Comments | guns_n_poodles: Past and Present

fajrdrako in guns_n_poodles

Past and Present

Feb 22, 2009 09:58

Title: Past and Present
Author: fajrdrako
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Captain Jack Harkness, Captain John Hart
Challenge: tw100, challenge: slip of the tongue
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Not mine, no claims, all property of the BBC.
Notes: Cross-posted to my lj, guns_n_poodles, and to tw100.

( Past and Present )

ship: john/jack, writing: drabble

Comments 6

zoesmith February 22 2009, 15:30:36 UTC

Awww poor John *huggles him*
Great drabble!

fajrdrako February 22 2009, 18:19:22 UTC

Thank you so much.

sueworld2003 February 22 2009, 15:33:16 UTC

Oh excellent! I very much liked that nod to the past.

fajrdrako February 22 2009, 18:22:22 UTC

It seems to me that Captain John is so very much closer, subjectively, to their shared Time Agent past than Jack is. We don't know how much time has passed subjectively for John since he last saw Jack, but it seems to me likely that it isn't much - a few years at most, possibly only months. For Jack, it's been more like 130 years at the very least, and that's at the begining of "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang". With all sorts of life-changing experience there, including meeting the Doctor and becoming immortal. He's certainly had time to grow into his new realities. For John - not so much.

sueworld2003 February 22 2009, 18:30:16 UTC

"For John - not so much."

Which is the crux of the problem of course. He's the one left behind remebering what they had and only now realising that he's never going to walk that path again.

fajrdrako February 22 2009, 18:37:03 UTC

only now realising that he's never going to walk that path again.

I see a bit of a parallel to Jack's life there. Jack spent more than a century waiting for the Doctor, and then learned, when he met him again, that they couldn't recover what they had back when on the TARDIS - too much had changed for both of them.

So John meets up with Jack again, and he's - well, we don't know for sure if John is essentially the same man he used to be, but we suspect so. And he's in a horrible situation: Jack doesn't want him any more, Gray is trying to use him, the Time Agency has fallen apart, he has no back-up, no friends, no allies and no lovers, and he's in a strange world he doesn't know or understand.

I wonder what would have happened if Jack had been happy to have him back, if Jack had wanted him to stay instead of saying "I don't want you on my turf." Would John have managed to tell Jack about Gray, and would they have found another way to foil him?