mr twoodinst really wanted the 100% real alien artefact, and if he’d been in his right mind Manny would have stepped back, with a tip of the top hat he’d acquired two auctions ago, and let them have it.
Not a chance. It was out of his hands now. Later he’d try to rationalise that he’d been having some sort of sleep deprived out-of-body experience; the real Manny, nice, mild-mannered Manny who got shouted at by Bernard a lot and couldn’t cut someone up at traffic lights without days of guilt, had been floating lazily around the ceiling light while some sort of auctioneering fiend had taken his form.
A new high bid at the last possible second and it was his. Manny actually cheered out loud in victory, then clamped his hand over his mouth; for a moment the house was silent. Then Bernard roared something in his sleep about a shower of bastards stealing his fish, the snoring started up again, and Manny swayed on the spot and toppled forward, dead asleep.
**
Manny could honestly say that he had never woken up with a Thai prostitute on one side of him, a large bag of hardcore porn and class-A drugs on the other, and his mother there giving them all with a sorrowful where-did-Moopa-and-I-go-wrong look. He imagined it would be something like waking up fully clothed and curled around a portable computer with Bernard glaring down at him with all the wrath of God on his face.
“What it looks like,” he mumbled. “It isn’t. Honest.” He’d been keeping the computer a secret. Bernard hated the internet, in more than just the generalised way he hated everyone and everything on Earth. He didn’t mind the pornography aspects, he said. It was the idea that it could bring people across the globe together to share interests and swap views in a vast network of common humanity. That was downright offensive.
“It’s nearly dinner time,” Bernard hissed. “I’m out of fags, I haven’t had my tea, there are people trying to buy books and being cheerful about it and…” He sucked in his breath, as if what he had to say was so horrible he had to work up to it: “There’s an American in the shop.”
Oh, God. If there was something Bernard detested more than the internet, it was Americans. They were only slightly below children on the all-time hate list. Only one thing could be worse:
“It’s not an American child, is it?”
“No.” Bernard’s lip curled. “It’s a man. All flashy accent and Mormon teeth.”
Manny rolled off the bed, only realising as he did so how long he’d been in the one position. Half the duvet came with him. “Listen, I’ll make the tea, then I’ll run out and get some more cigarettes, and the American’s probably gone by now, so if you go back down…”
Bernard’s eyes were already pretty narrow. For the first time, Manny realised just how narrow they could go. “Oh, I don’t think he’s gone. He was so keen to meet you. Looking for Manny Bianco, he said. Needed to have a little chat with him about e-something, he said. What the hell have you been up to?”
**
Just as Bernard had predicted, the American was still there when Manny crept downstairs. Everyone else had cleared off - he didn’t like to guess what Bernard might have said to them. The American (he had to be! Look at the way he stood!) was looking over the shelves with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, and he was wearing sunglasses even though they were inside, which must have racked him up another few places on Bernard’s scale of hate. Something about him, Manny decided, radiated coolness. Put up against him, the Fonz would end up slinking away to join a travelling folk group.
Manny had never done well with cool people. They seemed to awaken a primal instinct, if you believed, as Manny did, that his pre-primate ancestors were some sort of timid marmoset; faced with someone confident and in charge, millions of years of evolution rolled back and he had to fight the urge to dig a burrow and hide in it. It only got worse when the American turned, spotted him, and strolled over to introduce himself.
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he said, giving Manny one of the firmest handshakes of his life.
“Err.” He wanted to say his name too, in that exact same Bond, James Bond way, but his brain rebelled. It refused to supply his name, instead going through a list of all the Captains it could come up with. Captain Von Trapp. Captain Caveman. Captain Planet.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here. Kinda wondering myself - I’m mostly based in Cardiff these days -“
Captain America.
“- but you got our attention, Manny. Can I call you Manny?”
“Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” he blurted out and, for good measure, added, “What I meant was, you must be twoodinst. Err. Hello.”
Jack blinked, smiled, and went on as if people said that sort of thing to him all the time. “We were pretty impressed with the way you got that spaceship fragment from under our nose. We thought we had the eBay stuff sewn up but you were fast.”
“Fast,” Manny said, trying to at least look like he was keeping up.
“Here’s the thing.” Captain Harkness moved very close to him, gripping him by the shoulders. Manny emitted a distinctly marmoset-like meep. “We need that fragment, Manny. I don’t know who you’re working for - the guys at UNIT, Van Statten, whoever - but whatever they’re paying you, we’ll double it.” He smiled then. He had very white teeth. “And, hey, you’ll be helping defend your planet. Worth thinking about.”
“Thinking about. Yes. I will.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow.” He sauntered to the door. Manny had never seen anyone genuinely saunter before. “Same time.”
“I’ll be here,” Manny called after him. “In the shop.” He stood there for a few minutes, staring at the door as if he intended to stay on exactly the same spot for the next twenty-four hours. Then Bernard was bellowing for his tea, and Fran was tumbling through the door with a dazed look on her face, as if the face of Jesus had just appeared in her cornflakes and given her next week’s lottery numbers.
“There was a man,” she said. “Coming out of your shop. Who was he? Who? Who?”
Manny cringed at the loudness. “I don’t know! I think he might be a spook.”
“A what?”
“You know! CIA! Men in black! He wanted my genuine alien artefact.”
“I’m madly in love with him,” Fran said dreamily. “In the instant our eyes met I could see our whole future together. We’re going to have three children and a Saab.”
“You’ve got to help me Fran, I don’t know what to do. He’s coming back tomorrow and I don’t have the alien thingie to give him yet and I think Bernard might combust at having an American in the shop for two days in a row. Fran? Fran!”
“Two boys and a girl,” she said. “Yes. I think that’s the nicest way around, don’t you?” And she threw her hands in the air as if she was tossing a beautiful bouquet. Manny forced himself not try to catch it.
**
The thing Manny had started to believe really was an alien artefact came in next morning’s post, wedged between a free sample of Silkiest Facial Hair (he pocketed it when Bernard was distracted by toast) and a Reader’s Digest draw addressed to a Mr B Blick. The package wasn’t much bigger than a paperback. Manny hefted it in one hand, feeling let down. He said - mumbled, really - as much to Captain Harkness when he turned up. It was the first near-coherent thing he’d said and he was feeling quite proud until Harkness grinned, lowered his sunglasses and drawled, “Well, you know what they say about size not being everything.”
Manny gulped. From the kitchen, where they’d left him holed up with books and alcohol enough to keep him going for at least twenty minutes, he could hear Bernard sneer.
“Thanks for this,” Harkness said. “This could be the breakthrough we need against the Sontarans. You made the right choice.”
“Oh, it was nothing, Captain…”
“Call me Jack.” He put out his hand; Manny took it, and almost dropped through the floor when Capt- when Jack kissed it.
Manny had always thought of himself as heterosexual. Not that there was anything wrong with the alternatives, he added hastily, someofhisbestfriendsweregay etc; it just wasn’t anything he’d ever thought about, fondness for lamps and nice cushions aside. It was a bit disconcerting, then, to find his sexuality happily budging up to make room for Jack. “Um,” he said, aware he was blushing right to the roots of his beard, “you don’t have to rush off just yet. I mean, you could buy something. A book or… a different book?” He grabbed the nearest books to illustrate that, look, they had loads of them, more books than you could shake a stick at, then realised that he was holding a Mister Men book in one hand and an anthology of gay erotica in the other. He dropped both like hot potatoes, and found himself asking whether Jack might like a hot potato.
“Tempting,” Jack said, “but I had lunch at the office, thank you.”
Manny gratefully abandoned his plans to find and heat a tuber and seized on a safe conversational route. “Oh, you work in an office? That’s great. Great. I used to be an accountant. Doing accounting things, y’know.”
“We used to have an accountant,” Jack said agreeably. “Nice guy. Steve something, I think. Lost him a couple of years back after that thing with the plasmavores.”
“Oh.” Manny tried to look properly sad at the tragic loss of human life, rather than delighted at this insight into the spooky CIA/Men in Black world where even accountants stood against the forces of darkness. “How did he die?”
“Oh, he’s not dead. We just lost him. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth bar. If you’ve never been on a bar crawl with a plasmavore,” Jack said, “you’ve never lived.”
“I think I probably haven’t,” he said sadly, as the front door shattered. More CIA! He thought. Enemy agents! Aliens! But it was just Fran, in not much of a dress.
“Manny, the door was locked. Silly Manny, you’re always forgetting that.” I’ll complain about this later, her thin smile promised, and then it was gone, superseded by a million megawatt beam she turned on Jack, who slipped his sunglasses back on.
“Hiiii,” she said. “I’m Fran, I’m sure Manny’s mentioned me.” She got her hand kissed too. Get your own secret agent, Manny thought. Brazen strumpet, his Mooma would have called her, sashaying in with her, her legs and everything.
“So you two work together?” Jack asked.
“What, here in the bookshop? No, Fran works…”
“Yes,” Fran said. “We’re both in the ultra-secret organisation that’s interested in buying alien… things. I’m Manny’s boss. He has to write me reports.”
Manny goggled.
“In fact, I don’t think we should give you that - small, bubblewrapped thing that’s obviously a fine example of alien technology. What if you want to use it to build spaceships of your own?”
“That’s exactly why we want it.” Jack dropped his arm around her shoulders. Fran swooned more visibly than any self-respecting pretend secret agent should. “This can’t go beyond this room, of course. I’m sure your people have the place bugged - great cover, by the way, I’m gonna tell Gwen to buy us a bookshop the second I get back - but I can sense you’re on the level, Fran. I know I can trust you. We need this, Fran. For the world. Please.”
Manny boggled.
“All right then,” she sighed, and gripped his jacket. “We’ll think about it. Won’t we, Manny? We can talk about it over a nice meal somewhere.”
Strumpet! Hussy! He’d eaten at the office! He hadn’t even wanted a hot potato! She was forcing food on him!
“I could go for that,” Jack said.
Manny was set to slope upstairs, tail between his legs, to the comforting arms of his broadband connection, when Jack wrapped his free arm around him and said, “So, you guys know this century - sorry, this city - better than me, where are the three of us gonna go?”
Fran glowered. Manny didn’t care. At that moment he loved her more than almost anyone in the world.
**
“Come on then.” Bernard had started the day with six bottles of wine. This was the last but one, and he resented having to share it. Taunting the other two in their obvious misery cheered him up. “Tell me the sordid details of your transatlantic bisexual tryst.”
“There was no tryst,” Fran slurred. She was a bit sloshed. She’d drunk a lot in the restaurant, and some more in the taxi, and then she’d announced she was becoming a nun. By the time they got back to the shop she was telling passers-by that they needed to forge every mountain, climb every stream, and do something or other to rainbows until they found their dreams.
“Really? Was Captain Fanciness scared off by the thought of Manny with his clothes off? He’s probably seen those magazines you think I don’t know about, Beardama-San.”
“He said he’s not allowed to fraternise with enemy agents,” Manny said. “Someone called Gwen threatened to chemically castrate him if he did it again, apparently.”
“I’ll never love again,” Fran said. “Except for Jesus, obviously. It is Jesus nuns are into, isn’t it? I was never good at RE.”
Manny checked the time on his eBay-bought Thundercats watch. It seemed to have lost a little of its glory. “Jack’ll be halfway back to Cardiff now.”
They all shut up, silent and united in mourning for lost love, or lost alcohol.
“Bastard aliens, anyway,” Bernard finally said. “Coming over here. Taking our jobs and our women and, and, our precious minerals.” He peered at his empty wine bottle as if he suspected aliens were to blame for that too, then batted it off the desk. It bounced off a pile of Trollopes and rolled away under a shelf labelled, in felt tip pen, ‘Religion, Spirituality and Other Misc Bollocks’. “More wine!”
“Wine!” Fran banged her fist on the desk. “I think they frown on that in convents, so I might as well make the most of it now.”
Manny rushed to uncork the last bottle, keeping his thumb firmly over the label. If he was lucky, Bernard would never know he’d accidentally bought one bottle of the non-alcoholic kind. “Why do you hate aliens?” he asked, by way of distraction. “I mean, they’ve never done anything to you. Have they? They’ve never even tried to use mobile phones in the shop.”
“Don’t be flip, Manny. Bearded people can’t be flip.” He toyed with the stem of his glass. “My mother,” he said, “was just an innocent girl from County Meath. Not one of your hard-faced, sophisticated, big-city tarts with no pants and a heart like a mantrap. He turned her head! All his talk of time travel and other planets. My grandmother said it’d all end in tears, and wasn’t she right? Left on her own and pregnant and her alien boyfriend swanned off to the next girl that could be bought off with a couple of trips around the solar system.”
Manny scanned the wine label worriedly. It didn’t say anything about hallucinogenic properties.
“’Johnny can’t go to St. Malachi’s with you, Bernard, he’s so clever and special and he’s got to go and live with his dad so he can go to Time Lord School…’”
“I’m just popping down the off-licence,” Manny said. “I’ll get you some nice new wine. Yes. That’d be best. You coming, Fran?”
“Only if you sing The Sound of Music with me,” she said.
So he did, all the way to the shop and back, and to his great surprise, it seemed to help.
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Black Books/Doctor Who (2005) (more properly, Torchwood...)
Pairing: One-sided Fran/Jack and Manny/Jack.
Rating: PG
Notes: For the Jack Harkness Crossover Ficathon. A bit crackficcy. (I should add that at the time this was written Torchwood was some way from airing, so some things Jack says - like the implication he's only just arrived in this time period - have since been Jossed.)
Summary: A moment of madness on a certain internet auction site leads Torchwood to Manny’s door. Bernard is even less happy than usual.
There were questions that kept people up at night, haunting psychological teasers that crept into the human psyche at four in the morning and left one staring up at the dark ceiling (or tent, or whatever space the human the psyche was attached to happened to be occupying) unable to sleep. Questions like: Is there a God? What is my place in the universe? What’s it all about, really? And the pettier but still sleep-crushing concerns: Should I just leave him? Will my boss find out about the off-shore accounts?
Manny Bianco, awake and feverishly tapping away at his laptop at a time when even the drug dealers had gone home for a kip, had a far more pressing worry: did he, when all was said and done, need a pair of Elvis-themed novelty nail scissors from eBay? Sweat beaded on his forehead as he hovered over the ‘bid’ button and the seconds ticked down.
He cracked with twenty seconds to go. Well, he thought, scissors were always useful. He could use them to trim his beard. And these ones played Heartbreak Hotel! That was practically a pinnacle of human achievement!
It was a slippery slope. Just one more, he kept telling himself. One more auction, then I can get a few hours sleep before I have to open up the shop and feed Bernard. But he had crossed a threshold, his very own scissors-related Rubicon, and it made it so much easier to bid on other useless tat for the sheer thrill of winning it. Crocheted cushion cover of the Pope? His! 1978 issue of Amateur Photographer, slight creasing at the corners? Showed you, cameraboy63! Every win, however small, however ultimately useless, was a tiny rush of power. Manny, whose last taste of that particular drug had been during his one week as milk monitor in Mrs Pembleton’s Primary 1 class, couldn’t get enough. He stuffed some more cheesy Wotsits in his mouth, listened out for any change in the buzzsaw snoring from Bernard’s room, and bid on.
The very last thing he won - before he slumped over his keyboard, unconscious, with a faint smile of triumph on his face and a coating of Wotsit dust over most of his room - was something labelled GENUINE ALIEN ARTIFACT!!! 100% REAL!!!! Manny didn’t even read the description. All that mattered was that it was ending in the next minute, and someone called twoodinst wanted it. Cresting a wave of sheer bidders’ euphoria, he kept pushing the price up. A hundred quid. Two hundred. Mr twoodinst really wanted the 100% real alien artefact, and if he’d been in his right mind Manny would have stepped back, with a tip of the top hat he’d acquired two auctions ago, and let them have it.
Not a chance. It was out of his hands now. Later he’d try to rationalise that he’d been having some sort of sleep deprived out-of-body experience; the real Manny, nice, mild-mannered Manny who got shouted at by Bernard a lot and couldn’t cut someone up at traffic lights without days of guilt, had been floating lazily around the ceiling light while some sort of auctioneering fiend had taken his form.
A new high bid at the last possible second and it was his. Manny actually cheered out loud in victory, then clamped his hand over his mouth; for a moment the house was silent. Then Bernard roared something in his sleep about a shower of bastards stealing his fish, the snoring started up again, and Manny swayed on the spot and toppled forward, dead asleep.
**
Manny could honestly say that he had never woken up with a Thai prostitute on one side of him, a large bag of hardcore porn and class-A drugs on the other, and his mother there giving them all with a sorrowful where-did-Moopa-and-I-go-wrong look. He imagined it would be something like waking up fully clothed and curled around a portable computer with Bernard glaring down at him with all the wrath of God on his face.
“What it looks like,” he mumbled. “It isn’t. Honest.” He’d been keeping the computer a secret. Bernard hated the internet, in more than just the generalised way he hated everyone and everything on Earth. He didn’t mind the pornography aspects, he said. It was the idea that it could bring people across the globe together to share interests and swap views in a vast network of common humanity. That was downright offensive.
“It’s nearly dinner time,” Bernard hissed. “I’m out of fags, I haven’t had my tea, there are people trying to buy books and being cheerful about it and…” He sucked in his breath, as if what he had to say was so horrible he had to work up to it: “There’s an American in the shop.”
Oh, God. If there was something Bernard detested more than the internet, it was Americans. They were only slightly below children on the all-time hate list. Only one thing could be worse:
“It’s not an American child, is it?”
“No.” Bernard’s lip curled. “It’s a man. All flashy accent and Mormon teeth.”
Manny rolled off the bed, only realising as he did so how long he’d been in the one position. Half the duvet came with him. “Listen, I’ll make the tea, then I’ll run out and get some more cigarettes, and the American’s probably gone by now, so if you go back down…”
Bernard’s eyes were already pretty narrow. For the first time, Manny realised just how narrow they could go. “Oh, I don’t think he’s gone. He was so keen to meet you. Looking for Manny Bianco, he said. Needed to have a little chat with him about e-something, he said. What the hell have you been up to?”
**
Just as Bernard had predicted, the American was still there when Manny crept downstairs. Everyone else had cleared off - he didn’t like to guess what Bernard might have said to them. The American (he had to be! Look at the way he stood!) was looking over the shelves with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, and he was wearing sunglasses even though they were inside, which must have racked him up another few places on Bernard’s scale of hate. Something about him, Manny decided, radiated coolness. Put up against him, the Fonz would end up slinking away to join a travelling folk group.
Manny had never done well with cool people. They seemed to awaken a primal instinct, if you believed, as Manny did, that his pre-primate ancestors were some sort of timid marmoset; faced with someone confident and in charge, millions of years of evolution rolled back and he had to fight the urge to dig a burrow and hide in it. It only got worse when the American turned, spotted him, and strolled over to introduce himself.
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he said, giving Manny one of the firmest handshakes of his life.
“Err.” He wanted to say his name too, in that exact same Bond, James Bond way, but his brain rebelled. It refused to supply his name, instead going through a list of all the Captains it could come up with. Captain Von Trapp. Captain Caveman. Captain Planet.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here. Kinda wondering myself - I’m mostly based in Cardiff these days -“
Captain America.
“- but you got our attention, Manny. Can I call you Manny?”
“Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” he blurted out and, for good measure, added, “What I meant was, you must be twoodinst. Err. Hello.”
Jack blinked, smiled, and went on as if people said that sort of thing to him all the time. “We were pretty impressed with the way you got that spaceship fragment from under our nose. We thought we had the eBay stuff sewn up but you were fast.”
“Fast,” Manny said, trying to at least look like he was keeping up.
“Here’s the thing.” Captain Harkness moved very close to him, gripping him by the shoulders. Manny emitted a distinctly marmoset-like meep. “We need that fragment, Manny. I don’t know who you’re working for - the guys at UNIT, Van Statten, whoever - but whatever they’re paying you, we’ll double it.” He smiled then. He had very white teeth. “And, hey, you’ll be helping defend your planet. Worth thinking about.”
“Thinking about. Yes. I will.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow.” He sauntered to the door. Manny had never seen anyone genuinely saunter before. “Same time.”
“I’ll be here,” Manny called after him. “In the shop.” He stood there for a few minutes, staring at the door as if he intended to stay on exactly the same spot for the next twenty-four hours. Then Bernard was bellowing for his tea, and Fran was tumbling through the door with a dazed look on her face, as if the face of Jesus had just appeared in her cornflakes and given her next week’s lottery numbers.
“There was a man,” she said. “Coming out of your shop. Who was he? Who? Who?”
Manny cringed at the loudness. “I don’t know! I think he might be a spook.”
“A what?”
“You know! CIA! Men in black! He wanted my genuine alien artefact.”
“I’m madly in love with him,” Fran said dreamily. “In the instant our eyes met I could see our whole future together. We’re going to have three children and a Saab.”
“You’ve got to help me Fran, I don’t know what to do. He’s coming back tomorrow and I don’t have the alien thingie to give him yet and I think Bernard might combust at having an American in the shop for two days in a row. Fran? Fran!”
“Two boys and a girl,” she said. “Yes. I think that’s the nicest way around, don’t you?” And she threw her hands in the air as if she was tossing a beautiful bouquet. Manny forced himself not try to catch it.
**
The thing Manny had started to believe really was an alien artefact came in next morning’s post, wedged between a free sample of Silkiest Facial Hair (he pocketed it when Bernard was distracted by toast) and a Reader’s Digest draw addressed to a Mr B Blick. The package wasn’t much bigger than a paperback. Manny hefted it in one hand, feeling let down. He said - mumbled, really - as much to Captain Harkness when he turned up. It was the first near-coherent thing he’d said and he was feeling quite proud until Harkness grinned, lowered his sunglasses and drawled, “Well, you know what they say about size not being everything.”
Manny gulped. From the kitchen, where they’d left him holed up with books and alcohol enough to keep him going for at least twenty minutes, he could hear Bernard sneer.
“Thanks for this,” Harkness said. “This could be the breakthrough we need against the Sontarans. You made the right choice.”
“Oh, it was nothing, Captain…”
“Call me Jack.” He put out his hand; Manny took it, and almost dropped through the floor when Capt- when Jack kissed it.
Manny had always thought of himself as heterosexual. Not that there was anything wrong with the alternatives, he added hastily, someofhisbestfriendsweregay etc; it just wasn’t anything he’d ever thought about, fondness for lamps and nice cushions aside. It was a bit disconcerting, then, to find his sexuality happily budging up to make room for Jack. “Um,” he said, aware he was blushing right to the roots of his beard, “you don’t have to rush off just yet. I mean, you could buy something. A book or… a different book?” He grabbed the nearest books to illustrate that, look, they had loads of them, more books than you could shake a stick at, then realised that he was holding a Mister Men book in one hand and an anthology of gay erotica in the other. He dropped both like hot potatoes, and found himself asking whether Jack might like a hot potato.
“Tempting,” Jack said, “but I had lunch at the office, thank you.”
Manny gratefully abandoned his plans to find and heat a tuber and seized on a safe conversational route. “Oh, you work in an office? That’s great. Great. I used to be an accountant. Doing accounting things, y’know.”
“We used to have an accountant,” Jack said agreeably. “Nice guy. Steve something, I think. Lost him a couple of years back after that thing with the plasmavores.”
“Oh.” Manny tried to look properly sad at the tragic loss of human life, rather than delighted at this insight into the spooky CIA/Men in Black world where even accountants stood against the forces of darkness. “How did he die?”
“Oh, he’s not dead. We just lost him. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth bar. If you’ve never been on a bar crawl with a plasmavore,” Jack said, “you’ve never lived.”
“I think I probably haven’t,” he said sadly, as the front door shattered. More CIA! He thought. Enemy agents! Aliens! But it was just Fran, in not much of a dress.
“Manny, the door was locked. Silly Manny, you’re always forgetting that.” I’ll complain about this later, her thin smile promised, and then it was gone, superseded by a million megawatt beam she turned on Jack, who slipped his sunglasses back on.
“Hiiii,” she said. “I’m Fran, I’m sure Manny’s mentioned me.” She got her hand kissed too. Get your own secret agent, Manny thought. Brazen strumpet, his Mooma would have called her, sashaying in with her, her legs and everything.
“So you two work together?” Jack asked.
“What, here in the bookshop? No, Fran works…”
“Yes,” Fran said. “We’re both in the ultra-secret organisation that’s interested in buying alien… things. I’m Manny’s boss. He has to write me reports.”
Manny goggled.
“In fact, I don’t think we should give you that - small, bubblewrapped thing that’s obviously a fine example of alien technology. What if you want to use it to build spaceships of your own?”
“That’s exactly why we want it.” Jack dropped his arm around her shoulders. Fran swooned more visibly than any self-respecting pretend secret agent should. “This can’t go beyond this room, of course. I’m sure your people have the place bugged - great cover, by the way, I’m gonna tell Gwen to buy us a bookshop the second I get back - but I can sense you’re on the level, Fran. I know I can trust you. We need this, Fran. For the world. Please.”
Manny boggled.
“All right then,” she sighed, and gripped his jacket. “We’ll think about it. Won’t we, Manny? We can talk about it over a nice meal somewhere.”
Strumpet! Hussy! He’d eaten at the office! He hadn’t even wanted a hot potato! She was forcing food on him!
“I could go for that,” Jack said.
Manny was set to slope upstairs, tail between his legs, to the comforting arms of his broadband connection, when Jack wrapped his free arm around him and said, “So, you guys know this century - sorry, this city - better than me, where are the three of us gonna go?”
Fran glowered. Manny didn’t care. At that moment he loved her more than almost anyone in the world.
**
“Come on then.” Bernard had started the day with six bottles of wine. This was the last but one, and he resented having to share it. Taunting the other two in their obvious misery cheered him up. “Tell me the sordid details of your transatlantic bisexual tryst.”
“There was no tryst,” Fran slurred. She was a bit sloshed. She’d drunk a lot in the restaurant, and some more in the taxi, and then she’d announced she was becoming a nun. By the time they got back to the shop she was telling passers-by that they needed to forge every mountain, climb every stream, and do something or other to rainbows until they found their dreams.
“Really? Was Captain Fanciness scared off by the thought of Manny with his clothes off? He’s probably seen those magazines you think I don’t know about, Beardama-San.”
“He said he’s not allowed to fraternise with enemy agents,” Manny said. “Someone called Gwen threatened to chemically castrate him if he did it again, apparently.”
“I’ll never love again,” Fran said. “Except for Jesus, obviously. It is Jesus nuns are into, isn’t it? I was never good at RE.”
Manny checked the time on his eBay-bought Thundercats watch. It seemed to have lost a little of its glory. “Jack’ll be halfway back to Cardiff now.”
They all shut up, silent and united in mourning for lost love, or lost alcohol.
“Bastard aliens, anyway,” Bernard finally said. “Coming over here. Taking our jobs and our women and, and, our precious minerals.” He peered at his empty wine bottle as if he suspected aliens were to blame for that too, then batted it off the desk. It bounced off a pile of Trollopes and rolled away under a shelf labelled, in felt tip pen, ‘Religion, Spirituality and Other Misc Bollocks’. “More wine!”
“Wine!” Fran banged her fist on the desk. “I think they frown on that in convents, so I might as well make the most of it now.”
Manny rushed to uncork the last bottle, keeping his thumb firmly over the label. If he was lucky, Bernard would never know he’d accidentally bought one bottle of the non-alcoholic kind. “Why do you hate aliens?” he asked, by way of distraction. “I mean, they’ve never done anything to you. Have they? They’ve never even tried to use mobile phones in the shop.”
“Don’t be flip, Manny. Bearded people can’t be flip.” He toyed with the stem of his glass. “My mother,” he said, “was just an innocent girl from County Meath. Not one of your hard-faced, sophisticated, big-city tarts with no pants and a heart like a mantrap. He turned her head! All his talk of time travel and other planets. My grandmother said it’d all end in tears, and wasn’t she right? Left on her own and pregnant and her alien boyfriend swanned off to the next girl that could be bought off with a couple of trips around the solar system.”
Manny scanned the wine label worriedly. It didn’t say anything about hallucinogenic properties.
“’Johnny can’t go to St. Malachi’s with you, Bernard, he’s so clever and special and he’s got to go and live with his dad so he can go to Time Lord School…’”
“I’m just popping down the off-licence,” Manny said. “I’ll get you some nice new wine. Yes. That’d be best. You coming, Fran?”
“Only if you sing The Sound of Music with me,” she said.
So he did, all the way to the shop and back, and to his great surprise, it seemed to help.