Fic: Conversations with the Dead
Title: Conversations with the Dead
Summary: It had taken Jack a while to realise that he'd finally cracked.
Fandom(s): Torchwood/Doctor Who
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Spoilers: Set during ' Last of the Time Lords', some small spoilers for Torchwood's 'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang'
Rating/Warnings: Slight PG for mentions of torture and death
Word count: 4297
Notes: Huge thanks to xwingace for her invaluable help as a beta. Another Year that Never Was WiP Beast slain, thank you! Comments and concrit are love.
Fic Masterlist: Here, archived at alien_sands
Death is a commingling of Eternity with Time
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
---
Have you ever looked at a clock for longer than a few minutes?
No, of course you haven't, it's boring to watch time pass that closely, and usually there're more important things to do than watch the seconds tick by.
You'd have to be quite desperately bored to watch a clock for hours and hours, watch the relativity of time unfold as you wait for something specific to happen after a specific amount of time.
That's when you find out that Heisenberg's rule is true for time as well - the closer you watch, the fuzzier time gets, until it seems to stand still and minutes take days to pass. For humans, it's simply irrelevant. Boring.
*
It was there again. Jack could tell even though he had his eyes closed. He kept them firmly shut, not willing to look at it. The hesitant footsteps on the metal grating of his cell were so painfully familiar that he bit his lip to stop smiling out of sheer habit.
"Did you bring water this time?" he asked the sounds of a ruffling suit and Ianto - no, Jack thought, the hallucination - huffing. The sound, devastatingly right in every nuance, made him open his eyes, presenting him with the latest proof that he'd lost his mind, dressed in the usual suit and a red tie. Of course there was no water.
The first time he'd thought it was real: his team had come to rescue him, ready to bring the Master down and Earth back to normal. How easy it had been to believe in that moment before a guard had sauntered to pick up his forgotten cup of coffee (and damn, the smell alone was driving him nuts), completely failing to see Ianto staring at him like a deer caught in the headlights.
It had taken Jack a while to realise that he'd finally cracked.
"Thought as much, not even my imagination is that good," Jack sighed as the figment walked around, pointedly ignoring the quip and idly staring at the small room instead, cataloguing the valves and the little wisps of steam and oil leaking from several places. No doubt the real Ianto would be appalled by the disrepair of this place. So was the hallucination, if Jack interpreted the twitching muscle in its jaw correctly.
"Why are you here?" Jack asked finally, because even chatting to oneself was better than the complete isolation the Master loved to keep him in between far too elaborate torture sessions, no doubt hoping it would make him talk. He couldn't even tell how many days had passed since election day, the absence of sleep robbing him of the simple human rhythm of life.
Ianto lifted a graceful eyebrow. "So I'm real now?"
"No," Jack answered, annoyed, "but since my psyche is apparently trying to communicate, I might as well get over with it."
"I'm dead," the hallucination said.
When Jack's head whipped around to stare at it, it had already vanished. The sentence echoed through his mind, and made his heart grow cold. He shook his head, and focussed on his breathing again, trying to tune out the sound of the ship around him, to concentrate on the hum of the antigravity engines, their familiar pulsing drowning out everything else. Those hauntings were starting to unsettle him, because some part of him knew the hallucination might be right.
*
I have no idea how Time Lords do it; I know they don't need timepieces, they simply listen to their minds and watch the Arrow of Time, watch the seconds from an objective point of view, immune to something as fickle as the human imagination. They divide time into its basic parts if they feel like it, looking at possibilities, futures and pasts. They can never lose themselves in the moment, I guess, that beat of the universe ticking, always ticking in the same rhythm, the same beat, like the sound of drums.
I'm surprised not all of them turn mad, really.
*
"I'm dead," the hallucination repeated as if it had never left.
Jack groaned opened his left eye, which took all his strength, his vision of the man in front of him still tinted red from all the blood that had run down his face. The Master seriously needed more hobbies than Punch the Immortal.
He'd hoped the Welshman had just been some isolation-induced dream, but now he was back, dressed as impeccable as ever, sporting the suit Ianto had worn on the night Jack'd offered him a job.
The apparition followed Jack's gaze to the clock on the wall in front of him with interest. Of course, it hadn't been there before. It was helpful on some days and maddening on others when nothing happened but the seconds dragging on, but that was better than the complete isolation Jack'd woken up in before.
A quick calculation told Jack that it had only taken him about a month (43,200 minutes or 2,592,000 seconds and counting) to turn mad. He was getting old.
"What?" Jack tried to say, mostly because his brain hadn't caught up with the fact that he was alive again and needed to function yet. The word got stuck in his throat, still tender where it had been crushed. The hallucination apparently understood anyway.
"I'm dead, I think," those lovely Welsh vowels told him, "killed in the first wave. And now I'm here because I wanted to see you again."
Jack would've laughed if he'd had the strength. As far as he knew, not even Ianto was that cheesy, not even in death. Belatedly he realised that he was back in chains again.
"You should try some platitudes about hanging in there, but I think I've hung enough for several decades," he groaned, but when he looked down from where his hands were cuffed to the ceiling, the hallucination had vanished.
Jack sighed, staring at the digital clock again to distract himself from the ache in his wrists (another three and a half minutes gone now, 210 seconds and counting), watching the minutes, every second another drop in a torture only a Time Lord could've thought of.
*
But then look at us humans - look at me.
The ticking of a single clock was nearly enough to drive me mad, some ancient part in my brain compelling me to look, to check my inner chronometer against something I think of as real, when the Master could easily manipulate that clock when I'm not looking, just to drive me crazy. Well, crazier than I am already, obviously.
Nothing drives humans madder than changing everything they think of as facts.
*
"What do you see, Jack my boy?" The Master peered into his eyes, as if the answer was hidden somewhere in there, before tearing the knife from his chest. Jack just hoped he wouldn't try to dig it out. "You have a very unique connection to the..." the Time Lord thought for a moment, tapping his bloodied hand against his lips. "Undiscovered Country," he finally beamed.
From behind the Master, Ianto was watching them carefully, pale and his face full of sympathy.
Jack kept his eyes on Ianto the entire time, until the pain became too much and he lost consciousness.
*
And what is left of us if facts change? Doesn't that just scare you to death?
There's nothing left, just us without an anchor, lost on the sea of Time, nothing to grasp because nothing is stable, nothing is real anymore. Our minds will simply break down then.
I have to be more careful, concentrate on what I know is real.
Is time real? I can't quite remember.
*
"Why can't I be real?" Ianto - sporting jeans and a sweatshirt now (Goddess, he hated his randy psyche) asked.
Jack's gaze travelled from Tish's offered spoon full of gravy to the empty spot where the clock had been. The absence of it was as unsettling as its presence had been. It had been gone for two work shifts now, which was as close to a day as he could tell. Tish wasn't allowed to speak of these things, and he assumed she didn't come as regularly as they made him think.
Light, he thought, if he only had sunlight, then he could tell.
It made him nervous to lose something so ordinary as the passing of time, and it told him the Master understood a lot more about the basic human psyche than he'd presumed.
This was not good. Imaginary seconds tickled down the back of his neck (how many? 700? 800?), and he tried to count his heartbeat as a substitute. It didn't work, the interplay of systole, diastole and the sound of his own blood in his ears as well as his jaw muscles chewing the damp mash too chaotic for a clear and constant count.
It made him angry. And over there the man with the stopwatch stood and waited for an answer.
"I don't believe in ghosts," Jack spat out, ignoring Tish's little jump as he began to talk with nothing again. Let them believe he'd lost a few of his marbles, it made the interrogation sessions shorter. For some reason even the Master with his dirty telepathic tricks wouldn't delve into a human's mind to make it snap. Maybe Time Lords were afraid it would pull them under as well. Jack sighed. As if that bastard could get any more bonkers. Judging by the little clock appearing and disappearing, it only meant the Master would take the scenic route to breaking him.
He watched Ianto pace the room while he chewed his meal, trying to convince Tish with his silence that he was still safe to be around.
"There's never been a scientific proof for any spiritual energy that has been left by the dead," he continued once the girl had gone, remembering another time he'd had the same conversation, huddled together with his Battle Commander in the middle of an epic planetary storm, listening to the screams of the wind. Jack hadn't been able to convince him, but the sex had seemed to keep their demons at bay.
"So you simply don't believe in them," Ianto concluded. "What if you're wrong?"
Jack grinned. "Happens sometimes, especially when you're involved."
But Ianto (and when had the hallucination become Ianto?) didn't rise to the bait.
"The Master used Archangel," he frowned instead, scratching his head thoughtfully. Jack nodded, licking his lip at the familiar gesture. He really hated his brain. "A psychic network connecting the minds of the human race for him to control," the younger man continued, suddenly alive with an idea, "what if that's what making me stay here?"
"You mean it's not me, it's you? Oh come on, Ianto, you can do better than that." Something inside him suddenly boiled with anger. It had been 6 months (and 3 days, 12 hours and 46 minutes, as Ianto and his imaginary stopwatch told him - He couldn't tell anymore, he was too tired to count) on the Valiant by now, and still the Doctor hadn't been able to do anything. The constant pain, the sickening feeling of slowly losing any hope and the prospect of an eternity (how many seconds were that anyway?) spent as the Master's toy was seriously gnawing on his sanity.
The hallucination didn't seem to mind that he shouted at it, though.
"Imagine the power of Archangel," Ianto continued, pacing the small cell once more, carefully avoiding pipes and cables; his steps in perfect synch with Jack's heartbeat. Like a metronome. It was oddly soothing. Jack breathed in deeply to calm down. Shouting was no use. And despite the fact that he was quite obviously mad, Jack loved his memory for providing such excellent views of the Welshman's backside.
"If someone could tap into that, focussing the thoughts of everyone..." Ianto's eyes widened with understanding.
"Martha," Jack gasped, sagging in his chains. "No, no, no," he shook his head forcefully, trying to unsee that theory.
"What?" Ianto asked, clearly confused, but Jack didn't answer. He knew. Oh Goddess, he knew.
"Oh," gulped Ianto as he finally understood. "The Doctor didn't tell you because the Master might find out, and now I've ruined it," he sagged against the wall, covering his face with his hands. Hallucination or not, Jack couldn't bear to see the younger man so shattered.
"Hey," Jack said, waiting for Ianto to lift his lovely fingers from his face before he continued, "remember that you're just part of my imagination? We ruined it." Jack grinned, bathing in the small smile he got in return.
*
No human can really know what happens when facts disappear and Time dances with uncertainty. No one has come back to tell us, but I might just find out. I hope I'll have enough neurons left to tell you about it.
Until then there 's nothing else to do than stare at that damn clock anyway, steaming valves and the backs of the guards are only entertaining for so long.
Would you have thought I'd tire of looking at backsides? Hah, I bet you didn't.
*
"In the end, what the Doctor personifies for humanity is freedom. An ideal. Freedom is only an idea, a meme, so to speak. You can't destroy an idea, any attempt will only make it stronger."
The clock was back, sitting there on the bare wall like a fat spider, gloating, time suddenly horribly out of tune in the unfamiliar beat of liquid crystals changing polarity.
Jack licked his lips, the thirst a constant but dull ache, concentrating on Ianto lecturing him about philosophy. His heartbeat quickened when the anger about that ugly piece of technology resurfaced, overtaking the rhythm of the clock easily. A man had his limits, and months spent in chains would probably do that to anyone.
He concentrated on the steady voice again, the rise and fall of words and sentences keeping a constant tempo with that lovely Welsh lilt to every syllable.
It wasn't real, but it was keeping him grounded, keeping him sane.
"Think about it, a network that connects all human minds, all ideas, every dream. Tap into that..." Ianto waved a hand.
"And ideas become weapons," Jack shook out of his doze, finishing the offered thought. "Genius," he smiled, not only referring to the Doctor's plan.
"You know I know everything," Ianto grinned. But Jack clamped the rising hope down. He was still chained, and he wasn't exactly in peak condition psychologically speaking. Too much hope could be just what the Master needed to break him. He wasn't letting the hallucination getting the better of him, no matter how much he enjoyed their conversations.
"Might take time, though. A lot of time," Jack mused. The very thought of time was disconcerting. He rolled his stiff shoulders absentmindedly, realising he hadn't looked at the clock for over ten minutes now. It was there, he could tell, mocking him, but the urge to look was waning. Ianto nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"It's all we have," Ianto sighed, which Jack found utterly hilarious coming from a ghost.
"If you talk about faith now, I'll kill you," Jack grinned, and Ianto's answering laugh echoed through his brain until the Master returned for more interrogation.
*
They tell you that time isn't a constant, that it is relative and you nod and pretend to understand, but you don't.
This experience is teaching me something new every day.
See? I was never good at keeping time - nearly got court-martialled for that once.
Now I know that only about one minute has passed since I started talking, only two since I woke up from death - which should be eternal, shouldn't it? But that's the point. Time is relative, Einstein said, and he knew very well how true that was not only for the universe we tread in, but also for the human psyche in particular, the universe inside ourselves.
*
"He's stopped asking questions," Jack coughed as he regained consciousness on the cold steel floor, recognising the expensive Italian shoes and realising instantly who was standing next to him.
The times when he had minded talking to thin air had long since passed.
"Of course he did," the Welsh lilt tried to sooth him, "withstanding torture would justify your pain, give you a cause."
Jack glanced up into Ianto's concerned face and rolled over onto his stomach. "Just why do you know so much about torture?"
Ianto crouched down beside him, his shoes not stirring the pools of blood forming on the floor, knowing better than to offer a (quite insubstantial) hand.
"Torchwood One wasn't all the glamour Yvonne liked to show to the Queen." Ianto halted, waiting until Jack had managed to push himself off the floor into a sitting position.
"He's breaking you," Ianto whispered, and Jack laughed, but even to his own ears it sounded a bit too much like wheezy breathing.
"I'm seeing ghosts, I think he already did a pretty good job at that," he gasped. The wounds had gone, but the pain wasn't lessening. It happened when the nights were long.
"He's waiting until you talk without filtering," Ianto tried, but Jack laughed again, the situation suddenly too ridiculous. His own consciousness was trying to teach him about torture.
"I know how this works," Jack gasped, "I used to be the guy with the tools."
"Don't let him," the Welshman retorted, with eyes of someone who had seen too much and yet believed that the universe had a simple solution for everything.
Jack's initial resolution to not see the hallucination for more than it truly was was beginning to waver.
"I really have to tell you about John one day," Jack groaned, "you two would've gotten on quite well."
*
Time. Relativity.
Did you know there's more space between atoms than there are atoms in the universe?
It's a logical assumption, of course, but when empty space is more common than anything else, how can reality exist? The Doctor once explained to me that time filled all the spaces in between, and I thought it was a very poetic solution for this dilemma.
Now that I know how stationary and fixed time can feel, I'm not so sure it's the answer anymore. Divide time into its parts and it doesn't even exist anymore, the seconds fracture and splinter until you hear Planck laugh and the seconds grind to a halt.
*
"Jack, come on. Talk to me!" Ianto's voice was urgent, but Jack closed his eyes against the feeling of a knife between his ribs. Even the Master's inane prattle moved to the back of his mind, until all he could hear was the young - and probably quite dead - Welshman.
Of course he was dead, Jack corrected himself. Everyone he'd ever known probably was, why would the Master lie about that?
The pain didn't lessen, but the familiar voice kept Jack from screaming, which would irate the Master to no end. That disappointment would maybe make him kill him faster.
His heartbeat was slowing, and the seconds dragged on with the pain. He could feel his heart was faltering in his chest, irregular beats trying to uphold bloodflow when most of that had already seeped into his clothes, and the voice of the Master scraping over his battered psychic defences. Jack knew he couldn't hold out much longer.
"You never asked me what I've wanted," Ianto suddenly snapped, which made him open his eyes and stare across the room at the young man looking at him urgently (suit and tie, always suit and tie now), his arms crossed in front of him.
"Well," Jack wheezed, "what do you want?" He brought out, knowing that the Master wouldn't answer that question, but the hallucination just might.
"I'm dead now, does it matter?" Ianto shouted, that familiar glare slicing through Jack's heart on a completely different level as the cold steel of the Master's blade, "and if I'm just in your mind, shouldn't you be able to tell yourself?"
"Come on, humour me," Jack yelped, and the knife was torn from his chest. That wasn't exactly what he'd meant. It probably meant more pain.
"Dinner." Something dangerous gleamed in the Welshman's eyes. "A movie and dinner."
Jack laughed so hard that the guards came in full force at the noise, apparently thinking he'd finally managed to kill that bastard Time Lord.
*
I mean, how can time exist?
We think it does, of course, because of the sun travelling across the sky, because everything happens in a place, at a time, neat and tidy, not all at once.
But when you look at it, just look at it, how do you know it exists? You can't see it, you can't feel it.
Maybe time is an illusion, something we came up with to make sense of a universe outside and inside ourselves - maybe we'd turn mad if we knew the truth.
Maybe Time Lords understand.
I wonder what they can see that they can't tell us.
*
On the flight deck, he watched the Doctor's body rejuvenate, glow with the thoughts and hopes of billions of people, felt the psychic brush of power that surrounded the Time Lord now. Beside him, Ianto smiled manically, just barely able to swallow the justified 'I told you so', his hand slipping into Jack's. He could've sworn he actually felt the contact.
"Doctor," Jack whispered as the first human across the planet, watching the shape of a smiling Ianto vanish into thin air.
He closed his eyes, listening to the steady thrum of the psychic network, willing the last year away.
When the time for fighting came, he was ready.
*
Maybe we simply don't exist, and the passing of the present into the future is just our illusion of existence, a dream dreamt by someone else.
I can see it now, Time the heartbeat of that dreamer, and we just figments, made for a story called life. It's quite soothing to consider that pain, even time itself is an illusion, don't you think?
And I could swear that clock has jus ticked backwards now, while I wasn't paying attention.
*
The Tourist Office was empty when he finally arrived (thankfully his more secret entry codes still worked), fear and panic rising in his chest when he found no one downstairs. He caught himself staring at the face of an antique clock in his office, for a moment too stunned by the memories of a digital one to understand how all the hands and numbers worked. He shook his head and chased the confusion away, watching the seconds move in a calming circle, the knowledge slowly coming back to him.
It was only 5 pm, so where were they? A quick glance at the computers calmed him (he'd have to go out and help them, Blowfish tended to get nasty when cornered), and he let himself relax before the storm of reality could start again.
He took a good look at the Hub, the silence, the peace, bathing in the simple pleasure of being home.
*
I mean, look at memories.
Everything happens at once in our thick skulls when we're not concentrating carefully; time-travelling through our brain, countless neural pathways which are in the end made out of atoms - nothing but empty space.
I can't tell you how many times I've wished to go in there and change something, but I am too scared what my mind would turn into.
And inside ourselves, we can change destiny as little as we can outside.
An endless fractal.
Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it insane?
*
He gazed at the Retcon pill in his hand, taking another gulp of whiskey from the glass in his other.
It would be so easy to blur the edges of the last year, take the memory of so much pain to some corner of his mind to rot and disintegrate into dust, let it rest there with his desperation of an immortal life.
He could live in the here and now, forget the friends he'd lost. And wasn't that the right thing to do? They were alive now, would it matter if he remembered their deaths when they technically never happened? The cracks in his sanity were yearning for the release this pill would bring.
You never asked me what I've wanted.
The sentence hung in his mind, habit making him glance around his office before remembering that Ianto was out and very much alive, not some ghost or hallucination.
Minutes ticked by and Jack sighed before placing the pill back into his desk drawer. He slammed it shut, downing the rest of his drink before getting up to find out where his team was.
He needed to see them.
*
But in the end, can we change anything that's significant?
Can we change the future?
Sometimes I'm not sure. But we have to believe it, because everything else would drive us insane.
*
He trailed Ianto down to the small kitchenette, watching him work his magic on the coffee machine quietly before some impulse made him step forwards and hug the Welshman from behind. He forced the tide of emotions down that threatened to overwhelm him when he felt the slightly rough cotton of the suit against his cheek.
Ianto, obviously noticing his mental turmoil on some level, said nothing, just turned his head to watch him with a questioning eyebrow.
"I came back for you," Jack whispered, and kissed him with all the passion of a year spent apart.
*
Part Two
Summary: It had taken Jack a while to realise that he'd finally cracked.
Fandom(s): Torchwood/Doctor Who
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Spoilers: Set during ' Last of the Time Lords', some small spoilers for Torchwood's 'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang'
Rating/Warnings: Slight PG for mentions of torture and death
Word count: 4297
Notes: Huge thanks to xwingace for her invaluable help as a beta. Another Year that Never Was WiP Beast slain, thank you! Comments and concrit are love.
Fic Masterlist: Here, archived at alien_sands
Death is a commingling of Eternity with Time
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
---
Have you ever looked at a clock for longer than a few minutes?
No, of course you haven't, it's boring to watch time pass that closely, and usually there're more important things to do than watch the seconds tick by.
You'd have to be quite desperately bored to watch a clock for hours and hours, watch the relativity of time unfold as you wait for something specific to happen after a specific amount of time.
That's when you find out that Heisenberg's rule is true for time as well - the closer you watch, the fuzzier time gets, until it seems to stand still and minutes take days to pass. For humans, it's simply irrelevant. Boring.
*
It was there again. Jack could tell even though he had his eyes closed. He kept them firmly shut, not willing to look at it. The hesitant footsteps on the metal grating of his cell were so painfully familiar that he bit his lip to stop smiling out of sheer habit.
"Did you bring water this time?" he asked the sounds of a ruffling suit and Ianto - no, Jack thought, the hallucination - huffing. The sound, devastatingly right in every nuance, made him open his eyes, presenting him with the latest proof that he'd lost his mind, dressed in the usual suit and a red tie. Of course there was no water.
The first time he'd thought it was real: his team had come to rescue him, ready to bring the Master down and Earth back to normal. How easy it had been to believe in that moment before a guard had sauntered to pick up his forgotten cup of coffee (and damn, the smell alone was driving him nuts), completely failing to see Ianto staring at him like a deer caught in the headlights.
It had taken Jack a while to realise that he'd finally cracked.
"Thought as much, not even my imagination is that good," Jack sighed as the figment walked around, pointedly ignoring the quip and idly staring at the small room instead, cataloguing the valves and the little wisps of steam and oil leaking from several places. No doubt the real Ianto would be appalled by the disrepair of this place. So was the hallucination, if Jack interpreted the twitching muscle in its jaw correctly.
"Why are you here?" Jack asked finally, because even chatting to oneself was better than the complete isolation the Master loved to keep him in between far too elaborate torture sessions, no doubt hoping it would make him talk. He couldn't even tell how many days had passed since election day, the absence of sleep robbing him of the simple human rhythm of life.
Ianto lifted a graceful eyebrow. "So I'm real now?"
"No," Jack answered, annoyed, "but since my psyche is apparently trying to communicate, I might as well get over with it."
"I'm dead," the hallucination said.
When Jack's head whipped around to stare at it, it had already vanished. The sentence echoed through his mind, and made his heart grow cold. He shook his head, and focussed on his breathing again, trying to tune out the sound of the ship around him, to concentrate on the hum of the antigravity engines, their familiar pulsing drowning out everything else. Those hauntings were starting to unsettle him, because some part of him knew the hallucination might be right.
*
I have no idea how Time Lords do it; I know they don't need timepieces, they simply listen to their minds and watch the Arrow of Time, watch the seconds from an objective point of view, immune to something as fickle as the human imagination. They divide time into its basic parts if they feel like it, looking at possibilities, futures and pasts. They can never lose themselves in the moment, I guess, that beat of the universe ticking, always ticking in the same rhythm, the same beat, like the sound of drums.
I'm surprised not all of them turn mad, really.
*
"I'm dead," the hallucination repeated as if it had never left.
Jack groaned opened his left eye, which took all his strength, his vision of the man in front of him still tinted red from all the blood that had run down his face. The Master seriously needed more hobbies than Punch the Immortal.
He'd hoped the Welshman had just been some isolation-induced dream, but now he was back, dressed as impeccable as ever, sporting the suit Ianto had worn on the night Jack'd offered him a job.
The apparition followed Jack's gaze to the clock on the wall in front of him with interest. Of course, it hadn't been there before. It was helpful on some days and maddening on others when nothing happened but the seconds dragging on, but that was better than the complete isolation Jack'd woken up in before.
A quick calculation told Jack that it had only taken him about a month (43,200 minutes or 2,592,000 seconds and counting) to turn mad. He was getting old.
"What?" Jack tried to say, mostly because his brain hadn't caught up with the fact that he was alive again and needed to function yet. The word got stuck in his throat, still tender where it had been crushed. The hallucination apparently understood anyway.
"I'm dead, I think," those lovely Welsh vowels told him, "killed in the first wave. And now I'm here because I wanted to see you again."
Jack would've laughed if he'd had the strength. As far as he knew, not even Ianto was that cheesy, not even in death. Belatedly he realised that he was back in chains again.
"You should try some platitudes about hanging in there, but I think I've hung enough for several decades," he groaned, but when he looked down from where his hands were cuffed to the ceiling, the hallucination had vanished.
Jack sighed, staring at the digital clock again to distract himself from the ache in his wrists (another three and a half minutes gone now, 210 seconds and counting), watching the minutes, every second another drop in a torture only a Time Lord could've thought of.
*
But then look at us humans - look at me.
The ticking of a single clock was nearly enough to drive me mad, some ancient part in my brain compelling me to look, to check my inner chronometer against something I think of as real, when the Master could easily manipulate that clock when I'm not looking, just to drive me crazy. Well, crazier than I am already, obviously.
Nothing drives humans madder than changing everything they think of as facts.
*
"What do you see, Jack my boy?" The Master peered into his eyes, as if the answer was hidden somewhere in there, before tearing the knife from his chest. Jack just hoped he wouldn't try to dig it out. "You have a very unique connection to the..." the Time Lord thought for a moment, tapping his bloodied hand against his lips. "Undiscovered Country," he finally beamed.
From behind the Master, Ianto was watching them carefully, pale and his face full of sympathy.
Jack kept his eyes on Ianto the entire time, until the pain became too much and he lost consciousness.
*
And what is left of us if facts change? Doesn't that just scare you to death?
There's nothing left, just us without an anchor, lost on the sea of Time, nothing to grasp because nothing is stable, nothing is real anymore. Our minds will simply break down then.
I have to be more careful, concentrate on what I know is real.
Is time real? I can't quite remember.
*
"Why can't I be real?" Ianto - sporting jeans and a sweatshirt now (Goddess, he hated his randy psyche) asked.
Jack's gaze travelled from Tish's offered spoon full of gravy to the empty spot where the clock had been. The absence of it was as unsettling as its presence had been. It had been gone for two work shifts now, which was as close to a day as he could tell. Tish wasn't allowed to speak of these things, and he assumed she didn't come as regularly as they made him think.
Light, he thought, if he only had sunlight, then he could tell.
It made him nervous to lose something so ordinary as the passing of time, and it told him the Master understood a lot more about the basic human psyche than he'd presumed.
This was not good. Imaginary seconds tickled down the back of his neck (how many? 700? 800?), and he tried to count his heartbeat as a substitute. It didn't work, the interplay of systole, diastole and the sound of his own blood in his ears as well as his jaw muscles chewing the damp mash too chaotic for a clear and constant count.
It made him angry. And over there the man with the stopwatch stood and waited for an answer.
"I don't believe in ghosts," Jack spat out, ignoring Tish's little jump as he began to talk with nothing again. Let them believe he'd lost a few of his marbles, it made the interrogation sessions shorter. For some reason even the Master with his dirty telepathic tricks wouldn't delve into a human's mind to make it snap. Maybe Time Lords were afraid it would pull them under as well. Jack sighed. As if that bastard could get any more bonkers. Judging by the little clock appearing and disappearing, it only meant the Master would take the scenic route to breaking him.
He watched Ianto pace the room while he chewed his meal, trying to convince Tish with his silence that he was still safe to be around.
"There's never been a scientific proof for any spiritual energy that has been left by the dead," he continued once the girl had gone, remembering another time he'd had the same conversation, huddled together with his Battle Commander in the middle of an epic planetary storm, listening to the screams of the wind. Jack hadn't been able to convince him, but the sex had seemed to keep their demons at bay.
"So you simply don't believe in them," Ianto concluded. "What if you're wrong?"
Jack grinned. "Happens sometimes, especially when you're involved."
But Ianto (and when had the hallucination become Ianto?) didn't rise to the bait.
"The Master used Archangel," he frowned instead, scratching his head thoughtfully. Jack nodded, licking his lip at the familiar gesture. He really hated his brain. "A psychic network connecting the minds of the human race for him to control," the younger man continued, suddenly alive with an idea, "what if that's what making me stay here?"
"You mean it's not me, it's you? Oh come on, Ianto, you can do better than that." Something inside him suddenly boiled with anger. It had been 6 months (and 3 days, 12 hours and 46 minutes, as Ianto and his imaginary stopwatch told him - He couldn't tell anymore, he was too tired to count) on the Valiant by now, and still the Doctor hadn't been able to do anything. The constant pain, the sickening feeling of slowly losing any hope and the prospect of an eternity (how many seconds were that anyway?) spent as the Master's toy was seriously gnawing on his sanity.
The hallucination didn't seem to mind that he shouted at it, though.
"Imagine the power of Archangel," Ianto continued, pacing the small cell once more, carefully avoiding pipes and cables; his steps in perfect synch with Jack's heartbeat. Like a metronome. It was oddly soothing. Jack breathed in deeply to calm down. Shouting was no use. And despite the fact that he was quite obviously mad, Jack loved his memory for providing such excellent views of the Welshman's backside.
"If someone could tap into that, focussing the thoughts of everyone..." Ianto's eyes widened with understanding.
"Martha," Jack gasped, sagging in his chains. "No, no, no," he shook his head forcefully, trying to unsee that theory.
"What?" Ianto asked, clearly confused, but Jack didn't answer. He knew. Oh Goddess, he knew.
"Oh," gulped Ianto as he finally understood. "The Doctor didn't tell you because the Master might find out, and now I've ruined it," he sagged against the wall, covering his face with his hands. Hallucination or not, Jack couldn't bear to see the younger man so shattered.
"Hey," Jack said, waiting for Ianto to lift his lovely fingers from his face before he continued, "remember that you're just part of my imagination? We ruined it." Jack grinned, bathing in the small smile he got in return.
*
No human can really know what happens when facts disappear and Time dances with uncertainty. No one has come back to tell us, but I might just find out. I hope I'll have enough neurons left to tell you about it.
Until then there 's nothing else to do than stare at that damn clock anyway, steaming valves and the backs of the guards are only entertaining for so long.
Would you have thought I'd tire of looking at backsides? Hah, I bet you didn't.
*
"In the end, what the Doctor personifies for humanity is freedom. An ideal. Freedom is only an idea, a meme, so to speak. You can't destroy an idea, any attempt will only make it stronger."
The clock was back, sitting there on the bare wall like a fat spider, gloating, time suddenly horribly out of tune in the unfamiliar beat of liquid crystals changing polarity.
Jack licked his lips, the thirst a constant but dull ache, concentrating on Ianto lecturing him about philosophy. His heartbeat quickened when the anger about that ugly piece of technology resurfaced, overtaking the rhythm of the clock easily. A man had his limits, and months spent in chains would probably do that to anyone.
He concentrated on the steady voice again, the rise and fall of words and sentences keeping a constant tempo with that lovely Welsh lilt to every syllable.
It wasn't real, but it was keeping him grounded, keeping him sane.
"Think about it, a network that connects all human minds, all ideas, every dream. Tap into that..." Ianto waved a hand.
"And ideas become weapons," Jack shook out of his doze, finishing the offered thought. "Genius," he smiled, not only referring to the Doctor's plan.
"You know I know everything," Ianto grinned. But Jack clamped the rising hope down. He was still chained, and he wasn't exactly in peak condition psychologically speaking. Too much hope could be just what the Master needed to break him. He wasn't letting the hallucination getting the better of him, no matter how much he enjoyed their conversations.
"Might take time, though. A lot of time," Jack mused. The very thought of time was disconcerting. He rolled his stiff shoulders absentmindedly, realising he hadn't looked at the clock for over ten minutes now. It was there, he could tell, mocking him, but the urge to look was waning. Ianto nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"It's all we have," Ianto sighed, which Jack found utterly hilarious coming from a ghost.
"If you talk about faith now, I'll kill you," Jack grinned, and Ianto's answering laugh echoed through his brain until the Master returned for more interrogation.
*
They tell you that time isn't a constant, that it is relative and you nod and pretend to understand, but you don't.
This experience is teaching me something new every day.
See? I was never good at keeping time - nearly got court-martialled for that once.
Now I know that only about one minute has passed since I started talking, only two since I woke up from death - which should be eternal, shouldn't it? But that's the point. Time is relative, Einstein said, and he knew very well how true that was not only for the universe we tread in, but also for the human psyche in particular, the universe inside ourselves.
*
"He's stopped asking questions," Jack coughed as he regained consciousness on the cold steel floor, recognising the expensive Italian shoes and realising instantly who was standing next to him.
The times when he had minded talking to thin air had long since passed.
"Of course he did," the Welsh lilt tried to sooth him, "withstanding torture would justify your pain, give you a cause."
Jack glanced up into Ianto's concerned face and rolled over onto his stomach. "Just why do you know so much about torture?"
Ianto crouched down beside him, his shoes not stirring the pools of blood forming on the floor, knowing better than to offer a (quite insubstantial) hand.
"Torchwood One wasn't all the glamour Yvonne liked to show to the Queen." Ianto halted, waiting until Jack had managed to push himself off the floor into a sitting position.
"He's breaking you," Ianto whispered, and Jack laughed, but even to his own ears it sounded a bit too much like wheezy breathing.
"I'm seeing ghosts, I think he already did a pretty good job at that," he gasped. The wounds had gone, but the pain wasn't lessening. It happened when the nights were long.
"He's waiting until you talk without filtering," Ianto tried, but Jack laughed again, the situation suddenly too ridiculous. His own consciousness was trying to teach him about torture.
"I know how this works," Jack gasped, "I used to be the guy with the tools."
"Don't let him," the Welshman retorted, with eyes of someone who had seen too much and yet believed that the universe had a simple solution for everything.
Jack's initial resolution to not see the hallucination for more than it truly was was beginning to waver.
"I really have to tell you about John one day," Jack groaned, "you two would've gotten on quite well."
*
Time. Relativity.
Did you know there's more space between atoms than there are atoms in the universe?
It's a logical assumption, of course, but when empty space is more common than anything else, how can reality exist? The Doctor once explained to me that time filled all the spaces in between, and I thought it was a very poetic solution for this dilemma.
Now that I know how stationary and fixed time can feel, I'm not so sure it's the answer anymore. Divide time into its parts and it doesn't even exist anymore, the seconds fracture and splinter until you hear Planck laugh and the seconds grind to a halt.
*
"Jack, come on. Talk to me!" Ianto's voice was urgent, but Jack closed his eyes against the feeling of a knife between his ribs. Even the Master's inane prattle moved to the back of his mind, until all he could hear was the young - and probably quite dead - Welshman.
Of course he was dead, Jack corrected himself. Everyone he'd ever known probably was, why would the Master lie about that?
The pain didn't lessen, but the familiar voice kept Jack from screaming, which would irate the Master to no end. That disappointment would maybe make him kill him faster.
His heartbeat was slowing, and the seconds dragged on with the pain. He could feel his heart was faltering in his chest, irregular beats trying to uphold bloodflow when most of that had already seeped into his clothes, and the voice of the Master scraping over his battered psychic defences. Jack knew he couldn't hold out much longer.
"You never asked me what I've wanted," Ianto suddenly snapped, which made him open his eyes and stare across the room at the young man looking at him urgently (suit and tie, always suit and tie now), his arms crossed in front of him.
"Well," Jack wheezed, "what do you want?" He brought out, knowing that the Master wouldn't answer that question, but the hallucination just might.
"I'm dead now, does it matter?" Ianto shouted, that familiar glare slicing through Jack's heart on a completely different level as the cold steel of the Master's blade, "and if I'm just in your mind, shouldn't you be able to tell yourself?"
"Come on, humour me," Jack yelped, and the knife was torn from his chest. That wasn't exactly what he'd meant. It probably meant more pain.
"Dinner." Something dangerous gleamed in the Welshman's eyes. "A movie and dinner."
Jack laughed so hard that the guards came in full force at the noise, apparently thinking he'd finally managed to kill that bastard Time Lord.
*
I mean, how can time exist?
We think it does, of course, because of the sun travelling across the sky, because everything happens in a place, at a time, neat and tidy, not all at once.
But when you look at it, just look at it, how do you know it exists? You can't see it, you can't feel it.
Maybe time is an illusion, something we came up with to make sense of a universe outside and inside ourselves - maybe we'd turn mad if we knew the truth.
Maybe Time Lords understand.
I wonder what they can see that they can't tell us.
*
On the flight deck, he watched the Doctor's body rejuvenate, glow with the thoughts and hopes of billions of people, felt the psychic brush of power that surrounded the Time Lord now. Beside him, Ianto smiled manically, just barely able to swallow the justified 'I told you so', his hand slipping into Jack's. He could've sworn he actually felt the contact.
"Doctor," Jack whispered as the first human across the planet, watching the shape of a smiling Ianto vanish into thin air.
He closed his eyes, listening to the steady thrum of the psychic network, willing the last year away.
When the time for fighting came, he was ready.
*
Maybe we simply don't exist, and the passing of the present into the future is just our illusion of existence, a dream dreamt by someone else.
I can see it now, Time the heartbeat of that dreamer, and we just figments, made for a story called life. It's quite soothing to consider that pain, even time itself is an illusion, don't you think?
And I could swear that clock has jus ticked backwards now, while I wasn't paying attention.
*
The Tourist Office was empty when he finally arrived (thankfully his more secret entry codes still worked), fear and panic rising in his chest when he found no one downstairs. He caught himself staring at the face of an antique clock in his office, for a moment too stunned by the memories of a digital one to understand how all the hands and numbers worked. He shook his head and chased the confusion away, watching the seconds move in a calming circle, the knowledge slowly coming back to him.
It was only 5 pm, so where were they? A quick glance at the computers calmed him (he'd have to go out and help them, Blowfish tended to get nasty when cornered), and he let himself relax before the storm of reality could start again.
He took a good look at the Hub, the silence, the peace, bathing in the simple pleasure of being home.
*
I mean, look at memories.
Everything happens at once in our thick skulls when we're not concentrating carefully; time-travelling through our brain, countless neural pathways which are in the end made out of atoms - nothing but empty space.
I can't tell you how many times I've wished to go in there and change something, but I am too scared what my mind would turn into.
And inside ourselves, we can change destiny as little as we can outside.
An endless fractal.
Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it insane?
*
He gazed at the Retcon pill in his hand, taking another gulp of whiskey from the glass in his other.
It would be so easy to blur the edges of the last year, take the memory of so much pain to some corner of his mind to rot and disintegrate into dust, let it rest there with his desperation of an immortal life.
He could live in the here and now, forget the friends he'd lost. And wasn't that the right thing to do? They were alive now, would it matter if he remembered their deaths when they technically never happened? The cracks in his sanity were yearning for the release this pill would bring.
You never asked me what I've wanted.
The sentence hung in his mind, habit making him glance around his office before remembering that Ianto was out and very much alive, not some ghost or hallucination.
Minutes ticked by and Jack sighed before placing the pill back into his desk drawer. He slammed it shut, downing the rest of his drink before getting up to find out where his team was.
He needed to see them.
*
But in the end, can we change anything that's significant?
Can we change the future?
Sometimes I'm not sure. But we have to believe it, because everything else would drive us insane.
*
He trailed Ianto down to the small kitchenette, watching him work his magic on the coffee machine quietly before some impulse made him step forwards and hug the Welshman from behind. He forced the tide of emotions down that threatened to overwhelm him when he felt the slightly rough cotton of the suit against his cheek.
Ianto, obviously noticing his mental turmoil on some level, said nothing, just turned his head to watch him with a questioning eyebrow.
"I came back for you," Jack whispered, and kissed him with all the passion of a year spent apart.
*
Part Two